The Workplace Coach

It feels like every second article that pops up in my feed these days is about toxic leadership and the damage it can cause. There is no doubt that toxic leaders will hurt your people, performance outcomes, organisational culture and the company’s reputation. Toxic leaders have higher turnover, higher absenteeism, increased sick leave usage, more accidents at work, and more stress related compensation claims.

“Engaging or promoting a toxic leader is one of the most expensive mistakes a company can make.”

So how does this happen in the first place? How does a toxic leader get engaged or promoted into a role where they are now responsible for the psychological safety and wellbeing of a team of people?

This is the biggest challenge for employers. How to identify and deal with toxic leaders?

The thing about toxic leaders is that they don’t see themselves as toxic, in fact they will usually have a fairly high opinion of their own capabilities, and they are often pretty good at self-promotion (see Dunning-Kruger effect).

Toxic leaders are also experts at spinning the narrative to excuse their own toxic behaviours.

“I might be a bit of a micro manager but that’s only because I want it done right.”

“I have high standards, and I expect everyone in the team to have them too.”

“I’m just trying to push people to be better.”

“It’s not personal, I’m trying to make sure we deliver the results.”

Toxic leaders might deliver the necessary productivity and performance results for the organisation, but it will come at a huge cost in terms of workforce outcomes.

Toxic leadership is not always obvious and can be quite subtle. What are some ways that employers might identify and deal with toxic leaders in their company? Here are our top 5 tips:

1. Measure employee engagement by team, and then include ‘improving employee engagement’ as a KPI for every manager to achieve a satisfactory performance rating. Toxic leaders (or leaders with low capability) will have low engagement scores so they will be relatively easy to identify.
2. Review the HR metrics for the different teams in your organisation. Specifically, you want to look for teams with unusually high turnover, absenteeism, unplanned leave and personal leave usage. These can be signs that a toxic leader is running that team. Toxic leaders often have people calling in sick on a Monday or Friday.
3. Set the expectation by communicating clear messages to all staff, from the Executive team down, about the type of culture and work environment that you want to be known for in the industry. You have to walk the talk and lead by example.
4. Engage your HR people to review your policies and procedures that relate to conduct, bullying, harassment, safety in the workplace, the right to disconnect, performance management and conflict resolution. Be sure that your organisational values also reflect the type of organisation you are looking to build (see Atlassian Core Values).
5. Grow your managers into leaders. It is unlikely that your managers have had any real training on how to manage and lead people. The skills we often refer to as soft skills are in fact very, very hard for some people and don’t always come naturally. Give your managers (at all levels) access to coaching. Coaches are perfectly placed to help your managers build self-awareness, address toxic behaviours and build their capability as leaders.

If we start from the basic premise that most managers don’t wake up in the morning determined to make someone miserable at work, then what we are talking about is more than likely a capability issue rather than a fundamentally psychotic or sociopathic manager. It is not that the manager is setting out to be toxic, they just don’t know any better.

Too many managers will manage people the same way they were managed on the way up. Bad habits, toxic leadership traits and undesirable workplace behaviours get perpetuated in this way, and the best intervention to get a change in behaviour and build self-awareness and leadership capability is through coaching.

If you want your managers to be better leaders then give us a call at The Workplace Coach, we are here to help.