Addressing Toxicity in Organizational Hierarchies with Laura Baxter

Upon entering a new job, there's a palpable eagerness and optimism to contribute meaningfully to the organization. Yet, with the passage of time, this enthusiasm dwindles, tainted by strained relationships with supervisors or higher-ups. This all-too-familiar story exposes the harmful consequences of toxic leadership, transforming dedicated employees into disengaged onlookers who actively oppose their own company. How can we disrupt this cycle and cultivate a workplace culture that prioritizes the well-being and sustained productivity of its employees? In this episode, I have Laura Baxter, Founder of The Voice for Leadership, who has helped individuals enhance their voice, body language, and connect with the audience effectively. During our discussion, Baxter talked about her journey from coaching to publishing to becoming an opera singer. Moreover, she discussed cultural differences in leadership and decision-making, and superficial breathing. --- Listen to the podcast here: Addressing Toxicity in Organizational Hierarchies with Laura Baxter Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I want to tell you about a story that I’ve both lived and heard countless times. This is a story of someone who starts a job and starts a job actually quite optimistic about it. They’re excited to do something, they’re excited to join whatever organization that they’re joining, but then, somehow, over time, they become really jaded, usually by problematic relationships with their immediate supervisor, with their boss or someone in a higher leadership position. And there’s so many complicated reasons why that happens but the story has happened so many times that it is definitely something that we need to address because I’ve seen so many people suffer through some sort of situation where they normally would be good productive workers but, as a result of whatever’s going on above them, they just don’t care and sometimes become actively disengaged, which are the employees, they’re actually rooting against their own company, which happens almost a third of the time. Quite terrible. And my guest today, Laura Baxter, is not only an opera singer and a book publisher but she’s also a speaking and leadership coach. --- Hi. Thank you, Steven. It’s great to be here. So you have a lot going on. You have a lot of different endeavors, which is always wonderful. How do you manage all of that? How do you bring it all together? Good question. I was gonna say don’t sleep much, but, I actually get enough sleep. I think the clue is that, really, I love what I do, and all of it, both of the coaching people on the presentation or giving talks or also helping people with publishing their books or whatever it has to do with helping people find their voice. So although it may seem like it’s a lot of different aspects of that process, it really comes together with just helping people get their voice out there, be it their physical voice, that kind with presentation coachings, their ideas in a book or in a talk, it really has to do with finding their voice. And, of course, singing opera, you’re using your voice? Absolutely, absolutely. I don’t do opera anymore. That used to be my life. I do still do concerts, though, and I wouldn’t give that up. I love that. There’s something, some depth with music, so, yeah. And so do you think that’s something that most people are looking for in this life as people try to think through, okay, what job do I want, what do I want to do even in my social circles, personal life, family life, is people looking for a voice? Yes, I do, actually. And it can be something relatively small or seemingly insignificant, just like wanting to have some recognition for what you’ve done in your job or being able to share your ideas and your opinions on your job and your everyday life or it can be on a larger stage. It can be somebody really wants to get an idea into the universe to change things on a larger scale. And so back to the story that I began this podcast on, the one that I’ve been in and seeing so many times about someone who’s really disillusioned by poor leadership, do you feel like for that employee, for that person who’s just so frustrated that it’s distracting them from all the work they’re trying to do and everything they were trying to have an impact on when they joined the organization, it’s an issue of that person losing their voice? Yeah, it is. You and I have talked about this several times and full book that I published, I’ve been co-author, writing quite a few things on presentation and that kind of thing, but the very first full book that I published is Dealing with Divas and Other Difficult Personalities: A Mindful Approach to Improving Relationships in Your Business or Organization. I published that one first, I wrote that one first in its entirety because when I was working with my clients, and it did not matter what topic, it could be a topic of they’ve got to give a talk, they’ve got a meeting where they’re giving a presentation for their board, or it could be as simple as communication difficulties within their organization, the one thing I found that held people back the most more than anything else was difficult personalities. In other words, there was somebody in the room, even if we talked about stage fright, yeah, even with stage fright, most commonly, they were like, “Ugh, but so and so is gonna be in the room and what are they gonna think if I make a mistake?” and so it also often has to do with individual people with whom we don’t necessarily get along very well. You mentioned something early in the story you were describing and as you said, it is incredibly common. There’s a Gallup poll that comes out I believe every year every two years on employee engagement and the last one that came out was 2023 and I believe, I’ll have to double check the numbers to be 100 percent exact, but depending on what country or which areas or which region like the European Union or the US or worldwide, engagement was only between like 13 and 19 percent and that means the people who are engaged in the company, which means that they speak positively about their company and they like their job or they like working at that company is less than 3 percent, and that says a lot. And then you get into the actively disengaged and the just disengaged. The disengaged is the largest group, so those are people who are not satisfied but they’re not actively working against the company. And then you got the actively disengaged. Those are people who are actively speaking negatively about their company and those numbers are just phenomenal. It has to do with leadership and communication and personalities. Yeah, every time I see that Gallup survey, and I was actually just trying to look up what the latest one was because I remember seeing like a 36 percent number for the US and seeing that number actually worse globally, I always think about how much is being lost, not only from a GDP perspective of, okay, well, if you were to take, say, let’s just say it’s a third, a third and a third, for easy comprehension, so a third is employees are actively engaged, a third are actively disengaged, and another third are those kind of passive, those people, and I think it is more than that, I think it’s more common because I think the most common thing is like, “Ugh, I gotta go to work, but it gives me a good living, I got a comfortable house,” types of people. If we were to take, say, half the people in that category, make them actively engaged and take half the actively disengaged people and at least move them up to that neutral ground area, first of all, how much more productive every company would be, how much more could be produced from an economic standpoint, but also, from a life standpoint, how many more people would be happy and how much more good energy would be around us in the world to the point where people would be trusting one another bit more again because they’re in a more positive attitude, like the whole system could be in such a better place if we just improve those numbers on people’s jobs because that’s what people spend a good amount of their time, at least as of 2023. Yeah. I mean, if you take the third, third, third, we spend at least a third of our lifetime eight hours a day. That’s not insignificant. Also, these numbers are sort of reinforced by the so-called, after COVID, the so-called Great Resignation, and people just realized, “I just don’t wanna do it anymore.” And if they’ve been happy with the circumstances, with their colleagues, if there had been enough bonding there, then there would not have been that kind of movement away from their previous job. It’s a fascinating topic and it really does show us how much need there is for strong leadership. And while we’re on the topic of this, what happened after COVID, one thing that’s really baffling me right now is that we had the great resignation, we have all these labor shortages that people are talking about, it’s so hard to find people, and then, all of a sudden, about a year or so ago, people start to get really, really authoritarian, I guess, with these return to office mandates, and I, for the life of me, can’t figure out where that comes from. I get the idea that you need to spend some time in person and that sometimes just being at home at your computer, you don’t connect with people as much in some scenarios, but like people are getting, I don’t know, they’re just getting intense about it in a way that feels to me like it’s a counterproductive method by which they’re driving people away. I agree. I agree. The positive thing about COVID and allowing people to do home office is it really enabled a new type of flexibility to come in as sort of a standard that we’ve never had before,...