How To Manage Young Men in a Toxic Environment

By Katie Evanko-Douglas

Published 12.1.20

This is meant primarily as a guide for managers who have stepped into a new role where they are managing a predominantly young, male workforce which has developed an unacceptably toxic workplace culture and wish to change the culture and behavior to something more respectful and productive. It is based on my personal experience doing just that at my first full-time job out of college.

I believe this is an especially important topic for managers at technology companies because tech is made up, in large part, of a sea of young men who exist in a culture of extreme toxic masculinity. It is tempting to want to just go on a cancel rampage every time they say something idiotic and offensive. It can therefore be controversial and counter-intuitive to teach empathy towards these privileged groups that quite often make the rest of our lives hell.

But I’m interested in the outcome of real change and making work spaces a safe and productive place for everybody. In my personal experience, this is the most effective path for reaching that concrete end goal. It is a powerful skill indeed to be able to pace another’s reality in order to lead them towards healthier internal models and habits.

The most important thing to understand about cultures of toxic masculinity, especially for young men, is that they often say idiotic things out of fear. They’re extremely mean to each other but aren’t allowed to acknowledge how much it hurts. Looking cool and making the others laugh is what makes them feel safe. The things they say that harm others are for the most part a form of vulnerability armor.

Their peers won’t be picking on them if they’re busy laughing at their jokes making fun of someone else and the more vulnerable the target, the safer it feels to deflect the toxicity towards them. Hence picking on women and minorities who have less power to stand up against it feels the safest.

Though not a workplace example, the scene from Grease where Danny ruins things with Sandy while trying to look cool to the T-Birds out of fear for how his vulnerability will be perceived and exploited is a solid representation of how young men will do things that do not align with their actual feelings, goals, or moral compass due to a deep and visceral need to protect themselves from their peers in an environment of toxic masculinity.

If it’s not unusual for young men to treat women they like and want to impress with such disrespect in order to protect themselves against being vulnerable in front of their friends, you can see how it would be a problem in the workplace that they show disrespect towards people generally for the same reason.

Luckily, there are some concrete steps you can take as a manager to mitigate this. I’ll be honest, it’s not easy, especially in the beginning. But it does get easier if you can stick with it.

Step 1: Step Expectations

First, assume total ignorance. It is hard to do because you know they should know better and it’s infuriating.

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". -Hanlon’s razor.

The reason for this is twofold: in some cases they may genuinely not know what’s appropriate and it keeps you from getting personal, attacking their character, and implying they are disrespectful because they’re bad people. People will act according to what they believe about who they are so it’s important to make sure you never give them a reason to create a self-image of being an inherently bad person.

The way I handled this at my first job was to develop a training program that clearly laid out our professional expectations and the consequences for violating them. I had them pass a quiz on it and then sign a document saying they understood them. That way, ignorance could never be used as an excuse and I could dole out predictable consequences in a calm and impersonal manner.

Step 2: Enforce Expectations

This is by far the hardest step. In the beginning, they often responded with more disrespect channeled at me in personal ways because they wanted to make me angry so I would yell at them and dole out personal attacks in return. This had apparently worked for them in the past with previous managers. Provoking such reactions allowed them to mentally frame the manager as the bad guy who was out to get them and hated them on a personal level. If they assumed that was true, they could rationalize to themselves there was no actual problems with their behavior.

It really drove them crazy that I never said they were bad kids and instead calmly told them they’d be sitting at an assigned desk in front of my office for 1-2 weeks. It made them feel like they were in time out and was just incredibly annoying to them, but was not personal because it was based on the professionalism guidelines they’d signed.

Once your employees realize on a visceral level they will face annoying yet impersonal consequences from a calm and pleasant manager every time they break a professionalism standard, no matter how they react to those consequences, they will eventually get tired of being in “time out”. Being in “time out” makes them look and feel uncool in the eyes of their peers. They will stop being disrespectful in order to avoid it.

Though they won’t be happy about it. They will hate you. You have to learn to be okay with that, be the adult, lead by example, and treat them with respect and professionalism anyway. This process can take 1-3 months depending on how defiant the leaders of the clique you’re dealing with are.

Step 3: Praise Success

Now that you have the absence of disrespectful behavior, it’s time to move on to the last step and build up a positive work culture where everyone can feel safe and can be their best selves.

Luckily, you refrained from making any personal attacks on them or telling them they’re bad kids during the first two steps. So if they’re not doing anything bad now, all that’s leftover is space and a foundation to start reinforcing positive behaviors.

It can feel extremely difficult to do for someone who hates you with a passion and who you’ve spent the past few months in what felt like a fierce power struggle with. But it is necessary.

I still remember vividly the day everything changed with the kid I’d historically had the biggest problems with. I called him to my office for his regular feedback. He’d stopped doing anything bad and was actually quite talented at his job but assumed he wasn’t because he had a history of getting in trouble. When I started giving him good feedback, he crossed his arms and said angrily “just tell me everything I did wrong and let me get out of here.”

So I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “No, you’re going to sit there and listen to every single thing you did right.” I then proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes telling him in excruciating detail every single thing he did in the past two weeks that made him good at the specifics of his job duties and a good employee, including a time he showed leadership by telling one of his peers to stop doing something disrespectful because he didn’t want to have sit outside of my office again.

By the time he left about a year later, I was nominating him for employee of the month because he’d become one of my top student workers and a confident and compassionate leader of his peers. He performed so well because he felt safe from disrespect from his peers, felt confident in who he was and what his abilities were, and realized I saw him as a good employee and a good kid and was rooting for his success.

He wanted to keep making me proud and I’m proud of him to this day for the respectful and confident man he became while working for me.

These kids are at a very impressionable time in their lives. Small changes in outlook can affect their entire life trajectories. Just because they act like jerks when they enter your workforce doesn’t mean they’re inherently bad kids. More often than not, it means they have a low level of self-confidence, don’t feel safe around their peers, and don’t have a model for what it would look like to be a respectful, confident man and leader.

It’s much harder to coach them into becoming better, more mature men than it is to get angry and try to cancel them all. But I believe it’s worth the investment because our world will be better when it’s full of confident and respectful male allies who understand themselves and their value systems, feel empowered to be the type of men they truly want to be deep down, and who lead their peers by healthy example.