Understanding and addressing toxic leadership for a better workplace culture

Toxic leadership creates detrimental workplace culture, stifling creativity, reducing productivity, and harming employee well-being. The impact of toxic leadership can have significant impact on your mental, emotional, and physical health. We spend more than 1/3 of our day working, and having constant exposure to poor leadership, toxic leadership, can make those hours feel like months or years. It drains us completely, yet the power of corruption from one toxic leadership is exponential. There’s little control we have about our own leadership, we are given who we have, and if the workplace is proactive, they can address these issues immediately, but most organizations rarely address toxic leaders.

This guide explores the characteristics of toxic leaders, their impact on teams, and actionable strategies for organizations and individuals. Anything you can do to prepare yourself early have help you navigate through the professional trauma of working with/for a toxic leader.

Key Characteristics of a Toxic Leader

Not all toxic leader look the same, some of the characteristics are identified below. Depending on the company culture, certain characteristics are more tolerated than others, regardless, these can be identifiable traits of a toxic leader:

Micromanagement: Excessive control, stifling autonomy and trust.
Lack of Empathy: Disregard for employee emotions and well-being.
Manipulative Behavior: Using deceit for personal gain, eroding trust.
Inconsistency: Frequent shifts in goals, causing confusion and frustration.
Blame-Shifting: Refusing responsibility for failures, blaming others.
Narcissism: Excessive self-importance, disregarding others’ contributions.
Authoritarianism: Suppressing dissent and enforcing strict obedience.
Resistance to Feedback: Dismissing criticism as a threat.
Favoritism: Preferential treatment, creating division and resentment.
Poor Communication: Unclear goals and expectations, leading to inefficiency.

Note, a leader doesn’t have to have all of these traits to be considered toxic. Even one can create toxic workplace, and a toxic leader. Identifying these and addressing them early is crucial to modifying behavior and establishing boundaries of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in the workplace.

Impact on Team Dynamics and Performance

Ever hear the proverb, “One bad apple spoils the whole bunch”? Essentially, when you’re exposed to toxicity in your leadership, the poor behaviors can corrupt others, because it’s more about survival for many than changing the individual. This is where I have empathy for toxic leaders, they didn’t start out this way, they were impacted by previous leadership and became spoiled to survive in that environment, and they not carry that this is the only way to lead. Sadly, without deep self-work and awareness, it can become extremely challenging for them to address their toxic traits.

Here’s our toxic leadership disrupts team dynamics and overall performance:

Decreased Motivation: Reduced employee engagement and productivity.
High Turnover Rates: Loss of talent, increased recruitment costs.
Poor Collaboration: Stifled communication and teamwork.
Diminished Creativity: Discouragement of innovative ideas.
Erosion of Trust: Breakdown of cohesion and collaboration.
Increased Conflict: Escalation of tensions and misunderstandings.

Psychological Effects on Employees

If you’ve experienced one of the toxic leadership traits, you know that it can linger with you. It can feel like your autonomy and agency have been violated, it can feel like your and professional boundaries have been cross without your permission. These aren’t just isolated events, over time it can have severe psychological repercussions:

Increased Stress: Chronic stress from criticism and demands.
Low Self-Esteem: Eroded confidence in abilities.
Burnout (LINK): Physical and emotional exhaustion.
Anxiety and Depression: Heightened worry and fear.
Isolation: Feeling disconnected from colleagues.
Decreased Job Satisfaction: Reduced engagement and willingness to excel.

Addressing Toxic Leadership: Strategies for Change

Confronting & Reporting Toxic Behavior

As an individual you have a lot of power to modify and change your situation, but it will take active effort to bring the unacceptable behavior to the manager, HR, mentors, or other colleagues about your experience. Here’s what you can do to address and report toxic behavior:

Document Incidents: Keep detailed records of events, time, day, and what happened, what was said, how it felt, the context will create a clearer picture of what happened. If it’s via email/text messages, take screenshots and forward a copy of the communication to your personal email and your business email for your record. Having these documents can help you if things escalate.
Seek Support: Talk to trusted colleagues or mentors. The trusted colleagues and mentors can be your support and can provide guidance on how to manage it, can support you if you choose to escalate the situation, and can help you protect yourself. Power in numbers.
Report to HR: Escalate issues to Human Resources or management. This can be tough to do because most people believe that HR is there to protect the company, and yes that is mostly true, but they can protect the company by protecting you or protecting the toxic leader. This can have a significant impact on learning about the company culture. If they are protecting the toxic leader, it may be an indicator that they value the person and will tolerate their toxic behavior for the company’s benefit.
Self-Care Strategies: Prioritize mental and emotional well-being. I cannot stress this enough – the work and toxic challenges will take a mental, emotional and physical toll on you and it’s important to prioritize your self-care routine over the work and demands of your toxic manager. Because if you stay calm and not reactionary, you have a better chance of withstanding the poor leadership. If you get too upset and reactionary you may say or do something that can have severe consequences for your career within the organization.
Explore External Resources: Utilize employee assistance programs or counseling. Speaking with a career counselor, like me, can be extremely helpful in processing through the challenging experiences and finding your balance again so the terrible bosses have less of an impact on your mental and emotional well-being while you build skills to manage up.
Reflect on Career Goals: Evaluate alignment with the current environment. After a certain point, you’ll know if the company/organization will address toxic behaviors or if they’ll tolerate it and you have to reassess your career goals of what is worth your time and energy. There’s nothing wrong with protecting yourself first and leaving toxic workplace. Reflecting on your career goals can set your free from feeling stuck or thinking that this organization is your only option to work in the area that give you energy.
Stay Informed: Understand employee rights and reporting channels. Speak with a lawyer to understand your rights and stay informed on company policies and changes. They more you know the better you’ll be able to protect yourself. Toxic leaders likely have a good understanding on if will be tolerated from the organization and what could be considered inappropriate behavior.

Organization’s role in addressing toxic leadership

Organizational culture can enable or deter toxic leadership. Cultures lacking accountability or prioritizing results over well-being allow toxic behavior to flourish. Organizational culture comes from the tolerance at the top of the leadership, their priorities are encouraged and rest are secondary. Working with organization who rank high in corporate culture can a good place to find healthy work environment. Here’s what you should seek during your interview and beyond:

Regular Feedback: Implement 360-degree feedback for leaders. How are leaders measured for their performance? Reporting up process is where most employees are, they report their accomplishments to their manager, but they don’t account for peer feedback or those they manage. This can indicate a single direction feedback, which can be manipulated. If the organization conducts regular 360º feedback, where peer, subordinates, and managers all rate the employees performance, this can provide better transparency to the individual and create a culture of transparency and accountability.
Training Programs: Provide emotional intelligence and ethical leadership training. Training is an investment in organizational culture and should be part of the organization on a quarterly bases, the more investment in training and development, the better and easier it’ll be for the organization to address challenges and foster an environment where learning and growth is a priority.
Clear Policies: Establish explicit policies and consequences for toxic behavior. “No bullying” policy sounds great, but when it comes to action, it falls flat because it’s not well documented as what constitutes “bullying” behavior. This confusion can create subjective outcomes where certain behaviors are accepted while others are tolerated. Having clear policies help people recognize the boundaries and layers of protection.
Fostering a Positive Culture: Encourage respect, inclusivity, and open dialogue. This goes towards building psychological safety in the team, individual, and managers where open communication is appreciate and rewarded. Respect comes from trust, and trust comes from being comfortable to be vulnerable.
Leadership Accountability: Hold leaders responsible for their actions. Simple as that, focus on the impact and not intent of the leadership, if the impact was poor than the person needs to be held accountable for owning that their attempt didn’t have the desired result. Having accountability provides opportunity to correct toxic behaviors early and set boundaries for maintaining a healthy company culture.
Empowering Employees: Create safe channels for voicing concerns without retaliation. Again, when employees feel comfortable with speaking up, everyone wins. The level of psychological safety needed to accomplish this means everyone, from C-suite leadership to the intern feel comfortable being their authentic self and are able to address their concerns openly and constructively.

Seeking support

Addressing toxic leaders is tough and it becomes complex if you’re not in power or with influence. This is where most people choose self-preservation, rightly so, and avoid the situation, have more sick days, and avoid engaging with the leader and even question leaving the organization that tolerate, even reward, toxic behaviors. If you’re in this situations, I’m sorry you have to deal with poor leaders.

Follow the steps outlined to start helping yourself, and if you choose, start working with your team and senior leaders to address toxic leaders and behaviors. If you’re able to come with empathy for the toxic leader, you can show empathy while protecting yourself, but your ability to show empathy to towards the toxic leader isn’t necessary. Self-preservation is the number 1 priority, and empathysizing with the leader doesn’t make their behavior acceptable, but you can recognize they are human and with human experiences. Plus, they might have experienced professional trauma and toxic leaders and aren’t familiar with better options.

No matter what you do, you need to protect yourself first and create a strategy for you on what and how you’d like to move forward. This is where career counseling and coaching can be helpful, career counseling sessions are designed to help you manage your triggers and build resilience so the toxic behaviors aren’t as impactful, and career coaching sessions can help you with next steps. If you’re interested in learning more, please schedule a free consultation.

Tags :