Toxic workplaces 101
It’s funny – I study empathy, but I keep getting asked about toxic workplaces and toxic leaders. I’ve never put myself out there as an expert on toxic leaders, other than the experiences I’ve had that put me on the empathy path, but people subconsciously place empathy as the antidote to a toxic workplace. I think this is absolutely right, but I also think there’s more to it.
And obviously people are concerned about this or they wouldn’t keep asking.
Human behavior is complex – VERY complex – so to try and boil ‘toxic leadership’ down to a few traits just doesn’t work. Sometimes we need to think about what keeps these leaders going, and that means the people who follow them. That means…us.
Let me be clear – there are definitely leaders who are just bad people, but they’re in the minority. Leadership draws certified psychopaths and narcissists that have a hunger for power. But it also attracts people who are just incompetent, and don’t even realize it. The second one is scarier because those people generally have good intentions. You can give them the benefit of the doubt – right up to the point where the wheels come off the bus.
These leaders wouldn’t be in power without the people they lead, however. I know this can be difficult to swallow, but hear me out. We stay in our jobs and prop these people up, often because we feel we don’t have a choice. Sometimes we do things we know we shouldn’t just to keep the status quo. People who could ‘blow the whistle’ don’t because they fear being ostracized or thrown out of their groups. I stuck to a toxic job for 6 years, so I’m part of the problem too. It’s ugly, and I’m not saying it’s easy, but to some degree, we allow it to happen.
What would happen if, en masse, we said we weren’t willing to tolerate toxic behavior? It’s a wild idea, I know, but seriously. Think about a professional orchestra. There’s the conductor, and there’s as many as 200 musicians depending on what they’re playing. I’ve been in an orchestra where the musicians have played without a conductor – something happened, like the conductor had a heart attack, or we had a guest conductor that couldn’t lead. But even without a conductor, we pulled it off. However, have you ever seen a conductor waving his stick around without an orchestra? I’m not talking about practicing or working on their craft, I’m talking about leading…nobody? It’s pretty pathetic. To some degree people who are in power are there because we allow them to be. I know there’s a million good reasons why we do this, but in the end, we, as the followers, aren’t without responsibility. The exciting part is that if we’ve helped create the problem, we can help fix it. Maybe not tomorrow, but maybe someday.
