I've been in enough leadership teams to know what happens when someone on the executive team is consistently rude to the people below them. Nothing dramatic, usually. No blowup, no resignation letter on the table. Just a slow leak.
People stop bringing the hard thing up. They start pre-filtering what they say. They work around the person instead of with them. And everyone in the room who witnesses it, not just the person on the receiving end, starts pulling back too.
We've always talked about this as a culture problem. But it's actually a math problem.
What the research actually says
Georgetown professor Christine Porath spent 14 years and 14,000 people studying what incivility actually costs organizations. Here's what landed for me: 80% of employees who experienced or witnessed an act of incivility reported losing work time just worrying about it. Not dealing with it. Worrying. Sixty-three percent lost time actively avoiding the person. Sixty-six percent said their performance declined. This isn't morale. This is throughput.
And that's before we get to the creativity piece, which I think is the most underappreciated finding in all of this research. Porath and her colleagues ran experiments where participants were mildly belittled before a brainstorming task. They came up with 39% fewer ideas. In a separate study, people who merely witnessed a rude exchange performed 25% worse on cognitive tasks and generated 45% fewer ideas than the control group.
Just watching it happen costs you almost half your team's best thinking.
Why it gets worse than most leaders realize
Incivility eats cognitive bandwidth. When someone's brain is partially occupied processing "what did that mean" or "should I say something" or "is this going to happen again," there's less of the brain available for the actual work. It's not a character flaw in the employee. It's basic neuroscience.
SHRM's 2024 data puts the scale of this in context: two-thirds of U.S. workers say they've experienced or witnessed incivility at work in the past month. More than half in the past week. If you're running a team of 50, statistically some version of this is happening right now, and the productivity drain is happening with it.
The part that still surprises leaders when I share this: it's not just about the person being treated poorly. It ripples. Bystanders are affected. Team creativity drops. People start avoiding the person, which means information stops flowing the way it needs to. And after enough of this, the people who have options start using them. Twenty-six percent of workers in SHRM's data said they're likely to leave their job in the next year because of incivility they experienced or witnessed.
What this means for the CEO in the room
The question I ask executive teams isn't whether they have a civility problem. Most do, even when they think they don't. The question is whether they're treating it like the business problem it actually is.
Because the behavior that makes a team feel less safe is the same behavior that makes them less productive, less creative, and more likely to walk. Psychological safety on an executive team is already harder to build than most CEOs think, and incivility is the fastest way to lose what you've built. If you're a CEO reading this and thinking "we're pretty good on this," in my experience that's exactly when it's worth asking your team the same question.
So what do you actually do about it?
Porath's research is consistent on where to start: you address it when you see it. Her specific guidance for leaders confronting incivility in the moment is what she calls BIFF. Be brief, informative, friendly, and firm. Not a lecture, not a performance review conversation. A short, direct, respectful exchange that names what happened and what you expect instead. Most leaders either say nothing or say too much. BIFF is the middle path that actually works.
The second move is making civility visible when it shows up, not just policing it when it doesn't. When someone handles a hard conversation well, when a leader gives difficult feedback without damaging the person on the receiving end, when a team works through real disagreement and comes out stronger, name it. Your team is watching what you notice as much as what you punish.
The third piece is giving people a way to name the problem when it happens to them. Two-thirds of employees who experience incivility intentionally give less at work afterward, and in most cases the organization never knows it happened. That gap between what's happening and what reaches leadership closes only when people believe that saying something won't cost them more than staying quiet. That's a trust problem before it's a civility problem, which is why the fix has to start at the top.