This was also published as a Twitter thread here

Why India’s Managers and Founders Are Creating Toxic Work Environments (even unknowingly) and How We Can Fix It!

Here’s an ultra hot 🔥 take: In India, many managers and founders end up creating toxic work environments. This isn’t just a hunch—it’s something I’ve seen firsthand, and it stems, in my opinion, from two core issues: a lack of training in working with people and showing empathy, and a lack of planning and prioritization. Let’s dive into the anecdotes, unpack why this is happening, and explore why it’s critical for us to address this as a community to retain talent.

The Root Causes

1. Lack of Training in People Skills and Empathy

Many managers in India aren’t proficient in the soft skills needed to lead teams effectively. This isn’t their fault—it often comes down to a lack of formal training or exposure to working with people and showing genuine empathy. As a result, teams suffer, morale drops, and the best talent walks out the door.

2. Lack of Planning and Prioritization

A lot of managers struggle with planning—almost everything feels “urgent,” and there’s no real prioritization. This can happen for several reasons:

Afraid to Say “No” or Push Back: Culturally, we’re a country where saying a straight “no” isn’t common, especially in asymmetric power dynamics like those between managers and their teams or higher-ups. Over time, this creates a culture of “yes people” at the top, even if it means their teams are overstretched and unable to keep the best talent.

Bad Planning: Many people learn planning and project management by accident, not through formal education. There’s also a lingering “tech is cool, management is bad” syndrome in our industry, so any training in this area is often done half-heartedly.

Lack of Technical or Domain Depth: Many managers don’t put in the effort to deeply understand their domain or technology, which makes their planning and management skills poorer by an order of magnitude. Without that foundation, they can’t prioritize effectively or guide their teams well.

The Ripple Effects of These Problems

These issues don’t just stay within teams—they bleed into the broader organization and hurt retention. Let’s look at some specific ways this plays out:

Heavily Centralized Planning: Some organizations insist that every decision must pass through a small group of people. Those individuals get overwhelmed, and decisions bottleneck. Over time, this creates a culture of “followers” rather than leaders, stifling growth and innovation.

Overworked Leaders and Toxic Behaviors: When a few so-called “leaders” are overloaded, they can develop memory and cognitive challenges, lose their cool, and resort to abuses, swear words, or other toxic behaviors. This normalizes unhealthy practices, like “Startup hai, shouting/abusing words/anger/working on weekends is okay”—which it isn’t.

Heroic Efforts Over Sustainable Growth: Many managers mistakenly think the engineer who puts in heroic, all-the-time efforts is the best, while someone who plans better and avoids constant firefighting isn’t appreciated equally. This mindset drives burnout and pushes talent away.

War and Sports Analogies Gone Wrong: I’ve heard so many stories of founders and managers using war or sports analogies to justify endless work. What they miss is the “peace time” or “downtime” between battles or games—rest and reset are essential, but they think it’s always war. There are better ways to motivate people to a purpose, but this approach is, in my opinion, stupid and unsustainable.

How We Can Do Better

We don’t have to repeat the toxic patterns we might have experienced ourselves. Here’s how we can turn things around: Encourage Disagreements and Open Debate: Founders, especially, can set the tone by enabling a culture where challenging assumptions and open debate are welcomed. The culture a founder sets largely shapes how managers manage their teams.

Prioritize Planning and Empathy: Invest in formal training for managers—not just in technical skills, but in people management, empathy, and effective planning. A human-centered approach to leadership delivers results that matter and creates lasting change.

Be Humane and Mission-Driven: A positive, mission-driven approach will enable people to do their best work. Expecting people to work all the time, without clarity on the mission or sustainable growth, only leads to burnout and turnover.

Stop Normalizing Unhealthy Behaviors: We need to call out and stop normalizing things like shouting, abusing words, or working weekends as “just part of startup life.” A good manager’s job is to shield their team from pressure from above, not pass it through unchecked.

Why This Matters for Retaining Talent

As a community, we can’t afford to lose our best engineers and talent to toxic work environments. The stakes are too high. By addressing these issues—training managers in people skills, prioritizing planning, and fostering humane, sustainable workplaces—we can build organizations where people want to stay and thrive. There’s so much to learn and do when leading a group of smart engineers who are positively invested in a mission. Let’s do better.