Don’t Let Cynicism Undermine Your Workplace

How to restore trust and confidence in your leaders—and your organization

by

Jamil Zaki

by

Jamil Zaki

From the Magazine (September–October 2022) · Long read

Summary.

Some company cultures are marked by mistrust and paranoia, which leads to a slew of negative outcomes: poor performance, burnout, turnover, and cheating. People who worry about the behavior of others spread gossip and are prone to backstabbing. That brings out the worst in their colleagues, leading cynics’ suspicion and distrust to become self-fulfilling prophecies. The good news is that cynicism has antidotes, according to the author, who shares research findings—his and those of others—to help leaders understand how people fall into a “cynicism trap,” how their organizations’ policies and practices may be pushing them into it, and what they can do to escape it. Tactics include redirecting the organizational culture toward collaboration and trust and making sure that all managers—not just those at the top—are modeling trusting behaviors and combating cynicism in their interactions.

Idea in Brief

The Problem

Too many organizations are marked by cynicism—a belief that others are selfish, greedy, and dishonest—which predicts a slew of negative outcomes at work, including poor performance, turnover, cheating, and stifled innovation.

Why It Happens

Our natural pull toward negativity and the notion that cynics are smarter than noncynics allow cynicism to self-perpetuate. Organizational policies and practices can further reinforce a culture of mistrust.

How to Fix It

You can reduce cynicism in your organization by developing policies and processes that redirect the organizational culture toward collaboration and by making sure that all leaders—not just those at the top—model trusting behaviors and combat cynicism in their interactions.

An open CEO role at Microsoft should be the holy grail for executives in the tech industry, but that wasn’t the case in 2014. The company’s growth had stagnated. By botching early leads on smartphones and other new technologies, Microsoft had lost market share to Apple, Google, and Amazon and had gained a reputation as creaky and out of touch—a giant ship lurching in the wrong direction. The Bloomberg journalist Dina Bass listed those downsides in an article bluntly titled “Why You Don’t Want to Be Microsoft CEO.” Five days later Satya Nadella took the helm. Microsoft’s failures stemmed from a deeper problem: a culture mired in mistrust, competition, and tribalism, which killed morale and stifled innovation. In his 2017 book, Hit Refresh, Nadella described an illustration of Microsoft’s org chart by the designer Manu Cornet that showed the company’s divisions in a standoff, with circles representing rigid silos aiming guns at one another. The cartoon was meant to be funny, but the problems it highlighted weren’t. Nor are they rare.

A version of this article appeared in the September–October 2022 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of The War for Kindness. His new book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, will be published in September of 2024.

Don’t Let Cynicism Undermine Your Workplace

Idea in Brief

The Problem

Why It Happens

How to Fix It

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