Are Your Coworkers the Best or Worst Part of Work?

Working in emergency medicine, or in much of medicine more broadly right now, can feel like heading into something close to a battle zone on a routine basis. Soldiers entering an actual battle depend heavily on trust in the people beside them, genuine confidence that colleagues will have their back no matter what. It's reasonable to want that same sense of camaraderie in an intense, high-stakes clinical environment.

The Gap Between Hope and Reality

Instead of that camaraderie, the actual environment sometimes looks like criticism, gossip, backbiting, passive-aggressive behavior, and ongoing interpersonal drama. That gap between what would genuinely help and what actually shows up is a real source of additional stress on top of the clinical demands of the job itself.

Here's the harder truth: an entire institution's culture isn't something any one person can control or transform through individual effort alone. That kind of large-scale shift, if it happens, tends to require far more than one person's actions.

What Actually Is Within Reach

There is real leverage available at a smaller scale. Much like a bacterial culture on a petri dish can grow from a single organism, workplace culture can shift, gradually, starting from a single person choosing to show up differently. The one variable consistently within control is your own behavior, not the institution's, not a colleague's, but your own.

Sometimes the right response to a genuinely toxic environment is leaving it. But often, the more available option is learning to show up differently within it: taking care of your own baseline wellbeing, setting and actually holding boundaries, and examining thought patterns that aren't serving you well, rather than waiting for the environment itself to change first.

A Pattern Worth Examining Honestly

It's worth being honest about a specific dynamic that often runs underneath workplace criticism: pointing out other people's incompetence or flaws while simultaneously fearing the same judgment being directed back. That combination, critical of others, anxious about being criticized, often traces back to unresolved insecurity about one's own worth or competence, rather than being purely about the other person's actual behavior.

Once genuine confidence in your own value as a person and a physician settles in, the compulsion to point out others' flaws tends to fade substantially. There's simply less need for it.

Small Shifts That Add Up

Holding back one unnecessary critical comment. Offering one genuine piece of praise. These individually small actions accumulate over time into a workplace that's genuinely more pleasant, not primarily for the sake of appearing kind, but because a less hostile environment benefits everyone in it, including the person choosing to hold back or offer praise.

Why Judging Others Doesn't Actually Feel Good

There's a real, if brief, neurochemical reward that comes from discussing someone else's incompetence or flaws, a small hit of dopamine and oxytocin tied to shared complaint and connection over criticism. But that reward tends to be short-lived, and it's often followed by a lingering sense of discomfort or regret that outlasts the initial satisfaction. Deliberately looking for what's going right, rather than defaulting to what's going wrong, tends to produce a more durable sense of wellbeing over the course of an actual workday.

The Bottom Line

An entire institution's culture is genuinely outside any one person's control. Your own behavior within that culture isn't. Small, consistent choices, less unnecessary criticism, more genuine acknowledgment of what's working, honest examination of your own insecurities rather than projecting them outward, accumulate into a meaningfully different day-to-day experience, even in an environment that hasn't fundamentally changed.

FAQ

Can one person really change a toxic workplace culture? Not single-handedly transform an entire institution, but individual behavior does have a real, if gradual, ripple effect, similar to how a culture on a petri dish grows from a single starting point. Consistent individual choices can shift the immediate environment even without institutional-level change.

Why do some people criticize colleagues while also fearing judgment themselves? This pattern often reflects underlying insecurity about one's own worth or competence, projected outward as criticism of others, while simultaneously anticipating similar judgment being directed back.

Does venting about a difficult colleague actually make things better? It can provide a brief sense of relief or connection, but this tends to be short-lived and is often followed by a lingering negative feeling. Consistently looking for and acknowledging what's going well tends to produce more durable wellbeing than repeated criticism.

When should someone leave a toxic workplace rather than try to adapt within it? This depends on the specific severity and nature of the toxicity. Some environments genuinely warrant leaving. In many cases, though, meaningful improvement in day-to-day experience is possible through personal boundaries and behavior shifts, even without leaving.