First of all, I'll push back on the idea—and it's not your idea—of “a bad apple”. That's one way for the organization to say, “It's not us. It's that one person.” No, it's organizational, and it's the federal government's responsibility to make sure that people they give positions of authority to deserve them. It's the federal government's responsibility to have mechanisms in place to identify the bad ones and to listen to the people who are working around them who say, “This is a problem ” and to fix that problem and provide a safe work-life balance. The organization suffers when good-hearted people leave because of a toxic work environment. The organization weakens and the people are weakened too.
It's not a matter of a few bad apples: It's a matter of an organization that has failed to implement a strategy to identify when a toxic workplace is happening. It's easy enough to look at when somebody who's in a position of authority comes into a really high-performing section and all of a sudden its productivity goes way down. What happens? People get sick, people leave, and that person goes on to the next promotion. Just look for those patterns. Organizations and the federal government....
We can be world leaders on this. This is an opportunity. If there weren't a solution, I would just walk away, but there is a solution. It's the political will that needs to be there to move forward on this.