Can You Feel It?

Work feels heavier than it should. How we relate. How we communicate. And how we don’t.

Deadlines slip, tempers flare, and once-motivated people withdraw. It feels like it’s “just work”, but it doesn’t have to be.

Workplace toxicity seldom arrives with fanfare and announcements, it hides in invisible bottlenecks, muddled handoffs, and unspoken tensions. Toxicity oozes slowly. We don’t notice it and after a while it becomes normalized. People can’t remember any other way work could be.

Then, because we can’t see the toxicity, we blame each other, we blame our bosses, we blame our employees. We blame the customer. We blame the government. We blame policy. We blame blame and more toxically blame.

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Stop That

Until your team can see where the pain originates, it can’t begin to heal.

Toxicity lurks and grows in shadows. When how we work becomes visible, both toxicity and cure are immediately seen.

Why Toxicity Persists Unseen

Most teams don’t set out to be dysfunctional. They inherit broken systems, ambiguous roles, and overloaded communication channels. Gifts! A from these gifts, stress mounts, psychological safety evaporates, and turnover stealthily erodes momentum. These forces operate beneath the surface and our traditional metrics (focused on measuring what we know) miss them entirely.

Bring Toxic Patterns into the Light

When things are hidden, the obvious answer is to make them … not hidden. Make the complexities of work clear and how you work collaborative. Mapping the real flow of value renders silent friction visible. Once everyone sees the same picture, they share language, ownership, and the agency to fix what hurts.

Five Steps to a Healthier Workplace

* Map your Current WorkWhen you map your work, you map your culture. You map how you help or hinder each other.Gather the team and build a living map of every step, decision, and handoff. physical sticky notes, a digital Kanban board, or an online whiteboard. Color-code stalled items, repeated rework, and unclear ownership so trouble spots leap off the wall. (Pro tip: work backward from the final outcome to surface hidden dependencies.)

* Spot the Toxic BullseyesOn your map, highlight areas that feel hostile, powerless, or perpetually stuck. Don’t blame, just find where your current system creates tension. These “bullseyes” often cluster around overloaded experts, murky priorities, or silent approval loops. Seeing them in your process transforms blame into problem-solving.

* Expose the Agency GapsAsk, “Where do people feel they can’t act with confidence?” Mark these zones in a bold color. They’re direct indicators of psychological safety breaches. Empowerment starts by recognizing where it’s missing.

* Visualize Your Reality and Your Path, Not Your Wishes and FailuresYou now have something extremely powerful. You know how you want to work together and how you are currently working together. Now, for the first time, you know what you want your kanban and other visualizations to show you. Everyone on the team wants to complete their work with quality and on time. Before your planned work, slow throughput, and defects were all you visualized, so all people could see is how they failed. That failure came from not knowing how you could work well together. Now you do, so you can visualize your two products: culture and completion. (Pro tip 2: You can’t complete without culture.)

* Co-Create Rapid RemediesConvene short, blame-free sessions in front of the boards. Brainstorm “today-sized” experiments: clarify a policy, smooth a handoff, or redistribute decision rights. Small, visible wins build momentum and restore trust. Work together to work better together.

Your Next Move

Reserve time this week to visualize your team’s workflow, if you do it right it will take some time. Identify a single toxic workplace sign and tackle it together. You’ll find many and they are much less threatening than they sound. Most of the time, it’s something like setting a policy for where certain information goes or when someone needs to focus.

Want more? Come see us at Modus Institute and sign up for the VSM class…or if you’d like to do something more involved drop me a line on LinkedIn and we’ll talk about doing a value stream mapping exercise or looking a how you are working together.

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