Toxic positivity is crumbling our comms landscape and its people

As comms folk, we are a bit like Joy from the Pixar film Inside Out - we cry: “yay for our clients!” “Woop, you go there, senior spokesperson!” “It’s ok, Mr. Journalist, you can blank me. I’ll just bounce right back to your inbox with a smiley emoji.” 

I say this with love and familiarity. It’s taken me years and years of doing the work to unravel my school girl addiction to praise, positive feedback and pats on the head. I’m not alone in wanting to be liked and praised in this industry. I see it as one of the most challenging traits for the hundreds of senior comms professionals I’ve coached over the last few years in their journeys through challenging roles, high-pressure decisions, navigating challenging internal politics and running their teams. The thirst to be approved of by others is, in many of us, insatiable. 

You might wonder how important or relevant this self-development, mumbo jumbo is in the midst of the many restructures, redundancies and general reworking of comms teams and agencies. In my view, it’s not only the tech that’s requiring an upgrade at this time in helping comms people become more efficient, effective and laser-focused on a business’s needs. It’s the people themselves, how they see themselves and where they can go. 

It’s not hard to see how this “say yes and do the thing” approach has had a toxic impact in our industry. And I’m not the first to point it out. Caroline Johnson, an authority on creative agencies and their models, believes the industry is “in a business model crisis” because, “We over-indexed on keeping the relationship sweet as a way of being rewarded with more revenue, and that has [led to] commoditisation.”

My take on this as a coach who has heard about many a toxic culture and demotivated comms team? Comms people are overly indexing on the niceness scale, which has created a legacy of pleasing stakeholders, customers, clients and board members through maximum output for minimum investment - but this can’t be its future because it’s not sustainable. Where this goes is a black hole of inefficiency, poor decisions, devalued work, unrewarded extras and burnt out people. Sound familiar? So maybe we have reached peak “nice”... 

Of course, it’s not about becoming the opposite of this and deciding “no” is the default option or that Sadness can now take the control panel (if we stick with the Inside Out filmic analogy). But - just for fun - let’s apply some Jungian coaching shadow work to the equation.

Consultants and employees can remain friendly, helpful, service-orientated and empathetic, while introducing some of the opposite traits in themselves to help protect their teams and increase the value of their work. Let’s say a client wants something in an unrealistic timeframe and confrontation is called for. Or an FD wants to cut resources to the bone - a level of being difficult is needed, which might ruffle feathers, rather than a people pleasing approach. 

And that’s ok. Outside of comms, business is full of people being direct, challenging, obstructive, and sceptical. And they aren’t socially ostracised for behaving this way. Often they’re promoted!

So, if comms folk keep burying these opposite qualities - like being abrupt, awkward, challenging, pessimistic, confrontational or even obstructive, they will remain the Cinderella of the business. 

Of course, it won’t feel safe to redress the balance of the nice to nasty scale because as shadow traits, comms people will immediately see the risk of taking these traits too far. It’s a threat to survival, right? If you’re too mean to your team or awkward with your boss no one thrives. Of course.

But what happens if comms people collectively (and gently) break the people pleasing cycle by dialling up some opposite traits by 5 or 10%? 

I believe the whole industry would change. They could be better respected, more senior, more efficient, experience less burnout and receive more recognition and bigger budgets. I know it is so much more complicated than this at the moment but our behaviour is one factor we can control in a changing landscape, with many others beyond our control. The journey, in this coach’s view, to a brighter, more inspiring, sophisticated and purposeful industry is inward, not outward. The beings who stay with this career path are in for a hell of a ride. But in a good way. And they’re going to have some fun with their shadow side... 

If you’d like me to help your comms team or agency use shadow coaching to integrate steelier, more astute and, yes, sometimes less positive but ultimately more effective decision-making, feel free to book a chat with me.