“A toxic environment is one that erodes, disables and destroys the physiological, psychosocial and spiritual wellbeing of the people who work in it in a permanent and deliberate way.”
- In his book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t, Robert Sutton makes the case that there is a correlation between toxic organisations and abusive bosses. He claims such bosses and cultures drive good people out and the cost to organisations is significant in terms of the bottom line through increased turnover, absenteeism, decreased commitment and performance. He says the time spent counselling or appeasing these people, consoling victimised employees, reorganising departments or teams and arranging transfers produce significant hidden costs for the company.
- Swedish researchers, led by Anna Nyberg at the Stress Institute in Stockholm, have published a study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (link is external)on the issue of leaders’ behaviour and employee health. They studied more than 3,100 men over a 10-year period in typical work settings. They found that employees who had managers who were incompetent, inconsiderate, secretive and uncommunicative, the employees were 60% more likely to suffer a heart attack or other life-threatening cardiac condition. By contrast, employees who worked with “good” leaders were 40% less likely to suffer heart problems.
- According to a 2010 survey conducted by the Workplace Bullying Institute, (link is external)35% of the American workforce (or 53.5 million people) has directly experienced bullying–or “repeated mistreatment by one or more employees that takes the form of verbal abuse, threats, intimidation, humiliation or sabotage of work performance”–while an additional 15% said they have witnessed bullying at work. Approximately 72% of those bullies are bosses.
- What does toxic leadership look like and why with all the development programmes available to leaders, do we still see behaviour in the workplace that creates serious and enduring harm to employees and the organisation?
- Why is it tolerated?
At worst, toxic behaviours can be described as:
- Management focus is on profits, driving outputs, meeting targets, with little time to engage in supporting and helping individuals to be successful. The emphasis is usually on what has gone wrong, working longer hours due to under resourcing or absenteeism.
- Coercive, bullying behaviours (blaming, undermining, intimidating, disempowering others).
- Threatening or punishing those who challenge or don’t comply with the leader’s actions.
- Little or no constructive dialogue between leaders and their workers.
- Tolerance of bullying by employees to employees due to leaders taking no action.
- Micro managing and sub optimised performance (leaders doing the work of their people).
- Management point scoring and other divisive behaviours.
- Conflict is not dealt with openly or in a healthy way, and public agreement being undermined by private dissent.
- Absence of empathy.
Toxic Outcomes include:
- Working longer hours and an expectation that availability to work goes beyond the workplace (dealing with e mails/texts at home) leading to poorer concern of workplace balance.
- High levels of stress, turnover, absenteeism and burnout.
- Individuals feel undervalued and unsupported.
- Declining levels of staff motivation and satisfaction leading to poor performance, absenteeism, stress and turnover.
- Teams that are only partially engaged.
- Disaffected people who comply but don’t contribute beyond expected minimums.
- Executive Teams and Boards of Directors that fail to recognise and respond to strategic risks or fail to fully capitalise on strategic opportunities.
Surely the cost associated with this is too high?
Based on the work of Jean Lipman-Blumen, where she explores the paradox of while most followers complain about toxic leadership, nonetheless, they put up with it.
Listed below are a few reasons why we stick with toxic leaders:
- Our fears that we are personally powerless to challenge bad leaders contribute to our reluctance to confront them.
- We need our jobs to pay the mortgage and bills (our physiological needs).
- We don’t challenge because we think no one else thinks the leader is toxic; we can’t take the chance of endangering our careers and our fortunes.
- This thinking eventually hardens into far more powerful control myths that warn us we shouldn’t dare resist as we genuinely believe the leader will crush us with overwhelming force; our colleagues will turn against us; or we’ll be “downsized,” maybe fired.
- Situational fears that give rise to an increased need for certainty and orderliness – Leaders who promise us an orderly, predictable and controlled world can look very attractive when everything around us seems about to fall apart.
The real leadership challenge especially for executive and senior leaders is understanding the system in which they operate, and how to develop the leadership behaviours that will support organisation systemic change. This includes managing both the legitimate or official system as well as the unintended or shadow system (unwritten rules’, politics, grapevine, friendships, etc.) Both the official/formal system and the unofficial/shadow system have positive and negative effects on everyone in the organisation. Both systems can be supportive and toxic, and both can inhibit the free exercise of honourable, transparent and energetic leadership.
By positioning leadership development in the context of your organisation system and the operating systems of your partners, customers and stakeholders the likelihood of building collaborative productive relationships is significantly increased. I believe that every conversation that takes place in the workplace is an opportunity to lead.
Research by Christina Boedker of the Australian School of Business concluded that the ability of leaders to spend more time and effort developing and recognising people, welcoming feedback, and fostering co-operation among staff were critical to success. In fact, out of all the various elements in an organisation, the ability of a leader to be compassionate, “to understand people’s motivators, hopes and difficulties and to create the right support mechanism to allow people to be as good as they can be,” had the greatest correlation with profitability and productivity
The good news is, we can achieve radical improvements in organisational performance, addressing these issues positively and quickly, by systematically improving the quality of our conversations. To do that, we need to understand and respond appropriately to:
- the interplay of structures within an organisations communication system – problems in face to face communication are often due to the unseen influences of a deeper invisible structure. So long as it remains unseen the structure can undermine and violate communicative intentions.
- helping leaders break the pattern of repeating old behaviours which are unhelpful by raising their awareness and providing strategies to change and sustain new patterns of behaviour
- supporting leaders to interact more effectively starting with building trust and psychological safety, leading to more honest courageous conversations. enhancing wellbeing for everyone.
- understand the patterns and traps we fall into by understanding the system in which we operate and to which we contribute. Clarify and have conversations about the “undiscussables” – the elephants in the room.
At the Houston Exchange we have made a significant investment in training to be licensed, accredited coaching practitioners of Dialogue and Structural Dynamics (a theory of face to face communication). Our USP is to bring a new and innovative approach to leadership development, coaching and organisational change. We are passionate about the potential of this approach and can offer leaders and coaches a way of moving to a deeper level of communicative competency. Our approach is based on one of the most advanced conversational models we have found in our 25 years of organisational development. We have been working with this material for some years now and we are enthusiastic about sharing it with others. Contact us for further information on our leadership and coaching programmes.