Strategy #47: Protect positive new people from negative old people

New people can be the source of incredible enthusiasm, yet all too often their passion is quickly quenched by the cynicism of pickle-sucking old-timers seeking to inject them with their own negative bias against the organization and/or to exert control over the newcomers. This is often a factor in organizations where attrition is highest among people in their first year on the job. In a world where talented people have many options, they simply will not put up with being thrown into a negative, cynical, and sarcastic work environment.

A few pages back I mentioned having worked with a hospital that had a serious turnover and vacancy problem. At that same hospital, I spent an hour counseling with a nursing student who had gone up to the unit where she was to receive her first clinical experience. She took the elevator up all bright-eyed, but came down in tears after the way she had been emotionally abused by the negative, bitter, cynical, and sarcastic pickle-suckers on that unit.  In her book Where Have All the Nurses Gone?, Faye Satterly writes: “At least a significant minority of nurses neither view themselves as an empowered group nor trust others in the profession. And that attitude is creating an unpleasant work environment for those around them.”

That is a problem not just in healthcare, but in any organization where the leadership tolerates toxic emotional negativity. Unfortunately, such negative attitudes are profoundly self-sabotaging. While in the short term the pickle-suckers might “benefit” from ego-gratification, to the extent that their negativity drives away good people (like this nursing student), it makes it more difficult for their organization to cost-effectively compete – and thus to offer any semblance of job security.

It is the manager’s responsibility to create an environment that is welcoming and nurturing for new employees. It is profoundly counterproductive to tolerate a culture where new people are hazed or otherwise made to “pay their dues” before being allowed to fit in, and where they are called Pollyanna or over-achiever (as if there is something wrong with looking for the best in other people and seeking to accomplish a great deal in one’s own work) if they refuse to wallow around in the pickle swamp.

Remember: Corporate culture is defined by what you expect and by what you tolerate, and over time what you tolerate will outweigh what you say you expect. To permit is to promote.

“The severest test of work today is not of our strategies but of our imagination and identities. For a human being, finding good work and doing good work is one of the ultimate ways of making a break for freedom.”

David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work
as a Pilgrimage of Identity

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