“The higher you go, the more problems are behavioral” —Marshall Goldsmith[i]
Over the years I have often been asked to work with senior leaders on their management and leadership skills. These requests don’t usually come from these leaders themselves but are suggested by other interested parties who feel that the dysfunctionality at the top gets in the way of project or program success.
I have been involved in a variety of senior leadership interventions, such as senior leadership development programs, teambuilding retreats, field visits, or executive coaching. In my past life at Management Sciences for Health, we received US government funding (when there was a lot of that) to send some of those senior leaders to the US to get a degree. Sometimes this served the double purpose of removing the person from the environment so that others could breathe again or thrive, and also to open their minds by exposing the person to other ideas, cultures and ways of working with people.
We don’t have a lot to show for how these interventions changed things. We may have some anecdotes, if we stay in touch with the people we worked with, but the impact of senior leadership development programs and executive coaching interventions is hard to measure. There is so much variation in how such interventions are done that it is hard to extract any lessons from them about how we should deal with dysfunctionality at the top. As a result we have very little guidance for people who find themselves working in situations where the quality of the work environment gets in the way of improving performance, no matter how good our interventions are.
Dysfunctionality at the top has been described well by Peter Senge[ii] in his classic ‘The Fifth Discipline,’ in particular in the chapter where he describes the “myth of the senior leadership team.” One of the ways we see this dysfunctionality expressed is in the form of ‘toxic teams.’ Toxic teams are a huge problem in organizations. Unfortunately they are quite ubiquitous around the world.
I often ask people about their experiences in working in a great team. It is troubling to see how many people have never had such an experience. Recently I asked a group of mid-level and senior leaders from six African countries the same question. Very few hands went up. When I started to talk about ‘toxic’ teams nearly everyone nodded their heads in recognition.
Most people know intuitively what a toxic team is. Toxic teams are created by toxic leaders. Toxic leaders are people who have responsibility over a group of people or an organization, and who abuse the leader–follower relationship by leaving the group or organization in a worse-off condition than when they took on the role of leader[iii]. They harm their staff, and thus also their organization, unit, program or project “through the poisoning of enthusiasm, creativity, autonomy, and innovative expression.”[iv] They spread their ‘toxic fumes’ through over-control, believing that leading is about control. The resulting toxicity in the work environment is bad for morale, bad for self-confidence and makes it unlikely that anyone would risk proposing something new or take initiative. Ergo, we have an organization or team that functions well below its potential.
Toxic teams especially where employment is not easily found and walking out not an option, perpetuate themselves as people have no other role models than those who control and depress. Consequently when members of a toxic team move into positions of authority themselves, at best they have no other models to emulate, and at worst, there new position of power triggers a wish for revenge. We can talk about performance improvement, better results or innovation until we are blue in the face, but we are unlikely to see any of this in teams (or organizations) that are awash in toxins.
So we should be very concerned about toxic teams and help people who are the source of the toxicity become aware of the impact they have on others and then help them with tools and coaching to turn things around.
Since we cannot change others, unless they ask our help in changing (but they’d still be doing the change, not us), we can contribute to reducing toxicity in the environment by asking ourselves some questions first. We can later use those same questions to assist a toxic leader who is ready to detox:
The questions are adapted from Goldsmith’s book “What got you here won’t get you there.”
1. Do you need to win, to be right, and to be the expert, all the time?
2. Do you always have to add your opinion, your advice to someone who has an idea? Is the proposal or presentation not good enough or complete without your ideas? Do you always have to add something, even if someone else already said the same? Can you ask yourself, before opening your mouth “what is lost if I don’t add my two cents?”
3. How often are you passing a judgment, on a person, someone’s idea? How often are you using judgmental adjectives in your head when listening to someone speak??
4. How often are you using words that dismiss the other’s ideas or proposals? Do you have a tendency to make destructive comments? Or share your negative or destructive thoughts out loud, even when not asked?
5. How often do you start your sentence with “No,” “Yes, but,” or “However?”
6. How important is it to you to tell the world how smart you are, by speaking out at a meeting, giving your opinion? And how often do you make your opinions sound like there are facts?
7. How often do you speak up or out when you are angry, even if you pretend you are not?
8. How often are you withholding information that could help others do their job better?
9. How often are you failing to give proper recognition or claiming credit for something you don’t deserve?
10. How often to you find yourself making excuses when something in your performance is being questioned (by anyone who cares) – sure way to stop getting feedback about things you could improve, or passing the buck or blame to others?
11. How often to you find yourself clinging to your past successes, things you accomplished when you were in a very different (often technical) position?
12. Do you find yourself playing favorites with some people, who may be exactly the ones that suck up to you, flatter you and make you feel great? What about the ones that make you feel uncomfortable? How do you treat them?
13. How often should you have said “”I’m sorry” but didn’t, or refuse to express regrets? And how often did you miss an opportunity to say “thank you,” express gratitude or recognize someone for a job well done? Especially when this person is critical of you??
14. How often do you find your mind wandering when (supposedly) listening to someone? Are you listening better to some people and less so too others? Do the ones who are your favorites get a better ear than the ones who critique you?
15. How often do you punish the messenger of bad news?
16. How often do you say, in the face of criticism, “that’s just the way I am”?
[i] Goldsmith, M. (2014). What got you here won't get you there, Hyperion eBook. Page 41.