You raised pay. You added perks. You put new values on the wall. Still, your best people keep leaving.

Here is the part most leaders do not want to hear. A toxic workplace culture is pushing them out the door. The paycheck is not.

Researchers at MIT Sloan found that a toxic culture is 10.4 times more powerful than pay in predicting who leaves. Pay still matters. But a raise alone will not fix a team that feels poisoned.

I learned about toxic workplace culture at a hotel door

For 14 years, I worked as a doorman at a hotel in Atlanta. I carried bags and parked cars. After my shift, I walked onto empty conference stages to practice speeches I could only dream of giving.

One supervisor did not like that. He told me, “You will never make it as a speaker with your English. Who will pay you to stand in front of corporate America?”

In that moment, I heard the voice of an old man from my poor village in Haiti. The voice said, “Be careful. That is a rattlesnake in front of you.”

Years later, I walked through that same hotel lobby holding my book. I was there to deliver a keynote at a leadership conference. I saw that same supervisor stuck in the same position after years. Nothing is wrong with someone making a living honestly. What’s worth noticing is that a toxic and condescending attitude can determine how far you go in life.

That supervisor taught me something every leader needs to know. People remember how you make them feel at work. They remember whether you care about their growth or are just using them as a human resource.

What a toxic workplace culture looks like

You don’t necessarily walk into a workplace and instantly notice how toxic it is. It’s the culmination of hundreds of small moments that stacked to create a toxic workplace culture.

What happens when someone makes a mistake? Does anyone notice when a teammate stays late to help finish the report before the inspection? Do managers follow the same rules they set for everyone else? Are toxic behaviors tolerated?

Your culture is what people see and experience every day. And you, as the leader, are the one building it, toxic or positive.

Everything you do or say is teaching your people how to feel about the culture. It is also teaching them whether there is a future for them in the company.

A toxic workplace culture does not happen in a day

Nobody wakes up one morning inside a toxic workplace culture. It takes months or years of neglect.

In life, we get more of what we tolerate. A leader who lets one bad behavior continue teaches the whole team that it is allowed. Over time, those bad behaviors annoy the best people and they start looking for the door.

Everyone knows that showing up inside a toxic culture every day is very bad for our mental health. Very few people can bear that level of stress for eight hours.

Your people are starving for appreciation

During my keynotes, I always compare workplaces in America with my poverty-stricken village in Haiti. There, we were starving for food. But in your workplace, they are starving kids dressed in adult clothes. The kid in us never grows up in reality.

Now, you might be wondering what those adults in the workplace are starving for. Well, they are starving for appreciation and recognition.

Gallup and Workhuman tracked nearly 3,500 employees from 2022 to 2024. Employees who got high-quality recognition were 45% less likely to quit. They were also 65% less likely to be looking for another job.

Appreciation is not saying, “Great job.” The mind dismisses that as vague. Be specific. Name what the person did and why it mattered. Say, “You stayed with that customer until we solved the problem. That saved the team from starting over. Thank you.”

Where to start fixing a toxic workplace culture

Start with one small choice. Thank one person during the team meeting for something specific. You want everybody to get the message that you are aware when they do something beyond expectations. Some people don’t like public recognition. They prefer you tell them privately. That’s something you can find out.

Next, you need to pay attention to the behavior you have been tolerating. Decide you are done tolerating it. The more a behavior is tolerated, the more it grows.

A toxic workplace culture is fixed when leaders decide, every single day, to sanitize the environment. It takes thousands of small choices. Who you promote. Who you confront. Who you thank out loud. Who you help grow. When you admit you are wrong. When you take a stand for a team member who is not in the room.

What do you do with the people who are poisoning the culture? That is a bigger question, and it deserves its own answer.

A keynote cannot fix a toxic workplace culture in forty-five minutes. But the right one can make the problem impossible to ignore, and give your leaders one clear thing to do on Monday. See how I work with leadership teams.

Let me conclude by saying this. A tree does not grow rotten overnight, and it does not heal overnight. But every day you water the roots, you choose which way and how fast it grows.

There you have it.

Much success to you! Press on!