Imagine for a moment that you go to work each day, and the office is filled with smoke. People are puffing away on cigarettes in the next cubicle over, your boss chain smokes in every meeting, and no one says a thing.
It would make sense that your eyes water, your throat closes, you hack and cough, and your clothing smells awful. Every evening when you get home your family complains and won’t sit near you.
One day you summon the courage to say to your manager, “I can’t take the smoke any more.” They give you a pitying look and offer a coach to help you find strategies to deal with it.
Bless your heart, you and the coach gamely try to look at the situation in a different way. You explore what changes you can make personally. Maybe you even start bringing in your own oxygen machine.
But the smoke persists and continues. Others are suffering as well. Hacking coughs pervade the office, while the boss (and others) continue on with their polluting ways, reinforced by culture and even policy.
“This is crazy!” You say to me. No one would tolerate that, and no one would coach someone to accept this sort of contamination as the price of working for an organization. No matter what they do, it will harm their health and well-being. It just wouldn’t be worth it.
You are correct. In much of the world we stopped accepting secondhand smoke years ago when it became clear that people were becoming ill and dying from its effects.
So now please return to the top and substitute stress, overwork, lack of sleep, narcissistic abuse and bullying for smoke. Ponder all the mental and physical health impacts from being subjected to this sort of environment day after day after day.
And see how crazy I actually am.
For a fabulous book on the real costs of toxic stress in the workplace, check out Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Dying for a Paycheck.
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In the process of healing and need some support? Contact Ann for one-to-one coaching.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ann Betz is the co-founder of BEabove Leadership and an expert on the intersection of neuroscience, coaching, trauma and human transformation. She speaks, trains and coaches internationally, and writes about neuroscience and coaching as well as relational trauma. Ann is also a published poet who loves cats, rain in the desert, and healthy relationships. She is continually dismayed at the stories she hears of the toxic stress people are subjected to at work.
But Now I Know Your Name 