Dal mio articolo in "The Work Style Magazine" issue 2.
In the middle of a global recession and international financial crisis, Dr. Alan Goldman’s new book, Transforming Toxic Leaders, should be of serious interest. A number of practical cases lead the reader to apply suggestions to avoid to become a Toxic Leader.
INTERESTING THING: in the endorsements on the back cover, the reader will find the testimonials of premier global “toxic leadership” experts including the renowned Manfred Kets de Vries of INSEAD Global Leadership Centre in Paris; and Barbara Kellerman of the Harvard University’s - Harvard Kennedy School, USA.
The author alerts us that bad leadership ignored or undetected is extremely costly and damaging to businesses, partners, clients and customers. He shows how bad behavior and destructive decision making turns “toxic” when it spreads throughout organisations and supply chains and “infects” the entire company. The costly results of toxic leadership include: massive turnover; falling productivity and morale; plunging motivation; grievances and lawsuits; acts of sabotage; chronic absenteeism and lateness; stress and anxiety induced illnesses; injuries on the job and a hostile, abusive, suspicious and undermining workplace.
Goldman tells seldom heard stories of seemingly successful leaders who turn toxic. and illustrates how the abrupt and mean spirited terminations of employees by the Bentley Pacific CEO turned him into a toxic leader. Companywide fear, trauma and grievances follow. What is the alternative? In contrast to the toxic Bentley Pacific “downsizing from hell” the author offers the “positive downsizing” of a rival CEO at North Country Solutions, another engineering company down the road. Rather than traumatizing employees, CEO Lane Blake transforms a potentially toxic downsizing into a supportive and culture building affair!
Another way that a leader turns “toxic” is when he brings his “pre-existing” troubled mental and emotional state into the workplace and it negatively impacts strategy, decisions and people skills. Bullying, panic attacks, extreme impatience, physical and emotional abuse, obsessive and compulsive behavior, disorganization and confusion, and an inability to productively collaborate in executive teams are but a few of the troubling behaviors observed in leaders who turn toxic due to pre-existing conditions.
Throughout Transforming Toxic Leaders, the consultant is summoned fairly late in the game. Human resources, upper echelon leaders, employees and followers do not respond to bad leader behavior until they are forced to! The massive exit of engineers from SkyWaves in the form of transfer requests and the plunging productivity finally alerted the new HR director to the fact that something was terribly wrong. Once the consultant was retained he quickly learned that physical and emotional abuse among the engineers had been swept aside and not dealt with for approximately six years! What were the results? Leadership was “toxic” by virtue of ignoring, denying and trivializing abusive behavior. Moreover, toxic leadership had unwittingly created and sustained a dysfunctional culture that allowed bullying to metastasize throughout the company. In other cases presented in the book Goldman describes destructive leaders who are adored and applauded by a majority of their followers. Such “yes men” followers are mostly concerned with “what’s in it for me” and not jeopardizing their performance evaluations. Followers who do not report bad leader behavior are also concerned that any negative reports on their part might serve to threaten their prospects for advancement in the company.
Ironically, Transforming Toxic Leaders also illustrates how toxic leadership is not all negative and can in fact be a positive force within an organisation’s life. In the case of Dr. Ivan Lorimer, head cardiac surgeon for Eisenhower Heart Institute, he exhibited narcissistic traits, symptoms of an intermittent explosive disorder and obsessive compulsive tendencies that made him difficult for his surgical team to deal with. But it also drove him to command excellence from his staff and for his patients. As an elite mitral valve surgeon and leader of his institute’s cardiology division, Dr. Lorimer was an extraordinary perfectionist in part driven by his narcissistic and obsessive compulsive traits.
TWSM “Are there more toxic leaders than in the past?”
AG “Overall there appear to be more toxic leaders than in the past in part due to the fact that our movement into flatter, decentralized and empowerment oriented organisations has vastly increased the number of “leaders.” Moreover, the movement toward globalization, cross cultural workforces, and e-communications has all dramatically contributed toward not only new leadership prospects but also to the propensity for toxic leader and employee behavior. While there is no denying that employees are vulnerable to bad leaders, it is also true that no leader is fully immune from the potential wrath of an employee who wants to report bad behavior or belittle his leader online – since this may not be an in person, face-to-face option. In addition, crossing borders opens the doors for toxic leader behavior due to ethnocentrism, rigidity, and a failure to blend somewhat different approaches to management, teams and appraisal”
Finally, an unique feature of Goldman’s approach is a clear and succinct blueprint for transforming toxic leaders. The author provides one hundred and twenty-five toxic leader behaviors and policies and offers a detoxification strategy for every single item cited. In total, HR directors, managers and CEOs are provided with a hands on, practical, resourceful and thoroughly innovative cataloguing of 125 detoxification strategies based on the cases in the book. Each detoxification strategy is both theoretically sound and pragmatically oriented and provides prototypes for practicing leaders to apply the principles in their own organisations.
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