What You Tolerate, You Teach

Michelle and I were talking recently about how much impact a boss actually has on workplace culture, far more than most leaders realize. In the middle of that conversation, she said this: "What you tolerate speaks so loudly." I think that idea is often what separates healthy work environments from unhealthy ones.

Most leaders don't think of themselves as tolerating anything. They think they're being patient. Being kind. Giving someone a chance. But there's a version of "giving grace" that slides into plain old avoidance, and your team can tell the difference even when you can't.

Here's what I mean.

The Boss Isn't Exempt

We talk a lot about difficult employees and how to handle them well. But leadership has a blind spot, and it's this: leaders create toxic environments too.

When you think “toxic leader,” you might picture someone blowing their top, cursing and yelling when things go sideways. And that’s certainly accurate. But sometimes toxicity shows up in more subtle ways. Smaller, quieter habits, the kind that don't feel like a big deal in the moment, can also cause harm.

Habitually giving plum assignments to the high-performer on the team. Giving someone a pass because they’re your weekend golfing buddy. Avoiding difficult conversations with rule-breakers or underperformers. Enforcing the rules for some people and making exceptions for others. Those things might not look like toxicity from the boss’s perspective. They might feel like being reasonable, or doing what it takes to get through a hectic day. But your team is watching. And they notice the pattern those decisions add up to.

The Megaphone Effect

Every exception you make is a message. When the standard bends for one person and not another, you've told everyone else where they actually stand, whether you meant to or not.

This is why consistency matters more than most leaders give it credit for. It's not about being rigid. It's about making sure the same rule applies to Clyde in accounting as it does to your top salesperson. The moment it doesn't, trust starts leaking out of the room.

The Hardest Habit to Break

If I had to name the one leadership behavior that does the most damage, it's this: avoiding the direct conversation.

It's so much easier to send a vague, all-staff email about "professionalism" than to sit down with the one person who actually needs to hear it. But here's the problem. Everyone in that meeting knows exactly who you're talking about. Except that person. Because nobody's ever actually told them.

I learned a version of this the hard way early in my leadership. I'd read a book on responsibility and started taking the blame for every mistake my team made, even when it wasn't mine to take. I thought I was “being responsible.” Michelle finally told me I'd swung too far the other direction. I was so afraid of blaming my people that I'd stopped holding them accountable at all. Responsibility doesn't mean absorbing every failure. It means addressing behavior directly, privately, and promptly, every single time.

What Your Good People Deserve

Here's the part I want to leave you with. When you give a difficult person chance after chance with no change in behavior, you're not being compassionate to your team. You're being compassionate to the person causing the harm, at the expense of the people doing the work and doing it right.

Protect them. They're the ones who showed up, did their job, and stayed loyal to you. They've earned a leader who will do the hard thing on their behalf.

That's the job. You don’t have to like it. But you do have to do it.

Wondering where you might be tolerating more than you realize? Let's talk it through. Book a free discovery call.