HRChat: How Your Inner Child Can Remove Workplace Toxicity

Jeff Harry
2 min readJan 10, 2022

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Rarely do you ever think of healing your workplace by listening and healing your inner child, but that’s what I’m proposing. It’s fascinating that we talk a great deal about how the future of work will need leaders that have emotional intelligence, but what is that fancy term really?

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) encompasses the skills you learned in elementary school. Actively listening, being empathic, having compassion, caring for your fellow classmate, and just not being a jerk.

It’s amazing then how we got so many toxic leaders and work environments we have today if these are lessons that we should have learned in grade school.

https://wordfinder.yourdictionary.com/blog/wasting-time-at-work-surprising-stats-on-games-we-play/

In this podcast interview with Bill Banham, Editor-In-Chief of the HR Gazette, and the host of HRChat, we explore how to address these toxic work environments through play and positive psychology. We dive into the role a play-oriented/growth-oriented mindset can have in creating psychological safety, so staff can thrive and do their Zone of Genius work. In our discussion, we explore how to:

  • Embrace play and your intuition as a way to grow employee engagement, while making sure not to provide “forced fun.”
  • Engage your staff remotely in a way that is still real and not contrived.
  • Build psychological safety through small actions of compassion, empathy, and shared humanity over grandiose gestures of trust & team building
  • Avoid getting mired in office politics and petty squabbles, and use these opportunities to identify what’s important and where your values align
  • Use teambuilding, not as a way to fix teams, but to reveal the current team’s character and what issues need to be addressed

Here’s a snippet of it:

Check out the entire episode here:

HRChat Interview with Jeff Harry: How Your Inner Child Can Remove Workplace Toxicity

or here: https://hr-gazette.com/hrchat-interview-with-jeff-harry-how-your-inner-child-can-remove-workplace-toxicity/

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Jeff Harry

Workplace Positive Psychology Play Whisperer / Helping Fortune 500 Companies Build Psychologically Safe Workspaces Through Positive Psychology & Play