At work, do you ever feel insecure, overworked,
underpaid, or under-appreciated? Are you
frustrated when you are unable to meet expectations, or experience emotional harassment? Is your boss a control freak, or do you
frequently feel manipulated? Or maybe
you just find it hard to cope at work but you cannot put your finger on exactly
why it is so difficult? Sometimes
workplaces can become unhealthy, harmful to your emotional health, even
toxic.
But there are ways you can cope, rise above it, and take
care of yourself and others who are struggling.
In the book Rising Above a Toxic
Workplace: Taking Care of Yourself in an Unhealthy Environment, by Gary
Chapman, Paul White, and Harold Myra explain what a toxic workplace looks like
and shed light on how it happens. Simply
understanding why leaders may create a toxic environment can help us understand
better how to cope. The authors counsel
how to maintain our sanity and how to be a light in a place of darkness. They use many real-life illustrations along
with a survival guide and toolkit at the end.
Most of all, they help us know when it is time to leave those types of
workplaces.
Workplaces change over time, sometimes good to bad,
sometimes bad to good, sometimes a roller coaster in which we need to hang on
for the ride. I feel like the authors
quickly turn to getting off the roller coaster more than how to cope with the drops
and hanging on for change. Many of their
illustrations are of people who leave their toxic workplaces and then find a
new job and live happily ever after. In
reality, it can be just as easy to walk into another toxic workplace, or one
that starts out healthy and then management changes. The subtitle of this book would be more
appropriate to say “how to know when to leave” instead of “taking care of
yourself in an unhealthy environment”. Still,
I thought this was an enlightening book and found some wise advice within
it.
I received a complimentary
copy of this book from Moody Press in exchange for my honest review.
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