Stress, anxiety, frustration. Wondering why I even got out of bed this morning.

That’s what I was feeling every day at work. For almost two years.

I know, firsthand, how damaging the psychological and emotional impact of operating inside of a toxic workplace can be.

When I began my first career out of college as a high school business teacher, it felt like a dream come true. The only thing I ever wanted to do since I was a child was become a teacher. But by my third year, when there was a change in leadership, what once was a dream became a nightmare.

Our new principal, an insecure bully with narcissistic qualities, had something to prove. She was big on efficiency and “process improvement,” which was code for destroying established systems and turning everything upside down. She moved so fast, focusing her attention entirely on doing. She was, after all a marathon runner, who displayed every winning medal she ever earned in her office to prove it.

If the emails she would send to the entire staff at 2 a.m. wasn’t intense enough, perhaps nothing was more characteristic of her relentless focus on getting shit done than her standing lunch meetings in the cafeteria. She would literally eat her salad from a Ziploc bag while taking meetings with teachers and staff members in the cafeteria standing at a podium. She once commented to me that she liked having lunch this way because she could get three things done at once.

She was never interested in getting to know people. We were simply pawns in her game. Her daily battles sowed the seeds of distrust and uncertainty between other members of school leadership and staff members. She had a way of creating drama when she spoke to people and leaving confusion and uncertainty in her wake. Simply put, people hated her and I watched a once thriving school culture rot away into an environment of suspicion and fear.

My direct supervisor was scared…and it showed in her decision-making, in her expectations, and in the way she interacted with the members of the department. And I contributed, in my own way, to the chaos because I really don’t like being controlled. My own job was threatened a few times. I was met with derision and criticism on a daily basis. There was even a point when my supervisor didn’t speak to me for over a month, avoiding me like an angry teenager…and we shared the same classroom. Suffice to say, I did not feel psychologically safe in my work environment.

All of this led me to applying for my PhD in leadership. I vowed that, from this point forward, my work would ensure that others wouldn’t have to endure the same agony I had to at work. Because, unfortunately, these stories are all too common.

Case Study of Another Toxic Workplace

By 2007, Nokia Corporation held roughly 38% of the global phone market and about half of the emerging smartphone market. Today, Nokia no longer makes phones at all. It exited that business permanently in 2014, when it sold its Devices & Services segment to Microsoft, and rebuilt itself as a network infrastructure company.

So, what happened? How did a major player in one of the leading global industries vanish from an entire product category it once defined?

Huy and Vuori (2015) conducted a qualitative study to understand Nokia’s rapid downfall from 2005-2010. What they found was that the environment (internal politics, culture, and emotions) within the organization greatly influenced the company’s collapse.

In short, the climate of fear that permeated Nokia during the rise of the iPhone froze the coordination efforts needed to compete in the market against Apple (Huy & Vuori, 2015). Top managers feared external market factors and ‘motivated’ their staff primarily through aggression and fear tactics. The chairman and CEO was described as being “extremely temperamental” and “shouting at people at the top of his lungs,” which made it difficult for people to tell him things he didn’t want to hear. According to Vuori and Huy (2016), one VP was described as getting so angry, hitting his hand against a boardroom table, sending fruit flying across the room. These displays of aggression were commonplace and widely known inside the organization.

Cultural norms of status, performance pressure, and distress led middle managers to report over-optimistically, for fear of retaliation and being fired. The heavy-handed approaches from top management failed to motivate middle managers and, thus, they were in the dark about what was really going on in the teams below them. Coordination became nearly impossible when truth was being hidden by key decision-makers.

Ultimately, this led to the company allocating resources disproportionately across the organization and misdirecting their attention away from developing an operating system required to compete with Apple in the smartphone race (Vuori & Huy, 2016).

To a great extent, the culture of fear that was cultivated inside Nokia during that period led to its downfall in the global smartphone market.

Our work environments are created consciously and unconsciously. Whether or not the CEO at Nokia or my school principal knew that their behaviors would have such deleterious effects, their energy influenced their environments and the people around them.

Leadership isn’t just about making decisions. And it’s not just about getting shit done. It’s about harnessing the field that our tasks get completed and our decisions get made inside. It is about how our Being is expressed inside of what we’re doing.

In my article, Beingspace: Cultivating Space for Leadership, I shared my definition of a Beingspace.

A Beingspace is the energetic field that gets generated the moment consciousness meets anything: itself, another, or a group.

Put simply, it is the energetic container where Being expresses itself.

As leaders, we are responsible for our Beingspaces―the energetic signatures―that we create.

In the case of Nokia, the conditions inside the Beingspace created among that leadership team did not allow for open communication, innovation, and the development of trust within the organization. We now know what happened as a result of that Beingspace.

The Beingspace in my school in the first two years was characterized by collaboration, ease, and support. At the end of year three, that had eroded into once of fear, anxiety, and self-protection. And the Beingspace I held within myself those days was one filled with frustration, uncertainty, anger, and a loss of direction.

Digging Deeper into Beingspaces

A Beingspace is not synonymous with organizational culture. Culture is what becomes visible after the fact: the artifacts, the norms, the way people act and what they say they believe. A Beingspace is the thing generating the behavior, the pattern, or the norm in the first place.

A Beingspace first has to be felt and sensed before it hardens into any of that. It operates at multiple levels—within, between, and among—and it goes deeper than culture, which only shows you what a Beingspace has already produced.

Three Levels, Applied to Leadership

The first level that a Beingspace is created is within the leader themselves. Your own inner state is the foundation for how you operate as a leader. Unhealed wounds, unexamined anxieties, and repressed emotions do not disappear when you walk into a room. The contents of your subconscious mind run underneath everything you do, including your leadership, mostly outside of your own awareness. A dysregulated leader can’t generate a regulated team, no matter how good the org-chart is.

But as you cultivate a greater awareness of your internal world, your performance will be less influenced by unexamined aspects of yourself and your leadership will start to be a conscious expression of your Being. A leader who has a rich interior life can generate Beingspaces that people can thrive in, while a leader with no capacity for introspection and self-reflection generates Beingspaces that people struggle to survive.

The second type of Beingspace that a leader creates is between themselves and other individuals. This is the space of personal relationships and the rapport that those relationships create. The way a leader interacts with each team member, vendor, direct report, supervisor, or any other one-to-one interaction is the focus here.

So, whether a leader fosters trust or distrust, delegation or micromanagement, respect or fear, this is all downstream of the Beingspaces they create with individuals. You could make the claim that this all comes down to an individual’s management style, but their leadership style is only a reflection of the energetics they create in relation to others. What gets fostered in the energetic space, the Beingspace, happens first.

The final type of Beingspace are the energetic spaces among groups of people. This is what is created in a collective: a team, a department, and even the C-suite. Group norms, company missions, and belief systems are all a result of the energy that is created among people. But the Beingspace is the energetic container that influences all of that.

For Nokia, their collective Beingspace was filled with fear and the company operated in response to that. When I was working as a teacher, our principal spoke about our staff as a “family,” but the feeling that was fostered among us made us feel like anything but that. Espoused values―what a company says it stands for―cannot overrun what’s actually present in an energetic space. The collective Beingspace is the truth because it’s what people actually feel. No amount of team bonding, vision boards, or values statements posted on the wall will change the energetic foundation. Only attending to the Beingspace will change it.

There is a common understanding that leadership is about influencing the big picture, and this focuses a leader’s attention predominantly at the level of the collective, but a leader cannot do this without also attending to the other Beingspaces in their lives. How they show up and respond to a collective will always be in proportion to how they show up for themselves and for others.

Most leadership training addresses behavior like what to say in a difficult conversation or how to run a meeting, but never addresses the energetic condition the behavior is happening inside of. That’s the gap Beingspaces fills for leadership specifically. Tending to our Beingspaces gives us an actual diagnostic layer underneath our tactics―our doing―as leaders.

A Practical Diagnostic

Understanding a Beingspace is one thing. Applying it within your own leadership context is another. The following are a few questions you can ask yourself to investigate the three levels of Beingspaces in your life.

1. Within: What energy am I bringing into this room?

Your internal energy creates your personal Beingspace. So, when you enter a room or get on your next Zoom call, pause for a moment and notice what you are feeling within you. Maybe there’s some tension from the meeting before this one. Maybe you’re feeling a sense of unease. Maybe your mind is running an old anxiety script. Just notice it. You cannot lead a room consciously if you aren’t aware of what you’re bringing into that space.

2. Between: What Beingspace have I unconsciously generated with this person?

Every employee, peer, or client you advise has a felt sense of what it is like to be in a room with you. That energy was built by you and the other person, interaction by interaction. Take a few moments to reflect on how it feels to be in the presence of another person in your life. What have you been building between you?

3. Among: What is this team’s Beingspace telling me that my KPI’s don’t?

Numbers are one thing. What does it feel like in this group? What do I sense that isn’t being said? What do I know is running through everyone’s mind. Observe what you sense and don’t try to brush away what you know simply because it doesn’t feel logical. What you sense will tell you a lot about what has energetically been created in a Beingspace.

Why Does This Matter?

We are energetic beings and we are co-creating energetic spaces all the time. The reason I created the word Beingspace in the first place is because we need new language for understanding what has always been present, even if we haven’t consciously been aware of it. The field you’re standing in, the one that your team can feel before you say a word, it’s yours. It’s been there. You just didn’t have a word for it yet.

You can’t take responsibility for something you have no language to see. And when you can start reflecting and intentionally influencing your Beingspaces, you will find that the quality of your leadership changes, because the quality of your Being changes. And your leadership, then, will redefine itself. You’ll stop “acting” as a leader and you’ll finally begin to consciously shape the energetic field around you, not just manage the people within it.

If you're a founder, executive, or entrepreneur ready to stop managing your team and start shaping the field they stand in, the Leading From Being Mentorship & Mastermind is where that work happens. Learn more >

References:

Huy, Q., & Vuori, T. (2015, September 22). Who killed Nokia? Nokia did. INSEAD Knowledge. https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/who-killed-nokia-nokia-did

Vuori, T. O., & Huy, Q. N. (2016). Distributed attention and shared emotions in the innovation process: How Nokia lost the smartphone battle. Administrative Science Quarterly, 61(1), 9–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839215606951