Your Culture Isn’t Toxic—It’s Misaligned. And That’s Fixable.
(and how to see it before your team—or your body—pays the bill)
I used to think emotional intelligence was a superpower. That if you could name your triggers, regulate your responses, and read the room with precision—you’d be unstoppable. A kind of human blueprint for trust-building and psychological safety.
And, yes, in a system built for reciprocity, that super-power still flies.
But in a system built on control, that same EQ becomes a liability—because steady people are so easy to lean on, and even easier to overload.
You know the systems I’m referring to. You may have started your own business to escape one just like this.
Values painted on the wall, “people over profit” in the handbook.
Slack channel #gratitude pinging at 4 p.m. sharp.
You’re told, We’re a team—until a hard boundary shows up and suddenly the vibe is “Why aren’t you being a team player?” (A nice little “flip it and reverse it.”)
When you start paying attention… the energy doesn’t match the message. Morale slips, team member exits spike, and the Sunday Scaries move in. You catch yourself wondering if a nice, boring job sounds… restful.
Spoiler: the problem isn’t your sensitivity—or theirs. It’s the structure. Meaning, the values and the system are not aligned.
You’re not here to copy-paste the same harm—you’re here to build a business that feels livable—for you and every name on the payroll.
How mis-alignment sneaks past the mission statement:
Praise without power
You celebrate “flexibility”—and genuinely mean it—until a well-intentioned “no” bumps into the launch calendar. The pushback gets labeled “off-brand” or “slowing us down,” and suddenly the applause disappears. Signal: your culture loves adaptability, but hasn’t built room for dissent.Transparency by teaspoon
You host open Q&As, share the vision deck, even screenshare the Miro board. Still, the hard numbers and thorny trade-offs live in a tiny Slack thread because you don’t want to overwhelm the team. Result: folks stay motivated, but can’t steer. With a small tweak, like widening the circle on key data, you can watch ownership rise.Invisible emotional labor
Your ops lead is pure gold—keeping projects on track and soothing late-night Slack spirals. You never asked them to be the business’s emotional ballast; it just happened. Signal: If they’re always “the calm” in every storm, check whether you’ve built a second, quieter job into their first one. (e.g. You may think of it as “strategic support,” but their nervous system calls it unpaid therapy.)Care as camouflage
Birthday Zooms, wellness stipends, #gratitude Fridays—beautiful, and sometimes a buffer against harder conversations. When someone finally sets a boundary, note what shifts. Does celebration stay celebration, or does “valued” quietly morph into “misaligned”? If it’s the latter, the fix is structural, not personal.
When you spot one—or all—of these patterns, it doesn’t mean you’re running a toxic shop, just a misaligned one that folks will quickly brand as toxic. It means the system has out-grown its original settings. Good news: systems are design problems, and design problems can be solved.
Quick gut-check:
Do the same one or two humans calm every storm? If yes: You haven’t hired “rock-stars.” You’ve quietly outsourced your emotional risk management.
Does feedback only flow one direction—downhill? If yes: If critique stops at the leadership line, safety is a slogan, not a system. When psychological safety is real, questions flow both ways.
Are exits framed as “couldn’t hack the pace” or “they want to spend more time with family”? If yes: That story usually means the capacity math was off—by roughly one whole human life.
If even one of these landed, congratulations: you just found your next leverage point.
Mis-alignment is an ops problem wearing a feelings costume—one you can redesign.
You can shift the metric: from absorption to alignment.
Stop asking, “Why can’t my team handle more?”
Start asking, “What weight has the business silently transferred onto their backs—and why?”
Design moves for businesses facing this kind of dissonance:
Decision rights > job titles. One clear owner per initiative—with real authority to say “No” or “Not yet.”
Resource the real work. Culture-building, coaching stipends, time off, mental-health coverage: put them in the budget, not in empty promises and good intentions.
Audit meeting cadence for nervous-system cost. If the brief drops five minutes before the call, that’s panic, not transparency.
None of this slows growth. It stabilizes growth so the next hire isn’t signing up for burnout in disguise.
Now, let’s say those design tweaks are in place. None of those design tweaks matter if the culture-engine underneath still runs on silent extraction. Structure gives you the lanes; language tells you when a lane is drifting.
So once the budgets are set and the cadence is clean, your next job is listening—for the tiny phrases that signal the system is slipping back into convenience-over-care.
When care gets weaponized, listen for the tells:
The “throw away line: “She’s brilliant… just a bit too emotional for leadership.”
Where it shows up: Perf-review huddle—just you and your ops lead
What it really means: Her competence is clear, but her complexity feels risky. Let’s cap her influence.
The “throw away line: “We’re a startup—no time for feelings.”
Where it shows up: Investor strategy call
What it really means: Growth targets first; any human variables risk the sprint.
The “throw away line: “He’s mid-divorce; keep him off high-stakes work.”
Where it shows up: Slack thread on Q3 resourcing
What it really means: Real-life turbulence isn’t factored into our capacity math, so we’ll sideline him instead of redesigning the load.
None of those comments sound villainous in real time. They’re usually framed as prudence, protection, or “just being realistic.”
But the subtext is: Predictability over humanity. Convenience over complexity.
And lots of businesses are very successful deploying just this kind of logic. You can be very financially successful weaponizing care. Disposing of people. Humanity typically does make things more complex. While short term numbers might look great, morale, retention, and actual profits may be going down.
And, since you’re still here…. I’m not thinking that’s the kind of business you want to build. So if you catch a tell? Great—the next step isn’t a pep-talk—it’s a structural adjustment. Let’s start designing a business where growth doesn’t depend on disposability.
Here is your founder gut-check—three quick questions:
What pressure is this remark trying to relieve—deadline, investor optics, your own discomfort?
If we bury that pressure, who ends up carrying it anyway?
How could we solve for real capacity instead of trimming away someone’s humanity?
Catch the tell, adjust the system, keep the humanity.
That’s founder-level care—beyond hashtags, baked into how the work works by the people actually doing the work.
OK—so what now?
Map the emotional load: Who’s holding what, and for whose benefit?
Separate mission from morality: a headline value means nothing if the system underneath still runs on suppression.
Redefine leadership: not by how much you can absorb, but by how well your systems support what you say you value.
Regenerative culture isn’t a feelings free-for-all.
It’s clear agreements about what the business holds, what the team supports, and what no one has to carry alone.
That’s not idealism. That’s integrity.
In COO-fessions — Episode 6: The Hidden Extraction: Emotional Manipulation Inside Mission-Driven Companies — I sit down with org-design veteran Bob Gower to trace how well-meaning founders end up turning “people over profit” into unpaid emotional labor.
We have to treat every interaction as if it shapes the future—because every interaction does shape the future. We don’t get to choose which ones matter. That’s why we have to be conscious. We have to be principled at all times.
—Bob Gower
If you’re ready to align the care you value with the systems that keep profit and people intact, give this episode a listen. Then forward the episode to the teammates helping you build the culture you’d be proud to work in.
xo,
Brittany
P.S. If what you just read stirred something real—if you’ve felt the tension between what you say you value and what your systems actually reinforce—this is your next step.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You Free is the flagship workshop from Co-Op, the company I co-founded with Sarah Paikai to help mission-driven founders build businesses that hold more than just revenue.
If you’re leading a service-based business earning between $250K–$2M—and still quietly carrying more than your structure was built to hold—join us for our next workshop.
In 2.5 hours, we’ll help you trace where your backend is misaligned, name what it’s costing you, and begin rearchitecting for integrity—not just output. We made it 2.5 hours because depth takes time—and you deserve more than a pep talk. You’ll leave with a structural diagnosis, a practical framework, and clarity on where to build next.
This isn’t about fixing you or your team. It’s about shifting the load you were never meant to carry alone.
Learn more + register here→
