All it takes is a few people to destroy an entire corporate culture.
A few bad apples, as they say, can ruin everything.
Management does not even have to endorse the behavior either. They just have to be agnostic to it.
I have seen it. I mean, the second you allow sales and performance to supersede core values, everyone will know it.
The inaction speaks for itself. “Here at company X, we tolerate Y.”
And after that, all the rest seems like a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line?
If someone can get away with A, why not B too?
Unfortunate story:
His behavior had gone unreported. I asked a couple of the folks who told me about it why they’d never raised these events with their manager or with HR. Those replies were even more heartbreaking: “I didn’t think it would do anything,” and worse, “I figured everyone knew but didn’t care so long as his projects did well.” Hearing stuff like that was like a knife in my gut. This company I’d built, that I’d worked so hard to make into a place that cared about people and values, had clearly changed. It wasn’t because we’d hired dozens of vindictive or evil assholes. It was because letting even a few people (and this example I’m sharing sadly wasn’t alone) break our core values repeatedly without visible action from leadership led to the normalization of discordant behavior.
-Rand Fishkin, Lost And Founder
