What a Movie Sequel Teaches Us About Toxic Workplaces
When The Devil Wears Prada first hit cinemas twenty years ago, Miranda Priestly's razor-sharp cruelty felt almost aspirational in certain corners of the corporate world. High performance, brutal accountability, zero tolerance for mediocrity — many leaders quietly admired the formula even if they never admitted it out loud. Fast-forward to today, and the long-awaited sequel reframes that same character as someone hopelessly out of touch. That cultural shift on screen mirrors something very real happening inside organizations everywhere: the old model of fear-driven leadership is losing its grip — but it hasn't disappeared entirely.
Toxicity Is Still Very Much Alive
Bill Benjamin, Partner and Keynote Speaker at IHHP, describes what he calls a "Transactional culture" — one characterized by high accountability but dangerously low care. In this environment, short-term results are prized above relationships, and bad behavior is quietly excused as long as the numbers look good. It is a culture that feels productive on the surface while quietly rotting from the inside.
The numbers back this up. Employees witness or personally experience an estimated 208 million acts of workplace incivility across American organizations every single day, according to research from SHRM. That staggering figure is not just a morale problem — it is a financial one. Burnout, disengagement, and turnover cost companies tens of millions of dollars annually, and toxic culture is consistently one of the leading drivers of all three.
The challenge is that toxicity is often invisible to those living inside it. Like fish unaware of the water they swim in, employees and even leaders can normalize dysfunction over time. Recognizing the problem is always the first step toward fixing it.
How to Identify a Toxic Culture
Before you can fix something, you need to see it clearly. Toxic cultures tend to share a recognizable set of warning signs, even if the specific flavor varies from one organization to the next.
- High turnover with vague explanations. When talented people keep leaving and no one can articulate exactly why, culture is almost always part of the story.
- Fear replaces psychological safety. Employees hesitate to share ideas, raise concerns, or admit mistakes because they expect punishment rather than problem-solving.
- Results at any cost. Leaders tolerate — or even reward — aggressive, disrespectful, or unethical behavior from high performers, sending a clear message about what the organization truly values.
- Chronic gossip and cliques. Information travels through informal back channels rather than transparent communication, breeding distrust and internal politics.
- Exhaustion is worn as a badge of honor. Overwork is celebrated, rest is stigmatized, and boundaries are routinely violated without consequence.
- Accountability flows only downward. Frontline employees are held to strict standards while leadership avoids the same scrutiny, creating a corrosive double standard.
If several of these patterns sound familiar, your organization likely has a culture problem that will not resolve itself on its own.
13 Proven Ways to Fix a Toxic Culture
Transforming a toxic culture is neither quick nor simple, but it is absolutely achievable with sustained commitment. Here are thirteen strategies that research and organizational experience consistently support.
1. Name the Problem Publicly
Leaders who refuse to acknowledge toxicity inadvertently protect it. Openly naming cultural dysfunction — without blame or shame — is the first act of genuine change.
2. Audit Your Tolerance for Bad Behavior
Examine who gets away with what and why. If your highest-performing employees are also your most disrespectful ones and face no consequences, your culture will continue to suffer regardless of any other initiative you launch.
3. Build Psychological Safety Intentionally
Amy Edmondson's decades of research make it clear: teams perform better when people feel safe to speak up. Create structured opportunities for honest dialogue and respond to feedback without defensiveness.
4. Invest in Emotional Intelligence Training
Technical skills get people hired. Emotional intelligence — self-awareness, empathy, emotional regulation — determines whether they build or destroy the culture around them. Training in this area pays compounding dividends.
5. Redefine What Success Looks Like
If your performance metrics only capture output and ignore how results are achieved, you are incentivizing the wrong behaviors. Add relationship quality, collaboration, and team health to how you measure high performance.
6. Make Civility a Leadership Competency
Civility should appear in job descriptions, performance reviews, and promotion criteria for leaders at every level. What gets measured gets managed.
7. Close the Feedback Loop
Collect employee feedback through surveys or listening sessions — and then visibly act on what you learn. When employees see that their input drives real change, trust grows. When feedback disappears into a void, cynicism grows instead.
8. Address Middle Management Specifically
Research consistently shows that direct managers have more influence over day-to-day culture than any executive policy. Toxic middle management can neutralize even the best top-down culture initiatives. Invest in developing this layer of your organization deliberately.
9. Model the Behavior You Expect
Culture flows from the top. When senior leaders demonstrate respect, vulnerability, and accountability in their own conduct, they set the behavioral standard for everyone below them. The opposite is equally true and far more damaging.
10. Normalize Rest and Recovery
Organizations that glorify overwork produce burned-out, disengaged employees who ultimately leave or quietly coast. Encourage reasonable working hours, honor time off, and stop treating exhaustion as a proxy for dedication.
11. Create Clear Channels for Raising Concerns
Employees need accessible, credible pathways to report problems without fear of retaliation. Anonymous reporting options can help, but they are only effective when leadership actually investigates and follows through.
12. Celebrate the Right Wins
Publicly recognize employees who embody the culture you are trying to build, not just those who hit the biggest numbers. Recognition shapes behavior far more powerfully than policy documents ever will.
13. Accept That Culture Change Takes Time
Toxic cultures typically develop over years, and they rarely transform in a single quarter. Set realistic timelines, celebrate incremental progress, and resist the temptation to declare victory prematurely. Sustained, consistent effort is the only thing that actually sticks.
The Bottom Line
Miranda Priestly may still be glamorous in the sequel, but the world no longer finds her management style aspirational. That shift reflects a genuine evolution in what employees expect from the places they spend most of their waking hours. Organizations that recognize this reality and actively invest in healthier cultures will attract better talent, retain them longer, and outperform those that cling to the old transactional model. The cost of fixing a toxic culture is significant. The cost of leaving it alone is far greater.