When Reading the Room Becomes a Survival Skill
- Jul 7
- 4 min read
Kelly Gates is a Women’s Leadership and Identity Coach who helps high-achieving women navigate life and career transitions with authenticity and self-trust. Through her coaching program, The Inner Sovereign™, she empowers women to embrace reinvention, overcome burnout, and lead with clarity and courage.
Emotional intelligence is widely regarded as a workplace strength. The ability to read a room, understand different perspectives, communicate with care and build relationships can make someone an excellent colleague or leader. In a toxic workplace, however, those same qualities can become exhausting.
Emotionally intelligent people notice the things others may dismiss, minimise or learn to ignore. They sense the shift in a manager’s tone after a meeting. They see a colleague become quieter after raising a concern. They recognise when a team is carefully avoiding a subject that everyone knows needs addressing. They may not be able to point to one particular incident, yet they can feel the weight of an environment where something always seems wrong or about to go wrong, but nobody can articulate what it is.
Often, the manager’s mood becomes the unofficial barometer of the office. On a good day, people can relax. However, on a difficult day, messages are rewritten, conversations become cautious and employees quietly adjust their behaviour to avoid becoming the focus of someone else’s frustration. This can create a feeling of ‘treading around glass’, marked by vigilance rather than trust.
Manager avoidance can be equally destabilising. Some leaders avoid difficult conversations because they lack confidence, fear conflict or have never been properly equipped to manage people. The result can be a manager who is physically present but relationally absent, offering little direction, feedback or meaningful connection with the people they are responsible for leading.
When a manager does not engage, the team is left to fill in the blanks. People begin to wonder whether they are doing enough, whether they have made a mistake or whether a problem is brewing behind closed doors. Silence becomes its own form of communication, and self-doubt and a lack of confidence begin to take hold.
Those who name troublesome patterns are often especially vulnerable. Someone may raise a reasonable concern about an unrealistic workload, a poorly thought-through restructure, unfair treatment, or the absence of a clear plan. Rather than engaging with the substance of what has been raised, a manager may recast that person as disruptive or resistant to change. The original issue is then lost beneath a conversation about the employee’s supposed attitude.
This is where workplace gaslighting can emerge. A person who identifies a recurring pattern may be told they are overreacting or misreading the situation. Over time, they can begin to doubt their own judgement, even when their instincts have repeatedly proved accurate.
This is also where workplace bullying can take root. When a manager feels challenged by a legitimate concern but lacks the confidence or skill to address it constructively, they may shift their focus from the issue to the person who raised it. That can show up as exclusion, excessive scrutiny, withholding information, undermining someone’s confidence or making their day-to-day work unnecessarily difficult. In some cases, the pressure becomes so sustained that the employee feels that leaving is the only way to protect themselves.
This matters more than many organisations acknowledge. The CIPD’s 2024 Good Work Index found that one in four UK employees had experienced workplace conflict in the previous year. Yet, while 81% of employers believed they were doing enough to prevent and manage bullying and harassment, only 36% of employees who had experienced conflict felt it had been fully resolved. That gap tells its own story. Policies may exist, but people’s lived experiences can be very different.
Many organisations now have wellbeing strategies and carefully worded values statements. These have limited value if the everyday culture rewards avoidance, tolerates inconsistency and punishes people for speaking honestly.
A genuine wellbeing culture is visible in everyday moments. It is not created through a one-off resilience workshop, access to meditation or wellbeing apps, a discounted gym membership, or healthy snacks in the kitchen. These can be thoughtful additions, but they cannot compensate for poor leadership.
The greatest influence on workplace wellbeing is how leaders lead, how they handle discomfort, whether they are approachable regardless of their mood, whether accountability applies to everyone and whether employees can raise concerns without being made to feel that they are the problem.
For emotionally intelligent people, the hardest part of a toxic workplace is often seeing the truth of what is happening while being expected to pretend that nothing is wrong.
Read more from Kelly Gates
Kelly Gates, Women’s Leadership & Identity Coach
Kelly Gates is a Women’s Leadership & Identity Coach focused on helping high-capacity women navigate pivotal transitions in career and life. She works at the intersection of leadership, reinvention and self-trust, supporting women to move from performing roles to embodying who they truly are. Kelly challenges outdated narratives about success and midlife, guiding women to reconnect with their values, voice, and direction so they can lead and live with clarity and alignment.
