Are You Becoming a Toxic Leader?

How do you avoid becoming a toxic leader through vision and strategy?

Toxic leadership often masquerades as decisiveness or ambition, but underneath it, you’ll often find no true direction. A leader without vision becomes aimless. Strategy turns into busywork. Everything revolves around growth for its own sake, internal politics, or protecting status. Goals are vague or self-serving. Leaders create plans that justify their roles, not those that move the organization forward. The future is neglected because today’s metrics look “good enough.”

How do you avoid becoming a toxic leader through accountability?

Toxic leadership isn’t always loud or obvious. Sometimes, it creeps in quietly when accountability is allowed to slip away.

Are you leading your employees around with blindfolds on?

One of the common results of toxic leadership is the lack of real performance and process management. Without it, an organization drifts.

There are:

• No clear metrics that tell people what success looks like.
• No consistent processes to guide how work gets done. 

Is poor communication killing your company?

Poor communication in business is so common in organizations that many brush it off as just another corporate flaw.

But if left unchecked, it becomes a gateway to toxicity.

Could how you're structuring your team point to potential toxic behaviors?

This week's post focuses on one of the most misunderstood drivers of dysfunction: structure and silos.

Let me be perfectly clear, silos aren’t inherently bad. In fact, they’re necessary. We need specialized teams. We need structure to operate efficiently.

But when a leader begins to create layers of bureaucracy to insulate themselves, avoid transparency, or maintain control, silos stop being productive. They start becoming toxic.

Does neglecting employee development lead to toxic leadership?

Another one of the overlooked signals of toxic leadership is the lack of meaningful employee development.

On the surface, training might exist -- an LMS portal, a few workshops, and maybe even a budget for conferences -- but without a real strategy, it’s just noise.

Are you paying attention to how the work actually gets done?

Toxic leadership shows up when a leader becomes disengaged from how value is created and delivered. They ignore the basics. They don’t look at things like defect rates, on-time delivery, rework, customer satisfaction, first-pass yield, etc.

Are you solving real problems, or just staying busy to feel valuable?

My eighth post in my 10-week series on toxic leadership focuses on the leader who's always stuck in the knife fight.

It's a behavior that often looks like dedication, but leads to a dysfunction: The obsession with tactical thinking.

Some leaders operate in constant fight mode.

Are you growing leadership, or spreading toxicity?

Welcome to my final post in my 10-week series on toxic leadership.

Toxic leadership is a contagious virus!

Bad leaders create more bad leaders.