Opening Note
This week, I read a stop-you-mid-coffee-sip moment study about the workplace.
Nearly two-thirds of workers say they’ve experienced a toxic boss.
I immediately wanted to know more because lately I’ve been hearing versions of the same tension in conversations with directors, senior directors and C-suite leadership alike.
When I dug deeper into the research, what struck me most was that many of the behaviors people identified as “toxic” weren’t dramatic or explosive. They were communication patterns.
Blame shifting. Unreasonable expectations. Micromanagement. Lack of recognition.
Big pause.
Because toxic environments rarely begin with one catastrophic responsive moment. More often, they’re reinforced conversation by conversation, meeting by meeting, reaction by reaction.
And honestly, it helps explain a lot of what we’re seeing right now: teams struggling with trust and engagement, burnout, emotional exhaustion, and women exiting the workforce at concerning rates.
Last week I wrote about how words matter. This week, I keep thinking about the environments those words create.
While leaders can’t control every pressure people carry into work, they absolutely help shape the conditions people experience once they get there. And this can’t be an edict delivered from a stage or a town hall. It has to be reinforced by leaders on every team, at every level, every day.
The tone leaders set—especially under pressure—becomes part of the environment everyone else operates in. When that tone turns toxic, the costs become real: lower productivity, higher turnover, and enormous energy spent replacing talent instead of developing
I’ve noticed this showing up repeatedly in conversations lately, especially around how leaders balance between strength and empathy, directness and humanity, urgency and emotional awareness.
It’s also showing up in the evolution of senior communication roles from crisis managers to strategic leadership partners helping organizations navigate increasingly human challenges.
For years, leadership rewarded authority and endurance above all else. Today’s environments require something more nuanced:
Authority + emotional steadiness.
People don’t just remember the decision. They remember what was said and how it felt to work in the environment surrounding it. Over time, those moments compound into trust or tension, engagement or withdrawal, and the kind of culture people stay in—or quietly start planning to leave.
Worth Your Time
A few things that stood out this week—all connected, in different ways, to how people are experiencing work, energy, and leadership right now.
This piece explores why workers continue to feel uneasy about AI, even as companies push adoption aggressively. Why this matters: Leaders often focus on implementation strategy while underestimating the communication and emotional transition happening alongside it.
I also found myself smiling reading “49 Ways to Have Fun Right Now.” On the surface, it feels light. But after spending so much time this week thinking about burnout and emotional fatigue, it landed differently. Joy, play, and recovery aren’t distractions from performance. They help sustain it.
And one reminder I need personally: brain health experts are warning against working through lunch. Guilty. It’s easy to treat recovery like something we’ll “get to later.” Yet even an engine that never turns off eventually stops performing at its best.
Different articles. Different angles. Common thread. How people feel inside an environment shapes how they perform within it.
The Leadership Edge
One shift leaders need right now?
Moving from authority alone → to authority + emotional steadiness.
Because many of the environments people describe as toxic don’t begin with one major moment. They are shaped gradually through what gets reinforced, tolerated, rewarded and left unaddressed over time.
Communication is often where that reinforcement happens first.
Not just in formal messaging, but everyday interactions –how leaders respond under pressure, how feedback is delivered, how tension gets handled, how people speak to one another when the stakes are high.
Many leaders are rewarded for decisiveness, endurance, and execution—but never formally taught how to navigate the EQ side of leadership communication, like:
How to stay direct without becoming dismissive. How to deliver difficult feedback without creating defensiveness. How to address conflict without escalating it.
Emotional steadiness isn’t soft and it doesn’t lower standards. Rather, emotional steadiness creates environments where people can actually perform at their best.
This week’s simple reset:
Ask yourself:
Where did my team experience clarity and steadiness – and where might they have experienced tension or confusion?
What behaviors or priorities received the most reinforcement from me?
What did my reactions reinforce under pressure?
If someone joined my team for one day, what would they say gets valued here?
Don’t judge – just notice.
Awareness gives you the power to intentionally shape future experiences instead of accidently reinforcing unhealthy ones.
What to do with your answers:
If you notice a gap, there are immediate ways to start shifting the environment around you:
Set clear expectations up front: “We are here to accomplish x, and I want to hear the perspectives that help us get there.”
Slow down before reacting: “I am not going to respond to this immediately –I want to think this through.”
Address tensions earlier: “I sense different perspectives here. Let’s unpack the before we move forward.”
Talk about how the conversation itself is going: “This feels like it’s getting off track. Let’s reset and refocus.”
Beyond the Room
One a personal note, pace is my number one priority right now.
There’s productivity pace and then there life pace. I’m thinking a lot about both and how to use the energy I have to my best advantage.
My energy levels are finally evening out post-surgery, which feels good. Momentum is returning too. But pushing too hard is a risk. I still have to guard my days carefully and resist the urge to treat every good day like permission to immediately do more.
Honest -- that's hard. 🤨
So right now I am focused on disciplined expansion more than forced acceleration.
That mindset is connected with something I read this week about “Life Debt”—the hidden cost of constantly rushing through essential parts of life in the name of efficiency. Eventually, the cost shows up somewhere.
I’m also quietly on a mission to improve sleep quality. A very unglamorous mattress pad experiment is apparently working because my Oura ring says my deep sleep numbers are improving. Small win. I went ahead and ordered a second one of these for our guest bedroom.
And finally, the Met Gala runway remains one of my favorite annual guilty pleasures. Still undecided on Heidi Klum, but Anne Hathaway and Margot Robbie absolutely understood the assignment. Any favorites on your end?
Hard to believe, but this already the fourth issue of Seen. Heard. Trusted. I’m learning a lot as I go and genuinely appreciate everyone who has been reading, sharing, commenting and reaching out along the way.
If something resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you think someone else would enjoy it too, please feel free to share.
May your week ahead be all that it needs to be!
--Lauren
(Note: All links are shared as a courtesy—there are no partnerships or financial benefits tied to any recommendations.)