Disclaimer: This post is not a reflection of my current workplace. It draws from two decades of observation, conversations, and personal experiences navigating the wild and often weird world of small and midsize companies. If you feel personally attacked, you might want to sit with that for a minute.

Small and midsize companies love to talk big.
Culture.
Values.
Mission-driven work!

They’ll throw around buzzwords like collaborative, transparent, and we’re like a family – which, in retrospect, should have been the first red flag. Because families are messy and dysfunctional, and have unresolved trauma, and guess what? So does this company.

You walk in because the pitch was solid gold, right? They toss out lines to reel you in.
“We need your expertise”, they say (with a wink).
“You’ll help us scale”, they say (with their fingers crossed behind their back).
“We’re building something meaningful and you’re the missing piece”, they say (as the perch on their throne of lies).

They made it sound like you were system whisperer. You are the one and only person they’ve been waiting for to finally bring order to chaos and build this company into the best of the best.

But here’s what they didn’t tell you:
They don’t actually want systems, they want sweat equity. And they’re looking at you, kid. They want someone to “fix it,” but only as long as “fixing it” doesn’t require them to change anything at all.

Sometime around when that glorious “culture” they sold you on starts looking more like “clique-y chaos with a side of mean girls,” you realize a few truths…

You weren’t brought in to make things better. You were actually brought in to keep things moving. Your role is to do the work no one else wanted to do. Your “expertise” is to grind behind the scenes while they spout LinkedIn thought-leader drivel about what “authentic leadership” looks like. Spoiler alert: authenticity is just another buzzword to them.

And then when they change directions (because they will) or the founder’s spouse reads a Patrick Lencioni book and suddenly everyone’s job is “focusing on organizational health” – your expertise no longer holds the same value. You become expendable.

The same people who once said, “We couldn’t do this without you,” now can’t even remember what it is you did and why they brought you in to begin with.

Within many of these small and midsize companies, you’re only as good as their mood. Mood swings with cash flow, board pressure, or whatever new CRM they bought and abandoned after two weeks.

You thought you were coming in to build, but they saw you as a placeholder. You thought you were signing up for culture and values, but they saw you as a means to an end.

And here’s the really toxic, fucked up part: they never intended to keep you long-term. They just didn’t say that part out loud. They sold you on shared values, on making an impact, on being part of something bigger but what they really wanted was a skilled workhorse to prop up their half-baked vision until they figured out how to outsource it, reassign it, or flat-out kill it.

You’re not part of their journey anymore. You’re a tool in the toolbox. Once they’re done using you and your skills to hammer through the hard shit, you’re shelved. Or you could face the worse consequence – your responsibilities are “scaled back” while they post a new job with your prior exact responsibilities but with a new title and $20K less in salary.

When they’re done using your energy, your ideas, and your late nights pretending you’re part of something bigger, they’ll send you packing with a shrug and a cold “business decision” email, and maybe a small severance, because in the end, they never wanted you, they just wanted what you could do for them. Until they didn’t.

So here’s to the dreamers and the doers who’ve been bait-and-switched by “culture” and gaslit up on “values” that only applied when it was convenient.
You deserved better.
And now? You know better.

So the next time someone says, “We’re like a family here,” ask this: “Who’s the toxic uncle and what’s the real budget for therapy I’ll likely need?

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Welcome to Playfully Toxic, your new favorite series on workplace red flags, culture bait-and-switches, and how to spot the BS before you sign the offer.

Come back next Toxic Tuesday for another round of truth bombs, stories, and survival tips for navigating the professional jungle.

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