Toxic leaders inflict great damage on our organizations, communities, and nations. They draw us in with bold promises and then turn around and wreak havoc. It’s important to understand the phenomenon of toxic leaders, especially why people fall for them.
Before diving in, let’s define terms. When something is toxic, that means it’s poisonous and can cause great harm. When it comes to leaders, it involves inflicting lasting damage and maliciously abusing power.
A prominent scholar of toxic leadership, Dr. Jean Lipman-Blumen, founder of the Connective Leadership Institute and Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, defines toxic leaders as follows:
“those individuals who, by virtue of their destructive behaviors and their dysfunctional personal qualities or characteristics, inflict serious and enduring harm on the individuals, groups, organizations, communities, and even the nations that they lead.”
In her important book, The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians–and How We Can Survive Them (Oxford University Press, 2004), Professor Lipman-Blumen addresses the critical question of why people so often follow leaders who ultimately cause harm. Toxic leaders may display confidence, charisma, and power, but their leadership is ultimately manipulative, self-serving, and detrimental to the well-being of their followers.
The effects of toxic leadership can be grave. On a personal level, toxic leaders can harm the well-being of people and certain groups. In the workplace, they can generate frustration, dysfunction, attrition, and scandal. At the national level, they can polarize people, undermine institutions, and degrade or obliterate public trust.
The Telltale Behaviors of Toxic Leaders
How to tell if someone is a toxic leader—or heading in that direction? Here are 12 telltale behaviors of toxic leaders, according to Professor Lipman-Blumen:*
- Inciting and leveraging followers’ fears for their own advantage
- Setting people and groups against each other
- Persuading their followers to shun, hate, or harm certain people and groups
- Intentionally creating unrealistic “grand illusions” in the minds of their followers that impair followers’ ability to act independently while enhancing the leader’s power (e.g., convincing followers that they alone can fix things as an “omnipotent savior”)
- Stifling criticism of their actions
- Misleading followers via manipulation, lies, and deceitful diagnoses of problems, including finding scapegoats for problems and crafting dark ideologies and worldviews
- Ignoring or even engaging in corruption and cronyism
- Undermining the structures and systems in which they operate (e.g., via exploiting legal loopholes or attacking judges or other authorities) so they can engage in selfish and even lawless acts
- Sabotaging the process for selecting new leaders
- Making it difficult or impossible to remove or overthrow them
- Violating people’s rights
- Making things worse for their followers (and often others)
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The Telltale Qualities of Toxic Leaders
The Allure of Toxic Leaders paints a clear but disturbing picture of destructive leaders who are driven by “endless anxieties, overweening competitiveness, insatiable egos… and calls to false heroics.”
According to Professor Lipman-Blumen, toxic leaders tend to have the following dysfunctional personal qualities:
- Lack of integrity, with an inability to determine right from wrong, making them untrustworthy, hypocritical, and/or corrupt
- Evasiveness, deception, and lying
- Insatiable ambition
- Enormous egos that blind them to their own shortcomings
- Arrogance that prevents them from admitting mistakes
- Not listening to others or preferring input only from loyalists or sycophants
- Exorbitant greed, leading them to prioritize their own financial interests and neglect the needs of the larger community (i.e., the opposite of “servant leaders”)
- “Reckless disregard” for the impacts of their actions on others
- Harming the weakest people in the group or society
- Presenting harmful actions as noble, totally correct, and unassailable
- Blaming others for their decisions and actions
- Cowardice, leading them to avoid difficult decisions
- Failure to understand the dynamics and drivers of relevant issues and to act capably to address them
- Using others to do their dirty work and throwing people under the bus
The Psychological Factors Making People Susceptible to Toxic Leaders
An important finding from the research is that even good people tolerate or even support toxic leaders. What’s more, they often develop an emotional identification with those toxic leaders. With these dynamics in play, followers can become unquestioning, fiercely loyal, and dismissive of other options.
Why? During times of uncertainty or disruption, many people naturally gravitate toward leaders who project authority and decisiveness. Followers can be seduced by the leader’s grand vision, typically including bold promises of safety and stability.
There are often deeper psychological dynamics involved: people may seek out leaders to help them manage anxieties or to feel part of something bigger.
“…strong yearnings for toxic leaders percolate up from our unconscious, where psychological needs send us in search of authority figures who can offer us comfort and promise to satisfy some of our deepest longings.” -Dr. Jean Lipman-Blumen
In her 2004 book, Professor Lipman-Blumen documented several psychological factors that make people susceptible to toxic leaders:
- Need for reassuring authority figures (a holdover from our childhood need for reassuring parents)
- Need for security and certainty, which can drive us to surrender our agency to them
- Fear of isolation
- Need to be a member in a group
- Desire to feel special or chosen
- Sense of powerlessness to challenge leaders when they cross lines or to influence the dysfunctional systems that led to their ascent
“The emperor has no clothes.”
She notes that these leaders “first charm but then manipulate, mistreat, undermine, and ultimately leave their followers worse off than they found them. Yet many of these followers hang on.”
“We may grouse about toxic leaders, but frequently we tolerate them—and for surprisingly long periods of time.”
-Jean Lipman-Blumen, The Allure of Toxic Leaders
Personal Values Exercise
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
Rationalizations that Allow Toxic Leaders to Continue
Professor Lipman-Blumen notes that there are several rationalizations people use to justify their support of toxic leaders even in the face of evidence of their flaws and damage. Examples of these rationalizations include:
- I can’t risk things now due to my financial constraints
- I just need to wait this out
- Things could be worse
- I don’t know what the alternative would be
- I can’t make a difference on my own
- Things are so complex
- I have too much on my plate to do anything
- I don’t have the resources or strength to make a difference
- If I challenge the leader, I’ll get hurt
- It’s not my responsibility
We know from the groundbreaking research of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Jonathan Haidt, and others that, while we think we make rational decisions, we often leap to conclusions with automatic, emotional thinking (“fast thinking”), littered with unconscious cognitive biases, and then justify those thoughts with self-serving cognitive rationalizations that help reduce our cognitive dissonance (“slow thinking”).
“Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president.”
-Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
How to Know if a Leader’s Vision is Toxic
According to Professor Lipman-Blumen, a leader’s vision is toxic if it:
- is good for you but harmful to other innocent people
- diminishes people outside your group
- requires you to ostracize or remove certain people or groups, or see others as enemies
- positions the leader as the group’s savior
- turns badness into goodness or virtue into weakness
- would put you at risk if the tactics used were turned against you
- won’t stand the test of time and hold up against our cherished principles and shared values
Leadership Derailers Assessment
Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. It will help you develop self-awareness and identify ways to improve your leadership.
Key Points about the Allure of Toxic Leaders
How to make sense of all this important research from the mid-2000s and how it’s relevant to us today?
To begin with, toxic leaders trade in false promises.
Second, we often complain about toxic leaders, but we rarely remove them.
Next, many of the dynamics leading followers to align and stick with toxic leaders operate subconsciously. They have to do with our social needs and tribalism, as well as a conducive environment for toxic leaders to thrive, including uncertainty, instability, chaos, crisis, or real, perceived, or even manufactured threats.
Finally, cultural and organizational environments can enable toxic leadership. Hierarchical structures that lack transparency or accountability allow toxic leaders to rise to power and stay there.
Conclusion
Ultimately, this work isn’t a lament, and it’s not about resignation or submission. It’s a call to action.
The very point is to confront uncomfortable truths about the dynamics of power, rethink the responsibilities of followership, and become better followers ourselves.
By understanding the allure of toxic leaders, we can begin to build defenses against them. This requires critical thinking (including short-circuiting our cognitive biases), choosing better leaders, moral courage (including speaking truth to power), and cultures that value shared leadership and accountability.
But even those aren’t enough. We also need guard rails like checks and balances, adherence to the rule of law, term limits, and more. According to researchers Art Padilla, Robert Hogan, and Robert B. Kaiser in their 2007 Leadership Quarterly article, “The Toxic Triangle,” “Perhaps the most important environmental factor for preventing destructive leadership is the presence of checks and balances.”
Dr. Lipman-Blumen calls for not just escaping but resolutely and repeatedly rejecting the allure of toxic leadership. It doesn’t stop there. Ultimately, what we need to demand and facilitate is “constructive, other-oriented leadership.” A model like servant leadership, which “focuses primarily on the growth and wellbeing of people and the communities to which they belong.” Or like triple crown leadership, which focuses on building organizations that are excellent (achieving exceptional results and positive impacts across stakeholders), ethical (doing the right thing, even when it’s costly or hard), and enduring (standing the test of time while operating sustainably—sustaining great results with integrity over time).
–Gregg Vanourek
Reflection & Action Questions
- Are you seeing toxic leadership around you?
- If so, what will you do about it?
Tools for You
- Leadership Derailers Assessment to help you identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness
- Personal Values Exercise to help you determine and clarify what’s most important to you
- Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s inhibiting your happiness and quality of life
Leadership Derailers Assessment
Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. It will help you develop self-awareness and identify ways to improve your leadership.
Related Articles & Books
- “Toxic Leaders, Susceptible Followers”
- “The Problem of Bad Leaders—And Why We Keep Following Them”
- “Why Are We Talking about Ethics?”
- “The Importance of Integrity in Leadership”
- “The Root Causes of Ethical Failings (and Our Political Dysfunction)”
- “The Trump Leadership Playbook–And Why It Matters”
- “The Essential Qualities of Servant Leadership”
- “Are You Working for an Unethical Organization?”
- “What to Do If You Work for an Unethical Organization”
- “What to Do If You Work for a Toxic Boss”
- Jean Lipman-Blumen, The Allure of Toxic Leaders (Oxford University Press, 2005).
- Barbara Kellerman, Bad Leadership (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
- Jean Lipman-Blumen, “Toxic Leadership: When Grand Illusions Masquerade as Noble Visions,” Leader to Leader, Spring 2005.
- Art Padilla, Robert Hogan, Robert B. Kaiser. “The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments,” The Leadership Quarterly 18 (2007) 176–194.
Postscript: Quotations on the Allure of Toxic Leaders
- “Unhappy the land that has no heroes. No, unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.” -Bertolt Brecht, German playwright and poet
- “The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies.” -Donald Trump, Trump: The Art of the Deal
- “…a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control.” -Lord Acton
- “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” -Benjamin Franklin
- “Fear is the most powerful human emotion…. Toxic leaders will blame broad groups of people such as migrants or religious groups for the challenges faced by society and seek to exploit the momentum that follows it. It is the perception of a threat that creates the environment for the toxic leader to thrive. The threat does not have to be real.” -Roderic Yapp, “The Toxic Triangle—The Environment and Followers of Toxic Leaders”
- “There’s an old German proverb to the effect that ‘fear makes the wolf bigger than he is,’ and that is true.” -Donald Trump, Think Like a Champion
- “People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds…. If you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense.” -Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
- “We can believe almost anything that supports our team.” -Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
- “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” -Donald Trump, January 2016
- “Integrity is the most important characteristic of a leader, and one that he or she must be prepared to demonstrate again and again.” -Warren Bennis, leadership author
- “Followers have to keep leaders and peers ethically and legally in check. Instead of viewing followers as the ‘good soldiers’ who carry out commands dutifully, we need to view followers as the primary defenders against toxic leaders or dysfunctional organizations.” -Robert E. Kelley, “Rethinking Followership” in Riggio, Chaleff, and Lipman-Blumen, The Art of Followership
- “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period … was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle must be fought and re-fought.” -John W. Gardner
- “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” -Abraham Lincoln
- “Unite to win. Divide to conquer.” -Donald Trump, Midas Touch
- “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” -Lord Acton
- “There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.” -Edmund Burke
- “If I had to reduce the responsibilities of a good follower to a single rule, it would be to speak truth to power.” -Warren Bennis, leadership scholar
- “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” -C.S. Lewis
* Summarized and paraphrased by Gregg Vanourek.
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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards written with his father, Bob Vanourek) and LIFE Entrepreneurs (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion). Check out his Leadership Derailers Assessment or join his rapidly growing community. If you found value in this, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!
