Forbes: Is Your Company Culture Toxic? Look For These Seven Red Flags.

Culture is a key component of high-performing teams and organizations. A strong culture can help your company recruit and retain top-performing talent, boost employee satisfaction, improve workplace productivity, foster innovation, and give your company a tremendous competitive edge.

A toxic culture, on the other hand, produces increased turnover, lower productivity, and poor morale, each of which takes its toll on the bottom line. How do you know if your culture is toxic? According to a recent Forbes Coaches Council article featuring AIIR Senior Leadership Consultant and Executive Coach Dave Gloss, there are key warning signs that your culture is doing more harm than good.

“There is a lot of nuance to [identifying a toxic culture],” Gloss says. “The context of culture is important. What may be considered toxic in one environment may be high-performing in another.”

One sure marker of a toxic culture, he said, is low trust and safety. To reach high performance, Gloss says, the individuals at an organization need to trust each other on three levels: “Competence (Do we trust people can do their job?), benevolence (Do we trust people have good intentions?), and integrity (Do we trust people are morally sound?).”

You can read the full article on Forbes.com.