Part 1: Corporate Positivity Culture is Killing Us

The smile was never for you. It was for the brand.

I once worked ten-hour days for a company I actually wanted to see succeed. Not because the paycheck was great — it wasn’t — but because I believed in the work. I covered gaps, kept the wheels turning, went to bat for my team, even bent over backwards so colleagues could make their kids happy and not to mention working trade shows outside in -25 (-13 °F, for anyone still refusing to join the SI system).

The reward? Being told by HR, “I can’t have people here who are unhappy” — my depression combined with pneumonia and bronchitis caused by blasting AC at work is now apparently a threat to company culture. Translation: put on the happy face or you’re gone.

That’s the real “positivity culture” — weaponized cheerfulness as a control mechanism. It’s not about morale. It’s about optics. Keep up the façade or you’ll be labeled “toxic,” “gossipy,” “not a team player.” I got all three.

And it wasn’t just words. The retaliation was petty and precise:

• Air conditioning aimed at my head until I was sick.
• Underpayment baked into the budget year after year.
• Hiring buddies with zero skills, then putting them in charge of the people who actually knew what they were doing.

One after another, the good people were gone — HR, finance, operations, marketing — all walked out within months.

Their replacements? A masterclass in corporate Darwinism:

• HR with no degree, no experience, but total confidence after watching a five-minute YouTube video.
• A “change management program” rolled out without understanding it, enforced through harassment, then abandoned when no one bought in.
• Leadership positions handed to the owners' friends — people whose last jobs included pushing patients in wheelchairs to X-rays, now convinced they could run a company. Without those connections, they’d be pushing grocery carts in a parking lot.

One of the owner’s buddies — whose last real job was greeting hospital patients, plopping them into a wheelchair, and rolling them to the X-ray department — now fancied himself corporate leadership material. Without those connections, he’d probably be collecting carts in a grocery store parking lot.

He couldn’t spell in either of the company’s official languages, eventually resorting to ChatGPT to write basic messages. But garbage in still equals garbage out. When his own mistakes blew up, he made sure someone else took the blame.

Case in point: he kept paying for web hosting that didn’t even exist — year after year. Three hosting companies later, his “solution” was to tell me to get the new hosting provider or even the previous hosting provider to go collect the money from the old hosting company he never cancelled. It was like paying rent on three apartments, forgetting to move out of the first one, and then asking your new landlord to go get your money back from the old landlord — because, apparently, that’s “how business works". And to him, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable plan. A real visionary.

This is also the guy who bought garage waterproof paper towels for the office — cheaper, maybe, but useless — and “managed” morale by feeding staff cookies and sweets for short-term sugar highs. Competence? Optional. Connections? Required.

Then came the new controller (if she’s even still there — this place burns through people faster than printer paper). According to her own words, she had been charged with corporate fraud in a previous role and fired from another position. The fact that the company either didn’t check — or didn’t care — says everything you need to know about how they vet leadership.

Her formal education wasn’t in accounting or finance, but that didn’t stop her from taking the title. One of her early moves? Hiring a makeup artist to handle payroll — someone completely unqualified for the role — and paying her more than a seasoned videographer with a decade of experience, including work on BMW ads.

Like HR, she worked from home, not because of policy but because she was allowed. That privilege never reached the ten-hour-a-day staff chained to the office. And while drawing a higher salary than actual experts, she was also juggling two other other jobs, and running her own bookkeeping comapny — giving this company the bare minimum for top dollar.

Marketing? Handed to someone with scrapbooking skills, no idea about branding, style fonts, SEO or Google Ads. Not exactly shocking when you realize she’s the only person to ever “graduate” from a college that doesn’t even grant degrees. Years of solid positioning erased, leaving the company trailing a competitor whose “brand” was literally an add on a electrical poll.

Even HR turnover was a revolving door — five managers in two and a half years. The last braggs about her skill in “corporate protocol exchange management” (translation: firing people). The one before the Firing Lady, the one without a degree or experience, got anything she wanted, she lasted just long enough to work from home for personal comfort while the ten-hour-a-day staff never got the same option.

And the customer service department? Not a revolving door — that’s too polite. It’s Russian roulette. Most leave on their own because they can’t take it anymore and even a penny over the minimum wage is raise - the raise they won't get here. Some are shown the door. The rest work sick because minimum wage doesn’t come with savings, passing illness around like a group project no one signed up for.

The Trade Show Backstab

I ran trade shows like clockwork. Then one morning, I walked in to find the system flipped upside down by someone I’d personally vouched for — all because she wanted a participant to act as her personal chauffeur. When told “no,” she lost it. In this culture, rules are flexible for favorites, but set in stone for everyone else.

The “Gossipy” Label

Then there was the colleague who loudly hated immigrants. One day, I saw her in the elevator mid-shift, purse in hand. I asked if she was okay. She said yes. Only later did I realize she’d been let go. I mentioned it in passing to someone who mentioned it to someone else — and suddenly, I was “gossipy” and “fucked up.”

In this system, any excuse will do to put you back in your place — especially if you’re already seen as an outsider.

Why People Leave

Positivity culture is cheap. Loyalty is priceless.

They had chaos disguised as culture.
Favoritism disguised as leadership.
Compliance disguised as “teamwork.”

To everyone who’s walked out of a place like this: you didn’t quit because you couldn’t hack it. You left because you refused to live in the chaos, the enshitification, and the slow erosion of your self-worth.

That’s not failure. That’s self-preservation.

Here’s to every one of you who chose sanity over Stockholm syndrome. You’re the reason I’m writing this.


Next chapter → Death By The Thousand Paper Cuts

HOW NOT TO RUN THE COMPANY
Your boss is not your family - Slim Shady culture
Part 1: Corporate Positivity Culture is Killing Us
Part 2: Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts
Part 3: Nepotism & Favouritism: The Silent Killers of Good Companies
Part 4: Will the Real Slim Shady Stand Up?