It was not wars that cost this former ICRC head of delegation his nights, but toxic colleagues. Toxicity at work, a risk that managers ignore.
Walter Fuelemann coordinated civil protection in Bosnia during the war. He experienced Srebrenica from the inside. He accompanied the releases of political prisoners in Nicaragua, negotiated in contexts where international law hung by a thread. Thirty-one years at the International Committee of the Red Cross, as head of delegation. When asked what cost him nights of sleep, his answer is surprising. It has nothing to do with the war. What kept him awake were co-workers with toxic behavior, those who thought of themselves first. The paradox deserves attention, not as a psychological curiosity, but as a managerial signal that most organizations choose to ignore.
A crisis is being piloted, toxicity is seeping in
An external crisis has a structure. A beginning, an identifiable cause, a temporality. It mobilizes, it sometimes unites, it forces us to surpass ourselves. A manager who faces a crisis knows what he is fighting. It maps the problem, allocates resources, measures theadvancement. The crisis is legible.
The toxic colleague works differently. He does not declare himself. It does not have an official start date. It infiltrates meetings, in the corridors, in the silences that follow a team decision. It takes the form of the one who takes ownership of collective successes, of the manager who protects his perimeter to the detriment of the common project, of a dynamic where everyone watches their backs rather than moving forward. What makes toxicity so costly is its diffuse nature. It does not appear on any dashboard. She does not become a performance indicator. It accumulates in silence, and when it is seen, the evil is already deep. Managing a humanitarian crisis mobilizes all your resources, but leaves you intact on the essentials, formulates Walter Fuelemann. Toxic behavior attacks trust. And eroded trust cannot be rebuilt by decree.
Why toxic behavior is more exhausting than difficulty
It would be tempting to confine this testimony to the humanitarian world, a separate sector where the comparison with business would seem out of place. That would be a mistake. The dynamic is universal, because it touches on something anthropological: our capacity to tolerate internal injustice is much more limited than our capacity to confront external threat.
When faced with a crisis, we activate resistance mechanisms. We draw on unsuspected reserves. Faced with a colleague who pulls the cover, a superior who asserts our ideas, a culture where loyalty to oneself takes precedence over loyalty to the collective, these mechanisms are lacking. Because we shouldn’t need it. This wasn’t supposed to be the fight. It is this betrayal of the obvious that is exhausting, not the difficulty in itself. The difficulty we didn’t expect, in the place we didn’t expect it.
The data shows the extent of the waste. In France, only 8% of employees say they are engaged in their work, according to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace report based on 2023 data. This disengagement is often attributed to structural causes: lack of meaning, perspectives, remuneration. They exist. But they mask a more immediate reality. Many disengage because their direct environment is toxic, and no one intervenes.
Naming toxicity, a manager’s responsibility
Walter Fuelemann poses a simple requirement: to thematize well-being as a central aspect of an organization’s identity. Not to protect people from difficulty, which is part of the job. To treat toxicity as what it is, a strategic threat, not a personal problem to be digested alone.
The first responsibility of a leader, from this perspective, is to make visible what is happening in his organization. No in the sense of surveillance, in the sense of lucidity. The manager who knows what is happening in the corridors, who names harmful behaviors, who creates the conditions for problems to be escalated without costing the person reporting them anything, protects his team in a way that no bonus or cohesion seminar will do. It starts at recruitment : accepting a brilliant but toxic profile because its results are good is to introduce a virus into the system. This continues in the evaluation: if the criteria only measure individual results and never collective behavior, the message about what matters is clear. This extends to conflict management: to ignore is to validate.
In conclusion
The first resource of an organization is the women and men who work there. The phrase adorns annual reports, but it is first and foremost an operational reality. Like any critical resource, it requires protection, not from difficult work, but from that which silently erodes the capacity to devote oneself to it. Walter Fuelemann went through crises that few of us can imagine. What kept him up at night wasn’t them. His organizations should have heard him sooner.
