A new head coach arrives in the spring. In his first meeting he tells the players he wants to hear from them, and nobody says anything. By the summer, he's describing them as a group that doesn't communicate. Put yourself in that room and think about what happened to the last person who was honest with the last coach, and why you would expect this time to be different.
We use the word toxic a lot, so it's worth being clear about what we mean. A coach having a bad week is not a toxic culture, and a demanding one isn't either. The way I think about it, a culture becomes toxic when harm happens in a pattern, and keeps happening because of what the organization protects instead of correcting. This matters because it changes what we do next. When people are getting hurt on a team, we tend to look for the person responsible, asking who did this and who needs to go. Sometimes we can answer that, and sometimes that person does need to go. But if the organization has been allowing the harm, removing one person may leave the rest of the problem in place.
I'm a doctor, so I tend to approach this the way I'd approach a patient, and in medicine we don't treat until we understand the diagnosis. Someone who is tired, losing weight and sweating at night could have any of a dozen things, and the work is recognizing when those signs cluster into a pattern, which is the diagnosis, and then asking where that pattern comes from, which is the pathology. Only then do we reach for a treatment. We can do something similar with a culture. It's only a comparison, but it gives us an order to work in: what are we looking at, where is it coming from, and what is keeping it going? An urgent concern never waits for that. An injury needing care, suspected abuse or a safeguarding concern goes straight to the medical or safeguarding route, and if someone is in immediate danger, get urgent help.
So what are we looking at? The most common mistake I see is confusing demanding with damaging, because high standards don't make a culture toxic. You've probably heard someone say, "He's tough, but he gets the best out of people." Sometimes that's fair. But early results can buy a lot of tolerance, and that sentence can also protect someone who is causing real harm.
To tell the difference, I'd start with feedback. Demanding feedback is direct and specific, and it's about something the person can change, while damaging feedback goes after who you are, often in front of others. If the coach takes you into the hallway and talks about the pass, you know what to work on. If the coach stops in front of the room and talks about you as a person, there isn't much you can do with that. Emotion, for me, is the clearest sign. A demanding leader manages their own moods, and in a damaging environment the athletes manage the leader's moods. It's worth noticing who adjusts when the coach walks into the room, because if it's everyone else rather than the coach, a lot of attention is going into the coach's mood rather than the work.
I haven't tested this comparison as a measure. It's drawn from research on bosses who grind people down over time, and from interviews with athletes about emotional abuse in coaching. Nearly every environment has a bit of both, and the same behaviour can land differently on two athletes. The lines can also shift in youth sport, in individual sports and outside Western coaching cultures. Even so, the comparison can help us see which one is winning, and whether the damaging parts get dealt with or tolerated.
Why would an organization tolerate them? Part of the answer is that a toxic system damages its own ability to catch the problem, because the people who could report it may have learned not to. In my experience, by the time someone files a formal complaint, the organization has been hurting people for months. People in these environments can also start to doubt what they're seeing, wondering whether they're not tough enough or are the wrong fit, and if you've come to believe the problem is you, reporting it may not occur to you. You also learn from what happens to other people. If you watch a teammate question a decision and lose minutes, you may think twice before you do the same.
In 2003, two psychologists who study mistreatment at work published a survey of public-sector employees, looking at what happened to people who spoke up about being mistreated. Most of them faced some kind of retaliation. These were public-sector employees, so this can't tell us how often it happens in sport, or what would happen to any one person, and most of the research in this area comes from ordinary workplaces, with the evidence from sport mostly smaller studies of abusive coaching. But it gives us a reason to pause before we decide that people don't care. When people stay quiet, they may have good reason to expect a cost.
This is why replacing the coach may not be enough. Think about the new coach at the start, who asked for honesty and got silence. It's tempting to read that as resistance, but think about it from where those players are sitting. The new coach may be completely sincere, and what the players remember is what happened the last time someone was honest, whether it cost them anything and whether anything changed. Changing the coach doesn't change what they remember, and if they don't trust that it won't happen again, they aren't going to try again.
I understand why an organization wants a clean start. It makes sense to want to move on and give a new person room. But the people who lived through the last few years are usually still there, and so is what they learned. More invitations, however sincere, are unlikely to change the silence. What people need is proof: someone raises a concern, something changes because of it, and other people can see that it did.
Next we need to ask where the problem is coming from, which in medicine is the pathology question. The harm we can see at the athlete level doesn't always start there, because it can start above the coach and come down. Two teams of management researchers tested this. In 2009, one team asked how far ethical leadership at the top flows down through an organization, and in 2012 another team asked the same about abusive bosses. Both found that how senior leaders behave, ethically or not, flows down through the levels below them. These were general workplaces with several levels of management, so we don't know whether that holds on any one team, but I think they give us a good reason to look above the coach.
Board demands, a volatile owner, media scrutiny and money trouble can all land on whoever sits between the boardroom and the dressing room. Instability at the top can become mood swings, shifting standards and hoarded information in the middle, and for the athletes it can become anxiety, silence and people leaving. One way to check is to ask whether the behaviour gets worse after board meetings, an ownership change or a bad week in the press, and to lay a coach's worst stretches against the executive calendar. If they line up, that coach may be carrying the pressure rather than creating it. Sometimes the coach is the source, the behaviour stays the same no matter who's on the board, and the other coaches are fine.
I haven't tested this check. It can give us a direction, but it doesn't replace a proper investigation. Finding a source above the coach also doesn't shrink the harm below or excuse the person causing it, because athletes deal with the person in front of them. So we need to fix the cause above and also repair the harm below.
There's one more thing to look at, because a problem can come back after someone leaves. In psychiatry, we talk about perpetuating factors, the things that keep a problem going after whatever started it is gone. In 2007, three researchers who work on leadership and personality published a paper they called the toxic triangle. They argued that destructive leadership is never a solo act. There are followers who go along, some because the leader promises them something they need, like belonging, security or a future, and some because going along pays, and there's an environment that makes it possible, with instability, a sense of threat and no real check on the leader's power.
This was a conceptual paper, an argument from what was already known, and it didn't measure how often this happens. What I find useful is where it tells us to look once a leader has gone: whether senior players are still keeping the young ones in line, whether assistants are still running the old playbook, and whether the proper channel for raising a concern does anything. A yes to the first two doesn't mean people are weak. If going along was the price of keeping your place, it makes sense that people went along. But it can still do harm, and it can keep the pattern going after the leader has left.
Once we understand all of this, we can start talking about treatment. It may still mean someone leaves, and it may mean the fix has to reach the boardroom. The people who have learned to stay quiet will need to see that something has changed.
Think about a concern you have right now about someone in your organization, whether a different person in that chair would end up doing the same things, what has been happening above that person when things have been at their worst, and what the next person would walk into if that person left. If it isn't an urgent or safeguarding concern, writing down what you've noticed and asking someone outside the coaching chain whether they see the same pattern would be a useful place to begin this week.
Prefer to listen? Listen to Episode 3 — 26 minutes ↗. You can also find it on Spotify ↗, Apple Podcasts ↗, Amazon Music ↗, Overcast ↗ and Pocket Casts ↗.
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If you're catching up, Episode 1 ↗ explores the pressures people work under, and Episode 2 ↗ asks whether it's safe to speak up.
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Dr. MCB
P.S. This series draws on the book Madeline Antony and I wrote, The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership (Routledge). You can find the book here ↗.