The potential for friction is real. In a September 2024 Gartner survey of more than 925 U.S. employees, 25% reported witnessing aggressive or counterproductive behavior toward a coworker because of their political beliefs. That included offensive name-calling, avoidance, and arguments or raised voices. 

Yet only 16% said their organization provided tools to help managers understand and manage social and political issues at work. Apparently, the remaining managers were supposed to figure it out somewhere between approving timesheets and managing their own workloads.

A comment in a meeting or a reaction to a coworker’s social media post can change how people interact long after the conversation ends. Colleagues who once collaborated easily may begin avoiding each other, while managers hope everyone will magically get over it.

Ways to Navigate Political Tension

For HR professionals and leaders, navigating political tension at work means protecting employees’ ability to work together through disagreement. Here are four ways to get started.

1. Pay attention before someone files a complaint.

Political conflict doesn’t always announce itself through a shouting match in the break room. Sometimes, it shows up as an employee who stops contributing during meetings or two colleagues who suddenly struggle to complete work together.

These changes deserve attention, particularly when they follow a tense conversation. However, they also require curiosity. An employee’s withdrawal could have several explanations, so avoid deciding you know what happened before you’ve asked.

A private check-in can open the conversation: “I’ve noticed you’ve been quieter in our team meetings lately. How have things been going?”

Then give the person room to answer. If they describe a troubling interaction, ask about the specific behavior and how it affected their work. You’ll learn far more from that conversation than from reminding the entire department to “stay positive” and calling it leadership.

2. Encourage curiosity without requiring participation

When employees choose to discuss politics, the urge to win can quickly overwhelm the ability to listen. People begin preparing their rebuttal halfway through someone else’s sentence, and every question starts sounding suspiciously like an accusation.

Encourage employees to notice that shift. Asking, “What experiences shaped how you see this?” creates a different conversation from, “How could you possibly believe that?”

Listening also requires recognizing that political issues can carry deeply personal meaning. A topic one employee considers an abstract policy debate may directly affect a colleague’s family or sense of safety.

For that reason, curiosity must come with boundaries. Employees should have room to step away from an unwanted discussion. Nobody owes their coworkers a personal history lesson to justify why a topic matters to them.

3. Address harmful behavior consistently, including when you agree with the opinion

Leadership credibility gets tested when the person behaving badly shares the leader’s political views. It’s easy to recognize contempt when you dislike the message. It takes more discipline to address it when you agree with the speaker.

Focus on what the person actually did. Describe the interruption, personal insult, or repeated pressure to participate, then explain the expectation going forward. Give them an opportunity to respond and follow up to see whether their behavior changes.

“I was only joking” deserves a conversation about the conduct and its impact. It doesn’t automatically close the matter.

Apply the same care when a high performer causes the problem. Employees notice whose behavior earns a correction and whose behavior earns an excuse. That inconsistency can damage trust well beyond the original political disagreement.

4. Join our webinar on November 2.

Reading about respectful disagreement is useful. Figuring out what to say when an employee insults a colleague’s political beliefs in the middle of a staff meeting requires more preparation.

Join me for Navigating Political Tension at Work on November 2 at 11:15 a.m. PT, the day before Election Day. We’ll explore how to recognize warning signs of conflict, respond to heightened emotions, and equip managers to address difficult interactions with greater confidence where you will see more tips than are contained in this newsletter. It will only take 30 minutes of your time.

We’ll also look beyond Election Day, because announcing the results won’t automatically resolve the tension between coworkers. The goal is to help you build working relationships that can withstand disagreement long after the campaign signs come down.

 Register to attend.

The election will end. Your employees still have to work together. Whatever the outcome, your team will still have deadlines to meet and decisions to make together. How leaders respond to tension now can shape whether employees feel comfortable contributing or decide it’s safer to keep their heads down.

The post 4 Ways HR and Leaders Can Address Political Tension at Work appeared first on Civility Partners.

You’ve probably already rehearsed what you’ll say. You may have rehearsed their response, too, along with your very compelling explanation of why they’re wrong. Unfortunately, the version of the conversation happening in your head rarely includes anyone changing their mind.

De-Escalating Conflict At Work

On my Culture Forward Show last week, I talked with Daniel Orth, Associate Director of the Training Institute at the National Conflict Resolution Center (NCRC). Daniel has spent more than 20 years helping organizations in the U.S. and abroad work through conflict. 

Daniel shared NCRC’s ART method: Active Awareness, Respond Respectfully, and Troubleshoot Together. It’s a practical approach to de-escalating tense conversations, especially when your first instinct is to defend yourself, correct the other person, or suddenly remember another meeting you absolutely must attend.

Watch the full conversation here. Also, sidenote: Do you have a perspective that deserves a spot on the Culture Forward Show? We’re always interested in guests who bring practical insights, fresh thinking, and something more useful than “communication is key” to our audience of HR professionals and leaders. Fill out this quick form, and we’ll share more about guest opportunities.

Here’s what the ART method looks like.

Step 1: Active Awareness

Before you prepare your opening statement, take a look at the story you’re telling yourself about the other person. Have you already decided they’re difficult? Oversensitive? Trying to make your life harder? If so, there’s a good chance that judgment will show up in your tone long before you say anything overtly disrespectful.

Active Awareness means checking your biases, recognizing your communication habits, and knowing what tends to set you off. Perhaps you become defensive when someone questions your judgment. Maybe interruptions make you raise your voice, or you get so focused on explaining your intentions that you stop listening to the impact. Knowing those patterns gives you a chance to manage them.

If you skip the preparation, you’ll spend more time “cleaning up the mess on the back end.” Most leaders already have enough on their calendars without adding damage control for a conversation they made worse.

Start by separating what happened from what you assume it meant. “They questioned the deadline during the team meeting” describes something you observed. “They wanted to undermine my authority” is your interpretation. You may feel very confident about that interpretation, but confidence doesn’t turn it into a fact.

Then get clear about the outcome you need. If the goal is to agree on a realistic timeline, make that the focus. You might say, “We had different views about what the team could deliver by Friday. I’d like to understand your concerns and work through the plan.”

That opening gives you somewhere useful to go. It also leaves room for the possibility that the other person knows something you don’t, which remains possible even when you’re the boss.

Step 2: Respond Respectfully 

When someone is upset with you, listening can feel like waiting for an opening to explain why they shouldn’t be. You hear the first sentence, identify the part you disagree with, and start building your response while they’re still talking. Meanwhile, they can usually tell you’ve stopped listening, so they repeat themselves with more emphasis. Now everyone is louder, and nobody is further along.

Responding respectfully means giving the other person enough attention to understand the concern, then paraphrasing what you heard. For example, if an employee says, “You keep changing priorities and then blaming us when we miss deadlines,” resist the urge to launch into everything they don’t understand about your job.

Instead, try: “You’re frustrated because the priorities have changed, but the deadlines haven’t. You feel like the team is being held responsible for something it can’t reasonably deliver. Am I understanding you?”

You’re checking whether you understand the problem before trying to solve it. The employee may confirm your understanding, correct it, or explain something you hadn’t considered. Each response gives you more to work with than an argument about whether they’re being fair to you.

However, this only works if you’re interested in the answer. “I hear you” loses its charm when it serves as the introduction to a five-minute rebuttal. Follow your paraphrase with a real question, such as, “Which priorities are competing for the same time?” Then allow the answer to influence the discussion.

Feeling heard can help reduce the pressure to keep arguing a point, although it won’t make every person calm down on command. And if you discover you contributed to the problem, own your part clearly. “I changed the priorities without discussing what needed to move” gives you something to fix. “I’m sorry you feel that way” gives the employee a reason to regret bringing it up.

Step 3: Troubleshoot Together

Once you understand the concern, you can share your perspective and work toward a solution. This is also where leaders sometimes get stuck, because they worry that acknowledging someone’s frustration means conceding the argument.

Acknowledgment does not mean agreement. You can understand why someone felt excluded from a decision and still stand by the decision. You can recognize that an employee is frustrated and still address the way they spoke to a colleague. Listening doesn’t require you to surrender your judgment or your expectations.

For example, you might say, “I understand why the change was frustrating, especially without an explanation. The Friday deadline still stands because another team depends on this work. Let’s look at what we can postpone or reassign to make it achievable.”

Now you have a concrete problem to work through together. Ask what information is missing, where the workload needs to change, or what support would help. At the same time, be honest about what’s open for discussion. Asking for someone’s input when you’ve already made every decision tends to create another tense conversation.

Before you finish, agree on specifics. Who will communicate priority changes? Who decides what gets delayed? When will you check whether the adjustment worked? “We’ll communicate better” is a lovely sentiment, but it has probably appeared at the end of thousands of meetings that changed absolutely nothing.

What If the Other Person Stays Defensive?

Sometimes you prepare, listen, and respond thoughtfully, and the other person stays defensive. That’s frustrating, particularly when you feel you’re doing all the work to keep the conversation productive.

Daniel’s advice was to stay focused on what you came to accomplish. Telling someone exactly how ridiculous you think they’re being might feel satisfying. It’s less likely to help you influence a decision, resolve the disagreement, or leave with an agreement anyone intends to honor.

You can redirect without pretending you see everything the same way: “We still disagree about how this happened. What I’d like us to work through is how we prevent it from happening again.”

You can also set boundaries. If the conversation becomes insulting or too heated to be useful, pause it and establish when you’ll return: “I want to work through this, and we need to do that without personal remarks. Let’s take a break and come back at 2 p.m.”

Then actually come back. A pause can help people regroup; an indefinitely postponed conversation simply gives the problem more time to grow.

Address the Conditions That Keep Creating Conflict

Daniel’s final advice was to avoid being afraid of conflict. Handled well, a difficult conversation can help people understand each other and strengthen their working relationship. Getting there takes a willingness to hear something uncomfortable and follow through, especially when changing your own behavior is part of the solution.

If the same tensions keep resurfacing, though, your organization may need more than a better conversation. Unclear expectations, damaged trust, and a history of avoiding accountability won’t disappear because everyone attended a meeting and agreed to “communicate better.”

At Civility Partners, we provide expert workplace conflict resolution consulting to help organizations address those underlying issues. Whether you want to prevent friction through proactive culture strategies or resolve tensions already disrupting your team, our assessment, coaching, and facilitation services help you rebuild trust and establish clear expectations. We work with you to turn communication breakdowns into collaborative, accountable working relationships that move your business forward.

Ready to stop having the same conflict on repeat? Book a complimentary consultation with Civility Partners.

The post How to De-Escalate Tense Conversations at Work: The 3-Step ART Method for Leaders appeared first on Civility Partners.

A company can offer impressive benefits, display inspirational slogans, and call its people its greatest asset while tolerating behavior that sends those same people straight to LinkedIn’s job listings. Employees learn the culture through what leaders reward, what managers ignore, and what happens when someone raises an uncomfortable concern.

When those experiences undermine trust, engagement, and performance, a culture consulting firm can help identify what is driving the problems and turn good intentions into better practices. 

Finding the right partner takes more than choosing a recognizable name or an impressive proposal. Providers bring different strengths, from leadership development and organizational strategy to employee engagement, conflict resolution, and recognition. The best fit depends on what needs to change and the support required to make it happen.

What should you look for in a culture consulting firm?

Start with the problem you need to solve. Rebuilding trust after conflict requires different work from introducing a recognition program or aligning teams around a new strategy. A strong proposal should explain how the consultant will learn about your organization before recommending interventions.

Then ask what implementation includes. Who will coach managers, support difficult conversations, and help revise the processes that reinforce the wrong behavior? A report can 

identify the problem. Your team still needs the skills, support, and authority to address it.

Finally, define progress before the work begins. Depending on your goals, that might mean greater confidence in speaking up, more consistent management practices, improved retention, or fewer recurring conflicts. Attendance at a workshop tells you who showed up. It does not tell you what changed.

Culture consulting firms to consider

1. Civility Partners: For healthier workplaces and stronger organizational performance

Civility Partners is a strategic organizational development firm that helps organizations build positive, respectful work environments. Its services include workplace assessments, executive coaching, leadership development, corporate training, conflict resolution, and comprehensive culture change projects.

The firm works with organizations addressing harassment, discrimination, bullying, and other unhealthy workplace behaviors, while also helping clients strengthen employee engagement, performance management, communication, and management effectiveness. Its approach examines how leadership, individual behavior, and organizational systems influence the employee experience.

What sets Civility Partners apart is its combination of strategic guidance, practical implementation, and care for employee well-being. The firm uses discovery to understand each organization’s challenges before developing tailored solutions, then supports the conversations, behavior changes, and everyday practices needed to make progress sustainable.

Consider them when: Your organization needs support developing leaders, resolving conflict, improving engagement, or addressing the behaviors and systems that allow an unhealthy culture to persist.

Ask before engaging: How will assessment, coaching, training, and implementation support work together to address the organization’s priorities, and how will progress be measured?

2. Heidrick & Struggles: For connecting culture and leadership strategy

Heidrick & Struggles’ Organization & Culture practice connects culture with strategic goals and performance. Its published approach addresses organizational, team, and individual leader levels, drawing on leadership consulting and experience advising and placing executives.

That combination makes it worth considering when culture change is part of a broader leadership or business transformation. Its offering includes culture assessment capabilities and work on the mindsets, behaviors, and operational changes needed to support performance.

Consider them when: You need to align leadership, organizational priorities, and culture around a significant strategic change.

Ask before engaging: How will the proposed work involve frontline managers and employees, and who will support implementation beyond the senior team?

3. Korn Ferry: For culture transformation connected to organizational systems

Korn Ferry’s culture transformation offering combines business strategy, employee expectations, structural change, and behavior change. Its Culture 360 approach helps organizations define desired behaviors, build a cultural blueprint, support leadership alignment, and track progress.

It also distinguishes between aspects of culture to preserve and those that need to evolve. That is a useful starting point for organizations that want change without discarding practices that already work.

Consider them when: Culture change needs to connect with a broader redesign of how the organization works.

Ask before engaging: How will the team tailor the work to your workforce, handle sensitive relationship issues, and adapt as new findings emerge?

4. Gallup: For engagement measurement and manager action

Gallup offers the Q12 employee engagement survey alongside engagement consulting. Its survey focuses on conditions such as clear expectations, resources, recognition, development, and purpose, helping leaders identify where teams need support.

This makes Gallup worth considering when you need a consistent way to measure engagement and guide action. The important purchasing decision is what happens after the results arrive: measurement and implementation support should be discussed together.

Consider them when: Your priority is understanding engagement and equipping managers to respond to the findings.

Ask before engaging: What support will managers receive, and how will you explore sensitive issues that need more context than survey responses provide?

5. Ernst & Young: For culture change connected to broader business transformation

Ernst & Young (EY) is a global professional services organization with consulting capabilities spanning business transformation, people strategy, leadership development, and organizational culture. Its leadership and culture services help organizations strengthen leadership capabilities, support behavior change, and build more inclusive workplaces.

The firm combines research, data, digital tools, coaching, and workshops to support culture discovery, design, and implementation. Its approach connects culture with business priorities, including preparing leaders to navigate change and helping employees adapt to new ways of working.

Consider them when: Culture change is part of a broader business transformation that requires coordinated support across leadership, workforce development, and organizational systems.

Ask before engaging: How will the team translate its findings into everyday behavior changes, involve employees throughout the process, and support implementation beyond the initial recommendations?

How to choose the right culture partner

Bring prospective partners a concrete challenge: employees hesitate to report concerns, two departments no longer trust each other, or a high-performing manager repeatedly damages working relationships. Ask how they would investigate it, what action might follow, and how they would evaluate progress.

Then listen for how they involve leadership. If the proposed solution places every responsibility on employees, ask who will address the decisions and systems that shape their experience.

Culture work should help people experience meaningful change in the meetings they attend, the feedback they receive, and the way concerns are handled. Respect needs to survive a missed deadline and an uncomfortable conversation, too. That’s what we specialize at Civility Partners.

If you are ready to understand what is driving your workplace challenges and build a practical plan for change, let’s talk. Just send us a message here. 

PS: Do you want to share your expertise with the Civility Partners community? We’re looking for experts to guest our Workplace Intelligence Series’ bi-monthly webinars and Culture Forward Show. If you have insights our audience of HR professionals and leaders needs to hear, we’d love to connect. Fill out this quick form, and we’ll send you more information about guest opportunities!

The post 5 Best Culture Consulting Firms to Consider and How to Choose the Right Partner appeared first on Civility Partners.

They’re resistant… or they don’t want to learn the new system, they aren’t embracing the new strategy, they keep asking questions leadership thought they already answered, or even they seem skeptical about the latest transformation initiative.

That explanation is convenient but i’s also incomplete.

PwC’s 2026 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey paints a much more complicated picture of what’s happening inside organizations. Employees are adapting. In fact, 88% said they applied new skills in their jobs over the past year, and nearly two-thirds had to learn new tools and technology to at least a moderate extent.

Yet only 51% say they have access to the learning and development resources they need, down from 59% the previous year.

In other words, organizations are asking people to change while access to the resources that help them change is going in the wrong direction.

Your Workforce Isn’t Experiencing Change Equally

Change is no longer something organizations roll out once every few years. New technology. Restructuring. New leadership. New processes. New expectations. New roles. New performance metrics. Another platform everyone has to learn by Friday. The workplace has become a constant stream of adjustment.

The same research from PwC identified these workforce groups:

1. Front-runners have strong AI advantages and highly sought-after skills. They tend to feel confident, optimistic, and ready to adapt.
2. Engine room employees make up 56% of the workforce and handle much of the day-to-day work organizations depend on. Yet fewer than 40% say they have access to the learning and development resources they need, and only 20% say recent organizational changes make them optimistic about their organization’s future.
3. AI insurgent employees are relatively secure and engaged, but they’re feeling the pressure of constant change and increased demands.
4. Indespensables have the fewest advantages and are the least equipped to navigate what’s coming next, making them especially vulnerable as work continues to evolve.

That means you need to stop treating workforce readiness as though everyone starts from the same place.

Different employees have different levels of confidence, workloads, access to development, relationships with managers, and experiences with previous organizational changes.

So what do employees actually need?

1. Employees Need to Understand the “Why”

Leaders spend months discussing a major organizational change. They attend meetings. Review data. Debate options. Talk through risks. Revise plans. Discuss the decision again. And again.

Then they announce it Tuesday morning and wonder why everyone isn’t fully committed by Tuesday afternoon. Leadership has had months to process the change. Employees have had 20 minutes.

Give them a minute!

Employees need context. What problem are we solving? Why isn’t the current approach working? What will success look like? And, most importantly, what does this mean for me?

If employees don’t understand the change, don’t immediately label their questions as resistance.

Sometimes questions are just questions.

2. Employees Need the Skills to Succeed in the New Reality

Organizations cannot continuously change job expectations without continuously developing the people expected to meet them.

The same research by PwC found that workers actually rate their own ability to learn new skills higher than the support they receive to do so. While 61% feel confident in their ability to develop new skills, only 51% say they have access to the learning and development resources they need.

Employees may be perfectly willing to adapt and still feel unprepared to do it.

Organizations need to provide development that connects directly to where the business is going. That means identifying the skills employees will need, giving them meaningful opportunities to practice those skills, and this part seems to mysteriously disappear from many development plans—giving them time to learn them.

You cannot tell someone to develop an entirely new capability while maintaining the same workload, deadlines, meetings, and performance expectations.

Learning requires capacity. If development only happens after employees finish their “real work,” you haven’t made development a priority. You’ve assigned homework.

3. Employees Need Managers Who Know How to Lead Through Change

Most workplace change looks something like this: Senior leadership announces the change → Managers are expected to make it happen, but, unfortunately, nobody developed the managers.

PwC found that 24% of managers themselves struggle to manage change, while confidence in their own job security has fallen.

Yet managers sit directly between organizational strategy and the employee experience. You cannot expect managers to confidently guide employees through uncertainty when they’re standing in the same uncertainty without a flashlight.

This is why manager development can’t consist of sending people to a leadership workshop once and checking the box.

Managers need practice navigating difficult conversations, communicating expectations, building trust, giving useful feedback, holding people accountable, managing conflict, and creating psychological safety.

Our Manager Evolution Lab is not just another one-and-done leadership workshop. Managers practice the skills they actually need on the job—from difficult conversations and accountability to feedback, trust, conflict management and psychological safety—so they’re better equipped to lead people when things get messy.

4. Employees Need to Trust the People Asking Them to Change

PwC found that trust in management fell seven percentage points in one year. Among employees in the “engine room,” only 33% trust top management and 40% trust their immediate manager.

Now imagine telling that workforce: Trust us. This transformation is going to be great.

See the problem? Change requires vulnerability from employees. You’re asking people to give up familiar processes, develop new skills, accept uncertainty, make mistakes while learning, and trust that leadership knows where the organization is headed.

Employees are much more willing to take those risks when they believe leadership will be transparent, consistent, and fair. Trust, therefore, isn’t separate from change management. Trust determines how employees interpret change.

5. Employees Need Permission to Get It Wrong

Organizations frequently tell employees they want innovation while rewarding behavior that says the exact opposite.

• Be creative but don’t make mistakes.
• Try something new but hit every existing metric.
• Challenge how we’ve always done things but maybe not that thing.
• Experiment but please provide the ROI first.

You can see why employees might be confused. Adaptability doesn’t happen because you put “agility” in the company values. People adapt when the culture makes adaptation safe.

Employees need room to ask questions, test ideas, admit when they don’t understand something, challenge outdated processes, and occasionally get something wrong without fearing that every mistake will follow them into their next performance review.

If the safest career strategy in your organization is to keep your head down and do things exactly the way they’ve always been done, don’t act shocked when people aren’t racing toward change.

Your culture trained them to behave that way.

Stop Managing “Resistance.” Start Building Readiness

Yes, some employees resist change. There will always be people who prefer the familiar, disagree with a decision, or simply don’t want to adjust.

But “resistance” shouldn’t become the catch-all explanation every time employees struggle with organizational change.

Before blaming the workforce, ask a harder question: Have you actually given people what they need to succeed through the change?

We help organizations answer those questions through workforce assessments, interviews and focus groups, then turn what we uncover into an actionable roadmap for change.

Because you don’t build an adaptable workforce by repeatedly telling people to be more adaptable. You build a culture that gives people the clarity, skills, trust, support and psychological safety to do it.

So before you launch another initiative designed to make employees “more adaptable,” find out what’s getting in their way. Your employees may not be resisting change at all.

They may be waiting for the organization to get better at leading it. Send us an email! 

PS: Do you want to share your expertise with the Civility Partners community? We’re looking for experts to guest our Workplace Intelligence Series’ bi-monthly webinars and Culture Forward Show. If you have insights our audience of HR professionals and leaders needs to hear, we’d love to connect. Fill out this quick form, and we’ll send you more information about guest opportunities!

The post Your Employees Aren’t Resistant to Change. Here Are 5 Things They Need to Navigate It appeared first on Civility Partners.

And that drop “cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of GDP.”

Gallup defines engagement as the psychological attachment workers have to their work, their team and their employer and has proven repeatedly that disengaged employees lead to less profitable organizations, which translates to lower economic growth.

But let’s also be real.

Global engagement had only climbed to an average of 23% since 2020, which is also an appalling number and sadly, the highest engagement has ever been.

It’s also interesting (and sad) to note that the gap between managers and employees has shrunk to 3%. In 2022, the gap was 11% (31% of managers were engaged compared to 20% of employees).

But increasing engagement is not an impossible goal. Organizations engaged in engagement best practices see an average of 79% of managers being engaged at work — nearly quadruple the global average. No doubt that has positive financial implications for those employers.

Increasing Employee Engagement is Not That Hard

It can feel hard in the thick of daily tasks, complaints, poor morale, and a scary economy. And it can feel particularly hard if you’re not starting with data and instead throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks.

We spoke to one potential client, for example, who was spending half of her budget on a social event to increase engagement survey scores. I begged her not to force disengaged people to come to a party where they’d be, well, disengaged, but she insisted and I wish her well.

Step 1. Gather Data

If engagement is psychological attachment to one’s workplace, it makes sense that the greater the attachment, the harder and more productive one will be, and the more profitable the company will be.

Keep in mind, however, that psychological attachment is one outcome of culture, but the words engagement and culture are not to be intertwined (though they so often are!).

Your engagement score tells you something about how employees feel about their workplace. It doesn’t necessarily tell you why they feel that way.

That’s why your first step has to be gathering the right data.

A good workforce survey should help you understand the employee experience underneath engagement. How psychologically safe do people feel? What are their relationships with their managers and coworkers like? Do they believe communication is effective? Do they feel included? Are they satisfied with their jobs? Learn more about our Workforce Survey here. 

And depending on what you uncover, you may need to dig deeper through interviews, focus groups, or other qualitative methods.

You’re trying to understand what is happening in your culture before you decide how to change it. Because if you skip this step, you end up spending half your budget on a party.

Step 2. Figure Out What the Data Is Actually Telling You

This is where I see organizations get stuck. They did the survey. They got the results. Maybe they even presented a beautiful dashboard to the executive team.

And then someone asks, “Okay. What do we do now?” That question is much harder to answer than it sounds.

If employees score communication poorly, for example, “improve communication” isn’t an action plan. You need to understand what poor communication actually means in your organization.

Are leaders withholding information? Are managers inconsistent about what they share? Are employees overwhelmed with communication but still missing the information they need? Are decisions being made without explanation? Do people feel uncomfortable asking questions?

Those are entirely different problems requiring entirely different solutions. The same goes for low scores around trust, recognition, psychological safety, leadership, teamwork, or growth.

The survey identifies the smoke. Your job is to find the fire.

Step 3. Build a Roadmap Instead of Launching Random Initiatives

Once you understand what is driving the results, resist the urge to fix everything at once. This is another place where good intentions get organizations into trouble.

Leaders see 15 things they want to improve and launch 15 initiatives. Six months later, everyone is overwhelmed, managers have another pile of responsibilities, employees aren’t sure what’s actually changed, and HR is exhausted trying to keep everything moving.

Instead, build a roadmap.

Determine which issues create the greatest risk or have the greatest impact on the employee experience. Identify what you can realistically influence. Decide what needs immediate attention and what belongs in the longer-term plan. Then get specific about what change actually looks like.

If employees say they don’t receive enough feedback, for example, your goal shouldn’t simply be to “improve feedback.”

What behaviors need to change? Do managers need to hold more frequent conversations? Do they need skills for delivering difficult feedback respectfully? Do employees need clearer expectations? Does your performance management process need to change?

Now you’re moving from survey results to action. Organizations aren’t necessarily failing at engagement because they don’t care. Many simply haven’t been intentional about connecting the data to specific changes in organizational systems, leadership behaviors, and individual behaviors. And without that connection, engagement becomes a series of activities instead of a strategy.

Step 4. Look Closely at Your Managers

Managers are responsible for creating much of the day-to-day employee experience, but organizations routinely promote people into management and assume they’ll somehow figure out the “people” part along the way.

Suddenly they’re expected to give meaningful feedback, navigate conflict, coach performance, recognize good work, communicate organizational decisions, build trust, create psychological safety, hold people accountable, and support employee development.

That’s a lot to ask from someone whose leadership development consisted of, “Congratulations on your promotion.”

So if your survey tells you employees don’t feel supported, heard, recognized, developed, or psychologically safe, don’t immediately conclude that you have an employee engagement problem.

You may have a manager capability problem. That’s why manager development needs to connect directly to the data you’ve gathered.

Our Manager Evolution Lab, for example, focuses on developing managers over time rather than sending them to one training and hoping something sticks. Managers need opportunities to learn, practice, apply, and strengthen the behaviors that actually shape the employee experience.

If the survey tells you where employees are struggling, your manager development strategy should help managers build the skills required to change that experience.

Step 5. Measure Again With the Right Things

Eventually, yes, you should survey employees again. But don’t wait until the next annual engagement survey to find out whether anything changed.

If your roadmap focuses on improving feedback, measure whether employees are receiving more useful feedback. If you’re working on psychological safety, look for changes in employees’ willingness to speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, or raise concerns. If you’re developing managers, measure whether employees experience changes in manager behavior.

You want to know whether the actions in your roadmap are actually changing the conditions that contributed to disengagement. That also gives you an opportunity to adjust.

Engagement Requires Intentionality

Maybe the fact that global engagement remains so low shouldn’t surprise us.

Organizations spend enormous amounts of time measuring engagement, talking about engagement, and trying to improve engagement. But measurement alone doesn’t create change.

And neither do perks, pizza parties, wellness apps, or another inspirational leadership training if they have nothing to do with what employees are actually experiencing.

Engagement improves when organizations become intentional about the culture they’re creating. You know what to do next because your data told you.

And if you’re reading this thinking, “Great, but who has the time or expertise to do all of that?”

We do.

At Civility Partners, this is literally what we do. We can survey your workforce, dig into what’s driving the results, build your roadmap for change, and develop your managers to help make that change stick. You don’t have to piece together five different solutions or stare at another survey report wondering what comes next. Just take a look at our case studies here.

So what are you waiting for? Just send us an email to talk with one of our workplace culture experts. Let’s look at what’s happening in your organization, figure out what needs to change, and build a plan to actually change it.

Your engagement scores aren’t going to improve because you hope they will.

Let’s get to work.

PS: Do you want to share your expertise with the Civility Partners community? We’re looking for experts to guest our Workplace Intelligence Series’ bi-monthly webinars and Culture Forward Show. If you have insights our audience of HR professionals and leaders needs to hear, we’d love to connect. Fill out this quick form, and we’ll send you more information about guest opportunities!

The post Gallup 2026: Disengagement Hits COVID Levels & What to Do About It appeared first on Civility Partners.

You’ll find results like, “They’re entitled,” “They don’t want to work,” “They quit too quickly,” “They won’t pick up the phone,” and “They accept interviews and don’t show up.” Some even accept job offers and never make it to day one, a behavior that has helped popularize another catchy workplace term: career catfishing.

The 2025 Future of Work Survey by CV Genius found that 34% of Gen Z workers admitted to career catfishing. But Gen Z hardly has a monopoly on the behavior: 24% of millennials, 11% of Gen Xers, and 7% of baby boomers reported doing it too.

So rather than chalking this up to another Gen Z character flaw, employers should be asking a much more useful question: Why are younger candidates disappearing in the first place?

Consider the employment landscape Gen Z entered. Many watched mass layoffs happen over email and Zoom. They’ve seen organizations preach loyalty while eliminating positions. They submit applications through automated systems, receive automated acknowledgments, complete automated assessments, and sometimes make it surprisingly far into the hiring process without much meaningful human interaction.

Behavior doesn’t develop in a vacuum. The hiring experience teaches candidates what kind of relationship they’re entering and what kind of behavior is apparently acceptable.

What’s Really Behind Gen Z Ghosting?

Here are three reasons Gen Z’s are ghosting employers, and what organizations can do differently.

1. Employers Have Been Ghosting Candidates for Years

Let’s start with the obvious one. Candidates apply for a position, spend time tailoring their resume, answer application questions, and submit everything into an applicant tracking system. Then…nothing.

Others make it much further. They complete phone screens, interviews, assessments, presentations, and follow-up conversations. Then…nothing.

Indeed’s research found that 35% of job candidates said an employer didn’t acknowledge their application at all, while 40% said an employer ghosted them after they reached a second or third round of interviews.

From the employer’s perspective, there may be perfectly reasonable internal explanations. The hiring manager got busy, priorities changed, the position went on hold, or someone assumed someone else sent the rejection email.

The candidate doesn’t experience those explanations. They experience silence. And silence communicates something: once we no longer need you, communicating with you becomes optional.

Then employers are shocked when candidates return the favor. Funny how that works.

How to fix it: Close the loop

Every person who applies for a job should receive an answer. That doesn’t mean recruiters need to write hundreds of personalized rejection emails. It means applicants shouldn’t be left wondering whether their resume was reviewed, the position was filled, or the hiring process is still underway.

At minimum, acknowledge the application, communicate meaningful updates when appropriate, and notify every applicant when they are no longer being considered. Greenhouse found that 79% of candidates would consider applying to a company again if they received feedback after interviewing but didn’t get the job.

2. Gen Z Doesn’t Automatically Give Employers Their Loyalty

Gen Z isn’t necessarily uninterested in careers or growth. They’re defining those things differently.

Deloitte’s 2025 global survey of more than 23,000 Gen Z and millennial respondents found that only 6% of Gen Z respondents considered reaching a senior leadership position a primary career goal. Yet learning and development ranked among the top three reasons Gen Z chose their current employers.

They’re ambitious. They just may not define ambition as spending 20 years climbing one company’s organizational chart. They’re also paying close attention to what employers offer beyond a paycheck. Deloitte found that 89% of Gen Z respondents considered a sense of purpose important to their job satisfaction and well-being.

That changes the power dynamic. Gen Z workers may be less willing to assume that an employer deserves loyalty simply because they offered them a job.

And frankly, why should any employee? Loyalty is a relationship outcome, not an onboarding requirement.

How to fix it: Stop trying to sell candidates a job and start showing them why the relationship is worth investing in.

Be transparent about the work, the manager, growth opportunities, expectations, compensation, challenges, and culture. And please retire the temptation to oversell.

If the job is chaotic, don’t describe it as “fast-paced.” If the manager micromanages, don’t call them “hands-on.” If there’s nowhere to move internally, don’t promise unlimited growth opportunities. Candidates will eventually find out.

3. Candidates Are Judging Your Culture Before They Ever Work for You

Organizations spend enormous amounts of money on employer branding.

• They create beautiful career pages. 
• They post employee testimonials. 
• They talk about their values on LinkedIn.

Meanwhile, a candidate has been waiting 17 days for someone to tell them whether they made it to the next interview. Your hiring process is part of your culture. If your recruiting process feels disorganized, misleading, impersonal, or disrespectful, candidates have every reason to wonder whether working for you will feel exactly the same.

How to fix it: Audit your candidate experience like you would your customer experience.

Go through the hiring process from an applicant’s perspective. How long does the application take? Is the salary range clear? How quickly does someone receive an acknowledgment? How many interviews are actually necessary? Are candidates repeatedly asked for the same information? Are assignments reasonable for someone who isn’t being paid? Does every candidate know what happens next and when?

Companies wouldn’t knowingly make customers jump through unnecessary hoops and then wonder why they abandoned their carts. Candidate drop-off deserves the same attention.

Candidate Ghosting Is Data. Use It.

None of this excuses candidates who schedule interviews and don’t show up or who accept positions and disappear without communicating. Professional courtesy goes both ways. But if candidate ghosting happens frequently in your organization, don’t immediately decide that Gen Z is the problem.

Look at where people disappear. Patterns tell you something. Treat ghosting as data. If candidates repeatedly disappear at the same stage, investigate that stage before blaming an entire generation.

Because while Gen Z may be participating in workplace ghosting, they certainly didn’t invent it.

The hiring relationship starts long before someone’s first day. Every email, interview, delay, follow-up, and interaction teaches candidates something about what it might be like to work for you.

You can’t demand relationship-level loyalty while providing transaction-level treatment.

Civility Partners helps organizations identify the workplace issues driving disengagement, turnover, conflict, and other costly people problems and build healthier, more effective cultures in their place.

If attracting and retaining great people has become a challenge, schedule a complimentary call with one of our experts. The conversation will help you uncover what may be getting in the way and where to focus next.

The post 3 Reasons Gen Z Is Ghosting Employers and How to Fix It appeared first on Civility Partners.

We’re opening guest opportunities for professionals who can bring fresh thinking and practical value to the Civility Partners community.

There are two ways to join the conversation:

1. Workplace Intelligence Series: Bring your expertise to our twice-monthly webinars, which average 590 registrants and around 300 live attendees per session. These are educational, practical sessions designed for HR professionals, leaders, and workplace culture champions.
2. LinkedIn Live with Catherine: Sit down with Catherine for a more conversational discussion about a topic you know inside and out. Catherine has 82,000+ LinkedIn followers, with HR professionals consistently making up the largest segment of her recent LinkedIn Live audiences.

We’re looking for fresh ideas, useful research, practical takeaways, compelling perspectives, and conversations that make people think.

Sound like something you’d be a great fit for?

We want to hear it.

Fill out this quick form and tell us about yourself, your expertise, and what you’d like to talk about. Our team will review your submission to make sure there’s a strong fit with our audience.

If there’s a fit, we’ll send you details about the opportunity. If you’re interested in moving forward after reviewing them, we’ll schedule a quick call to discuss your topic, format, and next steps.

We’d love to hear what you have to bring to the conversation!

The post Do You Want to Share Your Expertise With Civility Partners’ Audience? appeared first on Civility Partners.

It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie. Some of the people raising these concerns are building the technology.

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon recently resigned and publicly warned about the race toward increasingly powerful AI systems. Anthropic alignment researcher Evan Hubinger has said he personally puts the probability of AI killing all humans within the next decade at greater than 10%.

When the potential consequences are enormous, responsible leaders don’t wait for certainty before managing risk.

AI Risk Is Already a Workplace Culture Issue

I don’t build AI models but I build healthy workplace cultures, and the AI conversation is exposing a very familiar organizational problem.

A company discovers something that delivers extraordinary results. Everyone gets excited about its potential. Pressure builds to move faster. Competitors are in the race. Leaders don’t want to fall behind. Then someone raises a concern and suddenly they’re the person standing in the way of progress.

I’ve watched this scenario play out with high-performing toxic leaders for years. A leader generates revenue, delivers results, or possesses expertise the organization believes it can’t afford to lose. At the same time, employees tell HR that this person’s behavior is creating fear, burnout, turnover, or psychological harm.

Leadership sees the results. Employees experience the risk. The organization keeps tolerating the problem because the damage hasn’t become expensive enough yet. Then it does. Leaders cannot take the same approach to AI.

Organizations need the culture, systems, boundaries, and accountability to manage AI responsibly before the consequences force them to act.

The Biggest AI Risk for Most Organizations Isn’t Extinction

Forget killer robots for a minute. Organizations are already facing AI risks inside the workplace.

• Employees paste confidential information into public AI tools. 
• Managers use AI-generated information to influence hiring and performance decisions without understanding how the output was produced. 
• Teams automate work without adequately addressing bias, privacy, security, or accuracy.

Employees also start trusting AI-generated answers because the technology sounds confident, even when those answers are wrong.

And in the race for efficiency, organizations risk stripping away the human judgment, relationships, conversations, and critical thinking that make workplaces function.

What Leaders Can Do Right Now

Leaders must take responsibility for how AI operates inside their organizations. Here are four places to start.

1. Create Clear Ownership for AI

Someone must own AI governance.

Leaving ownership of AI solely to IT is a mistake. AI affects people, privacy, performance, customers, decision-making, risk, and workplace culture.

HR, legal, cybersecurity, operations, and business leaders need clearly defined responsibilities for how AI is selected, implemented, monitored, and used.

When everyone owns AI, nobody owns AI. Make accountability explicit.

2. Define Your Non-Negotiables

Don’t wait for an AI-related incident to decide where the boundaries are. Define where human judgment is mandatory.

• Hiring
• Terminations
• Performance evaluations
• Disciplinary decisions
• Confidential information
• Employee data

Leadership needs to determine what AI can support, what requires human review, and what AI should never decide. Set those boundaries now, before speed and convenience set them for you.

3. Train People to Challenge AI, Not Just Use It

Teaching employees how to write prompts isn’t AI literacy. Employees need to understand hallucinations, bias, privacy concerns, security risks, verification, and the limitations of AI-generated information.

More importantly, create a culture where employees are expected to question AI. The most dangerous employee isn’t the person who asks, “Are we sure this is right?” It’s the person who assumes the machine must know better.

Critical thinking has become an AI risk-management skill.

4. Measure the Human Impact

Stop measuring AI success only by hours saved, productivity gained, or dollars reduced. Measure what happens to workload, trust, job quality, psychological safety, communication, customer experience, decision quality, and employee wellbeing.

If AI saves 1,000 hours of labor while destroying employee trust, that’s not successful implementation. Efficiency is one metric. Human impact is another. Leaders are responsible for both.

Don’t Automate Away the Skills We Need Most

The more powerful technology becomes, the more valuable deep human leadership skills become.

• Critical thinking
• Empathy
• Courage
• Accountability
• Communication
• Judgment
• Curiosity
• The ability to disagree constructively
• The ability to recognize when something technically possible isn’t ethically responsible

AI can produce reports, analyze data, write emails, summarize meetings, and generate strategies. That makes human judgment more important, not less. Organizations need to develop these capabilities aggressively alongside AI adoption. 

Our training programs help organizations strengthen the human skills AI can’t replace. Every program is tailored to the organization’s culture, challenges, and goals, so employees aren’t just learning concepts; they’re building skills they can actually use at work. Check out our menu of training topics here.

Automating tasks makes sense. Automating judgment does not. 

Don’t Wait for Damage to Prove the Warning Was Valid

Nobody knows exactly what AI will be capable of ten years from now. Leaders don’t need that answer to make better decisions today. Most importantly, don’t allow the pursuit of innovation to outrun responsibility.

I’ve spent my career watching organizations learn this lesson the hard way: Problems are much easier to prevent than they are to repair.

Toxic workplaces don’t become toxic overnight. Small behaviors get tolerated. Exceptions become habits. Habits become norms. Employees stop speaking up because speaking up doesn’t change anything.

Then leadership looks around and asks: How did we get here?

AI risk develops the same way. Not through one dramatic decision, but through thousands of small decisions nobody questions because everyone is moving too fast.

AI is changing work fast. Make sure your leaders and employees are ready for it. Talk with our workplace culture expert about tailored training that strengthens communication, accountability, critical thinking, psychological safety, and leadership. Let’s build the skills your workforce needs for what’s next.

PS: Do you want to share your expertise with the Civility Partners community? We’re looking for experts to guest our Workplace Intelligence Series’ bi-monthly webinars and Catherine’s LinkedIn Live conversations. If you have insights our audience of HR professionals and leaders needs to hear, we’d love to connect. Fill out the form, and we’ll send you more information about guest opportunities!

The post AI Could Kill Humans in the Next Decade?? Leaders, Here Are 4 Things You Can Do Now appeared first on Civility Partners.

Employees are offended by everything. Managers can’t say anything anymore. People need constant reassurance. Nobody can take a joke. Everyone has to walk on eggshells.

And usually, this conversation ends with some variation of, “Back in my day, we just dealt with it.”

Well, yes. People did deal with it.

They dealt with bosses who screamed at them. They dealt with inappropriate jokes, humiliating comments, impossible workloads, retaliation, harassment, and leaders who managed through fear. They went home furious, complained to their spouse, updated their résumé, disengaged, or simply learned to keep their mouths shut.

The fact that employees tolerated something doesn’t mean it was appropriate.

And frankly, that’s a big part of the answer to this whole question: A lot of things have been inappropriate for a very long time. Now they’re being called out.

So, What Actually Changed at Work?

Here’s what’s driving the shift:

1. Standards for Acceptable Workplace Behavior Changed

A manager screaming at an employee used to be called “tough.”

A leader demanding immediate responses at all hours was “committed.”

A rainmaker who treated colleagues terribly was “just intense.”

A lot of workplace behavior wasn’t necessarily considered acceptable because everyone genuinely thought it was fine. Often, employees simply didn’t have much power to challenge it.

Today, those behaviors are being questioned. Workplaces change as we learn more about human behavior, organizational performance, leadership, and the consequences of allowing certain behaviors to continue.

According to the American Psychological Association, 95% of workers say it’s important to them to feel respected at work. So when employees question behavior that feels demeaning, humiliating, or disrespectful, it shouldn’t automatically chalk it up to increased sensitivity. Expectations have simply caught up with what a healthy workplace should have required all along.

2. Employees Have a Bigger Vocabulary for Bad Behavior

Twenty years ago, an employee might have said, “My boss is a jerk.” Today, they might say, “My manager consistently interrupts me, excludes me from information I need, criticizes me publicly, and then dismisses my concerns when I raise them.”

We now talk openly about workplace bullying, incivility, exclusion, psychological safety, retaliation, microaggressions, burnout, boundaries, and toxicleadership.

That doesn’t automatically mean employees became more sensitive. Sometimes they simply became better at identifying and articulating what they’re experiencing.

3. Leaders Confuse Discomfort With Oversensitivity, and Employees Confuse Discomfort With Toxicity

Both sides can get this wrong.

Sometimes constructive feedback gets labeled “bullying.” Sometimes a manager says, “This work doesn’t meet the standard we agreed on,” and the employee hears, “My manager is creating a toxic environment.” Sometimes someone receives a direct email and spends the afternoon analyzing the punctuation like it’s evidence in a criminal trial.

People bring different personalities, histories, communication preferences, coping skills, and levels of resilience into the workplace. Naturally, people will respond differently to the same interaction.

And resilience matters.

Employees need to be able to receive feedback, hear “no,” navigate disagreement, work with personalities different from their own, make mistakes, have uncomfortable conversations, and be held accountable.

The question is what caused that discomfort because sometimes discomfort is a necessary part of growth. And sometimes it’s a warning sign that something isn’t okay. Knowing the difference matters.

4. “Too Sensitive” Can Become a Convenient Excuse Not to Examine Behavior

One employee says a leader is difficult. Okay. Let’s understand what happened. A second employee raises a similar concern. Interesting. Then a third. A fourth. A fifth.

I see this happen in organizations more than you might think. Multiple employees struggle with the same leader, but somehow the explanation is always that the employees are too emotional, too inexperienced, too needy, too difficult, or there’s that word again—too sensitive.

Maybe. But if different people independently describe similar behaviors and similar impacts, you’ve got data.

That doesn’t automatically make the leader malicious. In fact, much of my work coaching toxic rockstars involves people who genuinely don’t understand the impact they’re having.

But lack of intent doesn’t erase impact. Your job as an organization is to figure out which one you’re dealing with, not pick the explanation that’s most convenient.

So, Are People More Sensitive Now?

Sometimes, yes. We shouldn’t be afraid to say that.

Some employees need stronger resilience. Some need to get better at receiving feedback. Some need to recognize that disagreement, accountability, direct communication, and occasional interpersonal friction are normal parts of working with other humans.

But that’s only half the conversation.

Leaders also need enough self-awareness to recognize when “too sensitive” has become their favorite defense against feedback.

Organizations need enough courage to examine patterns rather than protect a high performer because confronting them would be inconvenient.

And HR needs enough nuance to distinguish between an employee experiencing normal workplace discomfort and an employee describing a genuine pattern of damaging behavior.

So, before you decide your employees are “too sensitive” or spend money fixing the wrong problem, find out what’s actually happening.

Our culture assessments go beyond surface-level engagement scores to uncover the patterns and root causes affecting your workforce. We’ll give you the data, insights, and clear recommendations you need to stop guessing and start addressing the issues that are actually hurting your culture and performance.

Don’t wait until frustration turns into turnover, complaints, or a full-blown culture problem. Send us a message or grab a time to talk with our expert here. 

PS: 

Got a workplace challenge you want help solving? Join me for an upcoming Office Hours for practical guidance, or dive into our Workplace Intelligence Series for more tools and strategies. Grab a session that works for you – I’d love to see you there.

The post Why Are People So Sensitive? 4 Things Have Changed at Work appeared first on Civility Partners.

Apparently, angry bosses aren’t going out of style.

So we figured it was time for an update – not because you need five more clever ways to tolerate bad behavior, but because dealing with an angry boss is more complicated than most workplace advice makes it sound.

When your neighbor gets angry, you can walk back into your house. When your friend loses their temper, you can tell them they’re being ridiculous. When your boss gets angry, however, there’s a power imbalance involved. This person may influence your workload, reputation, opportunities, performance reviews, compensation, and potentially whether you continue working there.

So when your boss raises their voice, fires off an aggressive email, publicly criticizes you, or walks into a meeting already furious, your nervous system isn’t simply responding to anger.

It’s responding to anger plus power.

4 Ways to Deal With an Angry Boss

First, Stop Trying to “Calm Them Down”

This might sound counterintuitive, but your first job is not to make your boss feel better.

According to SHRM’s Q2 2025 Civility Index, 69% of workers agreed that their manager or supervisor could have done more to prevent incivility in the workplace. In other words, employees shouldn’t be expected to manage bad behavior when leaders themselves should be helping prevent it.

Employees often become accidental emotional managers for angry leaders. They soften their language, apologize prematurely,  or agree with things they don’t actually agree with. Sometimes they even start anticipating the boss’s moods.

That’s when anger stops being an occasional emotion and starts becoming part of how the team operates. Instead of trying to manage your boss’s emotional state, focus on managing the conversation.

If your boss says, “How could you possibly let this happen?” You don’t have to match their energy, defend yourself immediately, or soothe them. Get specific.

“What specifically are you most concerned about?”

“Which part of the outcome needs to be addressed first?”

“What would you like corrected?”

You’re moving the conversation away from emotional intensity and toward something concrete. That matters because anger loves generalizations.

Step 2: Separate the Message From the Delivery

Your boss can be completely wrong in how they communicate something and completely right about the underlying issue. Both things can be true.

Maybe you did miss the deadline, maybe the client really is upset, maybe your work wasn’t good enough or maybe you should have communicated sooner.

An inappropriate delivery doesn’t automatically make the feedback inaccurate. This is where defensiveness can hurt you. If you become so focused on how your boss spoke to you that you refuse to examine what they said, you may miss information you genuinely need.

Mentally separate the two questions: Is there something useful in what I’m being told? And is the way I’m being treated acceptable?

Take responsibility for whatever actually belongs to you without taking responsibility for your boss’s behavior.

“I should have updated you when I realized the deadline was at risk. That’s on me.”

Full stop. You don’t need to add: “…but you don’t have to yell at me!”

Not yet, anyway. Accountability becomes much more powerful when it isn’t tangled up with self-defense.

Step 3: Address the Pattern, Not Just the Explosion

One angry moment does not necessarily make someone an angry boss. People have terrible days. Leaders are human. Stress gets the better of us occasionally.

The more important question is what happens repeatedly. Does your boss regularly raise their voice? Humiliate employees in meetings? Send hostile emails? Use sarcasm or condescension when frustrated?

If you see a pattern, document specifics rather than conclusions. “My boss is toxic” is an interpretation. “My boss raised his voice during three team meetings this month, called my work incompetent in front of five colleagues, and sent these two emails” is information someone can evaluate. 

If you’re unsure, use our Evaluate Behavioral Risk in High Performers assessment. It can help you identify the behaviors, assess their frequency and impact, and put clearer language around what’s actually happening.

Step 4: Know When This Is Bigger Than You

Some bosses occasionally get angry. Others use anger as part of a broader pattern of toxic leadership.

Toxic bosses often aren’t sitting in their offices plotting ways to ruin everyone’s Tuesday. In fact, many genuinely believe their behavior is necessary. They think they’re being direct, maintaining high standards, or holding people accountable. Meanwhile, employees are spending Sunday night dreading Monday morning.

At that point, the problem is bigger than how well you manage your boss. It has become a leadership and organizational issue. And yes, sometimes it means deciding whether remaining in the environment is worth the cost.

That isn’t giving up. It’s recognizing that you cannot single-handedly fix a workplace system that continues to reward the behavior hurting you.

If a boss repeatedly explodes at employees but continues receiving promotions because “they get results,” the organization has made a decision about what behavior it is willing to tolerate.

The Bigger Question Isn’t “How Do I Handle My Angry Boss?”

It’s why everyone else has to become better at managing one leader’s behavior?

Workplaces often adapt around abrasive leaders. Employees learn difficult conversation techniques. HR learns to de-escalate. Teams carefully prepare for meetings. New hires get warned, “That’s just how they are.”

Eventually, an entire team develops coping mechanisms around one person’s behavior and somehow calls it a people problem. It’s a leadership problem.

Learning to navigate anger and conflict is valuable. But organizations can’t confuse employee resilience with organizational tolerance.

If a leader’s anger is affecting trust, communication, performance, or people’s willingness to speak up, the organization needs to address the leader, not just teach everyone else how to survive them. Here’s how you can do that. 

So yes, learn how to deal with an angry boss. Just don’t get so good at accommodating dysfunctional behavior that you help normalize it.

Get More Tips on How to Deal With an Angry Boss

Knowing what to do is one thing. Figuring out what to say when your boss is actually angry is another.

That’s why we’ve added more sessions to our Workplace Intelligence Series, with 30- and 60-minute webinars tackling real workplace challenges and giving you practical strategies you can actually use.

And if your situation needs more than general advice, join Catherine for Office Hours. Bring your questions about your angry boss, a difficult coworker, a toxic situation, or whatever else is happening at work. It’s a confidential conversation designed to help you walk away with actionable ideas for what to do next.

Choose the session most valuable to you, join us for the entire series, or come talk it through during Office Hours. And feel free to invite your coworkers, friends, or network. Chances are, someone you know is dealing with an angry boss too.

The post How to Deal With an Angry Boss in 4 Steps appeared first on Civility Partners.