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Is your team or company's current culture plagued by negativity and dysfunction? The acronym CRAP—Criticizing, Rudeness, Arrogance, and Placing Blame—aptly describes toxic environments that hinder productivity and morale. But what drives these detrimental behaviors, and how can leaders transform them to foster a healthy workplace? By paving the way toward a culture epitomized by Constructive Feedback, Accountability, Respect for Opinions, and Empathetic Listening (CARE), leaders can inspire positive change and cultivate an atmosphere where everyone flourishes. When a company operates without a clear, articulated culture, or when behaviors run counter to the stated culture, it creates a void that quickly becomes toxic. This absence of a positive cultural identity can manifest in lackluster employee engagement, high attrition rates, and a noticeable decline in productivity and reliability.
To influence a company’s overall culture, leaders must proactively choose to change your team culture through intentional and visible acts, creating a better work environment for your teams.
What drives poor team culture? Simply put, it is CRAP. CRAP is defined as a culture demonstrating the following:
• Criticism: Constant negativity and fault-finding instead of offering helpful, constructive feedback.
• Rudeness: Engaging in disrespectful and unprofessional behavior that undermines a respectful work environment.
• Arrogance: Exhibiting an unwarranted sense of self-importance, often dismissing others' opinions and contributions without consideration.
• Placing Blame: Shifting responsibility and fault to others, avoiding accountability, and hindering constructive problem-solving and teamwork.
The CRAP culture vividly highlights detrimental attributes that can toxify the workplace environment. This culture drains energy and kills motivation, innovation, and problem-solving. No employee wants to work in a CRAP culture.
What is the opposite of a CRAP culture? And how do you change it? By creating a culture that CAREs. What does it mean to have a culture that CAREs?
• Constructive Feedback: Providing supportive feedback and praise, focusing on growth and improvement.
• Accountability: Embracing responsibility for actions and outcomes, asking "How can I help?" and "What part of this do I own?" to foster solutions and progress.
• Respect for Opinions: Valuing everyone's opinions, promoting an inclusive environment where all perspectives are welcome.
• Empathetic Listening: Listening to understand rather than to reply, ensuring communication is thoughtful and focused on building understanding and trust.
Adopting a CARE culture necessitates a deliberate shift in behavior and mindset, particularly from leadership. Such a culture promotes a positive, growth-oriented environment where feedback is aimed at improvement, accountability is embraced, opinions are valued, and communication is undertaken with empathy and understanding.
Most experts agree that culture is something you cannot easily define or see when you are in it, but you know it is there. Culture affects leadership and even more importantly, leaders affect culture. Why do insurgencies start in third world countries, churches split into new religions, or marriages end in divorce? Because no two cultures are alike. When people come together, inherent differences exist. It is a common purpose, mission, and set of values that unite people in positive ways.
Culture is comprised of the experiences that shape your beliefs about an environment and ultimately drive the actions you take and the results you achieve. Therefore, it is imperative to intentionally focus on changing culture to create results.
Organizational culture is a conglomerate of independent cultures within the organization. Many believe that the most senior leader’s culture will exist for everyone in the organization, but this doesn’t happen. People are unique, and everyone leads differently. A single-culture organization is only possible when there is one level of leadership. As a leader, failing to understand the environment created by you and your team will make identifying and improving the culture you are responsible for difficult. Simply stated, leadership behavior has the most impact on culture. Recognizing and accepting this is the key to creating a unified organizational culture. Leaders create culture, not organizations.
You may be saying, “This isn’t our team—we are productive. The issue must be with everyone else.” However, while the work product and output may be there even in a negative culture, passion and energy are likely waning. When a team continues to work in their own world, not helping each other or seeing the bigger picture, they will default to a CRAP culture where people criticize too much, are frequently rude, act like they're always right, and blame others for problems. This leads to a harmful cycle that must be broken to prevent recurrence.
Many times in a toxic culture, leaders within the team are focused on their own groups, often reflected in high manager engagement scores, but they are indifferent or sometimes even supportive when their teams demonstrate poor behavior toward others. The behavior is rarely addressed, and the perception is that it is tolerated or endorsed by leadership.
In these types of organizations, team members typically do not understand the long-term vision or strategy. Leaders often change messaging and priorities, creating additional confusion. Bottlenecks and roadblocks become pervasive, but when issues arise, the focus remains on people instead of correcting inefficient processes. Team members often assume negative intent or underlying motive, and in some instances, the relationships are so damaged that team members are forced to actively work around their leaders to accomplish work with other teams. Typically, there is a lack of clear communication structure, and when communication occurs it is often disorganized and dominated by a vocal few.
To improve the work environment and move toward a culture that CAREs, leaders must take these actions:
• Vision and Narrative Development: Clearly define the team's purpose, how each member contributes to this vision, and the importance of its role in the company. Craft a compelling story that motivates and instills pride.
• Behavioral Standards: Explicitly outline unacceptable behaviors (CRAP) and the positive behaviors that are expected. Create a safe space for calling out negative behaviors, regardless of the perpetrator's position.
• Leadership Accountability: Leaders should prioritize listening over speaking, acknowledge their mistakes openly, and commit to personal growth by addressing biases and negative behaviors. Remind leaders of the significance of their roles.
• Measurement of Leadership Effectiveness: Establish clear metrics for evaluating leaders, including goal achievement, management of their work team, team member development, cross-collaboration, and level of influence within the organization.
• Empowerment and Choice: Encourage team members to embrace leadership, believe in collective success, demonstrate courage, utilize resources, provide constructive feedback, enjoy their work, maintain honesty, and build trust through authenticity.
• Communication and Trust: Discourage gossip and promote trust-building. Respect and value each team member's time and contributions, acknowledging the unique skills within the team.
• Meeting and Communication Efficiency: Ensure that time spent in meetings and informal communications is valued and maximized, respecting the contributions of both remote and in-office team members equally. Agree on minimum expectations for all leaders to hold individual, team, and cross-departmental meetings.
• Praise in Public; Feedback in Private: Leaders and team members should focus on reinforcing and recognizing positive behaviors in public and third-party settings. If negative feedback is necessary, it should be delivered offline and handled in a direct, authentic, and constructive way.
• Process Improvement: Focus on fixing inefficient processes rather than attempting to change people. Address and eliminate bottlenecks to enhance team functionality.
• Inclusivity in Communication: Address any inequities between in-office and remote team members by establishing fair communication practices, celebrating all roles equally, and respecting organizational decisions about work arrangements.
No one joins a company as a leader to be irrelevant, and we cannot ignore a team’s ongoing dysfunction. A true intervention is required to maintain top talent, achieve goals, and drive the broader organization toward a genuine cultural change. If you cannot align your team on the same mission, you will struggle to make a meaningful impact on the overall organization.
At a minimum, feeling fulfilled in our daily work requires us to cut the CRAP and start to CARE.
Michael “Keith” Cutter is the Vice President of Talent Strategy at Delek US Holdings Inc., a downstream energy company. A licensed attorney in Texas, Keith has over 15 years of experience in human resources and labor relations. Passionate about culture and leadership, Keith has led strategic initiatives in talent management, diversity, and organizational development, primarily in the oil and gas industry.