The world has had its heart ripped out by the current recession, depression, call it what you will.
No, its not as bad as the 1930’s, but for those of us suffering because of personal greed, lack of planning and the worst examples of leadership we are ever likely to see, it’s hurting.
The list of corporations and individuals involved in scandals that have rocked the financial markets, decimated the lives and fortunes of millions of employees and investors seem to mounting on an almost daily basis. Corporate scandals have been around as long as corporations themselves. It is not the low-level managers, not the people who man the assembly lines and teller windows and call-centers and steel-mills who are to blame… but their leaders.
Destructive, unethical leaders are focused on visible short-term accomplishment. They provide superiors with impressive, articulate presentations and enthusiastic responses. But they are unconcerned about, or oblivious to, staff morale or customer loyalty. They are seen by the majority of subordinates as arrogant, self-serving, inflexible, and petty.
A loud, decisive, demanding leader is not necessarily toxic. A leader with a soft voice and façade of sincerity can also be toxic. In the end, it is not one specific behavior that deems one toxic; it is the cumulative effect of de-motivational behavior on morale and climate over time that tells the tale. Toxic leaders might be highly competent and effective in a short-sighted sense, but they contribute to an unhealthy command climate with ramifications extending far beyond their tenure.
In his best-selling book Band of Brothers, Stephen E. Ambrose provides an example of a toxic leader—the detested commander of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Ambrose writes, “Anyone who has ever been in the Army knows the type. [He] was the classic chickenshit. He generated maximum anxiety over minimum significance.” He had poor judgment, but his style was what generated resentment. He “could not see the unrest and the contempt that was breeding in the troops. You led by fear or you led by example. We were being led by fear.” Superiors took no action and, characteristically, no soldier officially complained to the chain of command, but the soldiers considered taking matters into their own hands and discussed shooting him when the company got into combat. Things did not go that far because the commander left the unit before Easy Company engaged in combat operations.
To suffering subordinates, in uniform or in business, toxic leaders represent a daily challenge that can result in unnecessary organizational stress, negative values, and hopelessness. Toxic leaders are anathema to the health of organizations.
They can be quite responsive to assignments from higher headquarters and obsequious to peers and especially to superiors, but their deficiencies are evident to subordinates. Toxic leaders rise to their stations in life over the carcasses of those who work for them. They run their units into the ground, casting a wake that is obvious to those who assume leadership positions behind them. People working under toxic leaders can become disenchanted with the company or, worse, might take the successful toxic leader as an example to emulate.
Toxic leaders do not add value to the organizations they lead, even if the unit performs successfully on their watch. They do not engender high levels of confidence that lead to department cohesion and esprit de corps.
Why, I ask, does any organization which claims to be people-oriented and that places such emphasis on leadership tolerate them?
Perhaps there is something about military culture combined with various personnel policies that contributes to suffering such leaders in silence. After all, people want to be proud of their units, and the military value of loyalty militates against airing dirty laundry. Subordinates might not report toxic leaders because nobody likes a whiner. We expect professionals to perform to the best of their ability despite a supervisor’s leadership style. The military inculcates an attitude that one must respect the rank, even if one does not respect the person. Military culture esteems technical competence, and technical competence will lead some senior leaders to overlook flawed toxic leaders.
There is no reason to assume there is any difference in the corporate world.
Those rating toxic leaders can be fooled by them. Many organizations have a system that is totally supervisor-centric in terms of incentives, rewards, and punishments. The only person whose opinion counts is the person who writes the evaluation report. What raters do NOT know is what the subordinates and peers think.
I would submit to you, and most would agree, that people we have worked for who are toxic leaders—the subordinates know and the superiors do not. The challenge is to get that input.
In “Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance,” a Harvard Business Review article, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatis, and Annie McKee agree: “An alarming number of leaders do not really know if they have resonance with their organizations. Rather, they suffer from the CEO disease; its one unpleasant symptom is the sufferer’s near-total ignorance about how his mood and actions appear to the organization. It’s not that leaders don’t care how they are perceived; most do. But they incorrectly assume that they can decipher this information themselves. Worse, they think that if they are having a negative effect, someone will tell them. They’re wrong.”
Existing climate-assessment surveys could be improved in terms of survey content, administration, and interpretation. Many people I speak to during leadership assessments tell me, “I am skeptical of many of the surveys based on when they are given, how they are given, and the questions that are asked.”
It has been noted that although leadership is an important variable in determining command climate, other variables, such as lack of resources for assigned objectives, also play a part. Climate-assessment surveys are tools for leaders to use to assess their own departments. Considerable skepticism exists that toxic leaders would take appropriate corrective action unless results are provided to raters. Surveys go the department manager or supervisor, not those who need to see them, the organizations senior leaders.
Personally, I doubt whether an organization is willing to identify and deal with toxic leaders if they are otherwise effective, at least in the short-term.
Toxic leaders stay on because they get results. Senior managers who take no action against toxic leaders take no action because they like the results.
Such inaction is usually voiced with an observable sense of regret and resignation.
If we determine that toxic leadership exists at a higher level than we are willing to tolerate and that such leaders can be identified by using tools like multi-rater leader assessments or climate assessments, the next question is, “What should we do to improve?” The solution starts from the top with an executive team oriented to a healthy culture willing to take action to achieve it.
When explaining why such action does not happen more often, I believe that if a company has toxic managers, it is because the culture enables it— knowingly or unknowingly—through nothing more than apathy.
One of the values any organization must have is respect. By definition, the toxic leader demonstrates a lack of respect to subordinates. The historically wide band of tolerance for leadership style should therefore be narrowed to exclude toxic leaders. Relief for cause and poor evaluations for toxic leadership can be powerful cultural statements. Doing so would require expanding the definition of success beyond short-term metrics to include the health of the organization and the understanding that unit climate matters because service members and civilians are more than just means to an end. In such a culture, those who do not foster a positive command climate will not be successful.
Identifying and purging toxic leaders is only part of the solution. Every supervisor should be on the lookout for toxic behavior in subordinates and to coach and develop them accordingly: “The only thing a bully respects is authority from above. Thus, the only way to get help in dealing with a difficult manager is to appeal to someone in a higher position who can intervene.”
Toxic leaders will rationalize their behavior as necessary to get the job done, or as part of the time-honored command technique of coming into the unit hard because it is easier to ease off than to tighten up.
Toxic leadership, like leadership in general, is more easily described than defined, but terms like self-aggrandizing, petty, abusive, indifferent to unit climate, and interpersonally malicious seem to capture the concept. A toxic leader is poison to the organization—an insidious, slow-acting poison that complicates diagnosis and the application of an antidote. Large and complex organizations should look for the phenomenon since culture and organizational policies might inadvertently combine to perpetuate it.
Superiors are in particularly important positions to deal with toxic behavior because they have the authority to counter it. Yet, they might be the last to observe the behavior unless they are attuned. Subordinates are generally not in a position to address the problem because toxic leaders are characteristically unconcerned about subordinates.
Still, toxic leaders need not be tolerated.
Enough hard-driving, high-achieving leaders who understand the importance of good climate exist to belie the myth that rule by fear and intimidation is necessary.
But they need to step up and show the way.
Paul Cartwright
CEO
Cardinal Inc.