For some years now, psychosocial researchers have been talking about the characteristics of a certain type of person, whose attitude is towards the negative, their daily actions are to look for, see and highlight the negative details, no matter how small, in the activities in which they perform, and they also spend long hours complaining about everything that happens within the organizational environment . These people have been called toxic people.
According to the Pan-American Institute of Senior Business Management, also known by its acronym IPADAE , it has been determined that between 5 and 10% of employees have this behavior, if not, you will have to work on your work commitment . Now, what would happen if in your company one of these people had a leadership position? What would be the effect on the organizational environment of a company if a toxic leader was elected or chosen to be led?
In search of a leader to improve the organizational environment:
In times of uncertainty and difficulties, an organization or society finds itself with exhausted leadership that is unable to lead it through the tortuous path of crisis; the uncertainty of the times to come and the anguish of the absence of visionary leaders leads them to act in desperation in the search for new leadership.
Shareholders or voters consider it necessary to replace those who lebanon phone number in charge of tasks with strategic management responsibilities and activities .
However, years of bureaucracy that has created a comfortable status quo, coupled with training programs and management styles that have perpetuated administrative skills, not leadership skills (Conger J. 1999) lead shareholders or voters to the paradox of looking for a leader to direct them in managing the crisis while keeping everything the same. This lack of vision in understanding that markets are changing or that the world is giving birth to a new era makes them decide on the least bad leader they have at their disposal, thus giving rise to a toxic leader who will only harm the organizational environment.
What toxic leaders are like:
When they are chosen to take over the management of any company, be it an online company, a factory or a public company, a mayor's office or a governor's office, depending on the country where you are located, these toxic leaders bring out their true personality; let's look at some of them:
They replace the organization's objectives with personal objectives: Projecting their own personal needs and beliefs onto their subordinates.
They are omnipotent and infinitely wise: after years of being part of the organizational bureaucracy, these people can accumulate theoretical and some practical knowledge on how to run the company, but they have never put it into practice or executed in the production of the same. When they occupy a leadership position, they then display great oratorical skills with a verbiage of theoretical concepts with no or almost no application to reality and, even more serious, they do not accept recommendations and other suggestions that do not agree with their own.
They are vengeful and resentful: one of the first actions of these toxic leaders is to use their newly acquired power to take revenge on all those people who, in their opinion, have harmed them throughout their years of work.
They complain about everything: when shareholders or voters realize that these leaders are ineffective, that their decisions are wrong and that they are going in the opposite direction to the desired way out of the crisis, they justify themselves with complaints about the work of others, evading their activities and commitments under the argument that “others” are responsible for their low productivity. Some go so far as to assign the responsibility to random events and extrasensory activity.
Authoritarians and despots: as their ineffectiveness becomes evident, they seek to maintain control at all costs by displacing all those who have an opinion or disagree with their great ideas. “Once disturbing thoughts such as absolute indignation become automatic, they are self-confirmed” (Goleman, D. 1995). This results in a court of subordinates who unquestioningly obey the orders given to them and are more concerned with entertaining and pleasing the toxic leader than with carrying out their work; which leads to an exhaustion of the company's resources and therefore the failure of the organization.
I invite you to read: The world needs social tolerance
What to do to prevent your company from falling into the hands of this type of leader:
May the unfortunate times that your company, country or region is going through not force this type of leadership on you. You must do everything necessary to prevent people of this style from advancing to leadership or strategic management positions. What can you do? What measures can you implement to detect them?
If your company has a large number of employees, which makes it difficult to conduct personal job interviews , you can take the option of conducting an online survey in which you apply an anxiety test such as the one developed by Ralph Haber or any other instrument that allows you to measure the emotional skills of potential candidates to be leaders; it also serves to evaluate their behavioral history, evaluate their credibility as a leader and as a person, and better yet, allow yourself to explore the incorporation of people who are Leader Coaches. Let this noble tool land in your company to help it in the transformation that current times demand and you will get a great organizational environment.