The Toxic Team: Weaponized positiveness

I worked once in a company that had a very nice ritual: every week, a list of positive things, a.k.a. awesomenes, was collected and read out for everyone to hear.

It was happy and charming at first, but then an interesting pattern emerged. Most awesomes were exchanged between a particular clique of people, cross-thanking each other for meaningless, obvious and cliché reasons.

What happened then, was a rising resentment both toward the overly positive clique, and inside the teams that didn't seem to see anything positive in their work. It quickly started being an internal joke, and made it very hard to voice praise, and positive attitude.

There's a line between being a positive person, and weaponizing it, apparently!