Life is Short, Work Somewhere Awesome

Guest article by TIm Dalton

Having just completed my first month of retirement, now seems like an opportune moment to reflect on my 42 years in the workplace. One aspect of retirement that I am enjoying is riding my bicycle every day. Not at the level I did when I was a competitive racing cyclist but for fun, fitness, and enjoyment; approx. 400km per week. I am also enjoying watching cycle racing on TV, especially this year’s Tour De France with the resurgence of sprinter Mark Cavendish. Two stage wins in two days, making a grand career total of 32 stage wins, only 2 stages short of the all-time record, 34 stages won by Belgian legend Eddy Merckx. These two stage wins come after a 5-year drought. Of interest here, is that only a few months ago Cav was talking about retirement from professional cycling, before Deceuninck Quick-Step threw him a one-year contract lifeline. Cav last rode for a version of this team, under general manager Patrick Lefevere, between 2013 to 2015 with much success. Could it be that Cav, like many of us found himself in a toxic work environment during those lost five years?

Its important to recognise that working as a full-time athlete is actually a job, career and often a lifestyle choice. There are managers, colleagues, KPI’s and performance targets to be met as with any other job. What can negatively impact functionality and performance are toxic workplaces. Speaking from experience, I have worked in a few toxic environments over the last 42 years, but I’ve always recognised this and walked away very quickly. My personal mantra is if you don’t like a situation then change it. In my experience, most toxic workplace cultures originate at the top with poor management and ’leadership’, whose bad habits can be contagious. These destructive behaviours trickle down to people in the organisation who incorrectly assume this behaviour is accepted and then, they too engage in it. A classic case of normalisation of behaviour.

Working in a ‘toxic’ work environment or a workplace where things feel hostile can make doing your job very difficult to do effectively. It can even shift your sense of what’s normal and acceptable in a workplace and lead to aberrant behaviour and imposter syndrome. The difference of feeling surrounded in a toxic work environment and being in a workplace where you feel respected is expansive and often misunderstood how this effects performance.

Competitive cycle racing is all about performance, is it not? There is much that could be written about Deceuninck Quick-Step (The Wolfpack), but from what I have seen, Deceuninck Quick-Step Professional Cycling Team are a great example of how they empower their people. When you give an opportunity and trust your employees, they can go a very long way to delivering tangible result of high value. Judging from what I’ve seen in the media, Cavendish is loving his workplace, management and colleagues and guess what, his performance is off the scale.