"People don't leave organizations, they leave bad bosses"

There is a commonly used statement in the management literature that has turned into a cliché - people don't leave organizations, they leave bad bosses."  I have found at least one article that suggests that while people do, in fact, leave bad bosses, it's not the number one reason that they leave organizations.  Jason McPherson at Culture Amp apparently gathered data from 175 different teams and found that in "good" companies, managers make a difference in whether an employee chooses to stay or leave.  However, in "bad" companies, good or bad managers make little to no difference to an employee's decision to leave.

Interestingly, a similar study conducted at Facebook (when it was still called Facebook) and found that people don't quit a boss - they quit a job.  But here's the catch.  The managers are the ones who are most responsible for determining what the job is like (at least at Facebook).  So it turns out that maybe people really do leave bad managers after all.  Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries explains it perfectly in the Harvard Business Review article "Coaching the Toxic Leader" when he says that leaders and managers "have the power to create an environment that allows people to grow and give their best - or a toxic workplace where everyone is unhappy."

Marcia Lynn Whicker first defined and popularized the term "toxic leaders" in her book Toxic Leaders: When Organizations Go Bad.  Whicker defined a toxic leader as an individual in a position of authority and responsibility who abuses the leader-follower relationship by leaving the team, group, or organization in a worse condition than it was when he or she first interacted with them.  Barbara Kellerman, writing in Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters described seven different types of toxic leaders:

1. Incompetent Leaders - Leaders who do not inspire or create positive change

2. Rigid Leaders - Leaders who refuse to change

3. Intemperate Leaders - Leaders who lack self-control

4. Callous Leaders - Leaders who do not care and ignore the needs of their teams

5. Corrupt Leaders - Leaders who lie, cheat, and place their interests above everyone else's

6. Insular Leaders - Leaders who disregard the health and welfare of those outside their immediate team

7. Evil Leaders - Leaders who commit atrocities and cause psychological or physical harm

In my last post ("We were soldiers once..."), I mentioned a book Hal Moore on Leadership: Winning When Outgunned and Outmanned co-written by Lt General Moore and Mike Guardia.  Lt General Hal Moore expanded provides what I thought is a great list of the different types of toxic leaders:  

1. Bully leaders - Leaders who inflict emotional pain, deliver threats and ultimatums, hurl insults, and invalidate the opinions of others

2. Narcissistic Leaders - Leaders who are arrogant and self-congratulatory to the point where the force themselves and their personality on the rest of the team and/or organization.  These leaders believe (wrongly) that they are the standard that every other leader in the organization should strive to emulate.

3. Divisive Leaders - Likely a subcategory of Narcissistic leaders, as they share many of the same qualities, these leaders channel their wrath or arrogance towards a specific person or group who they perceive as particularly weak or unfit to be a leader (based on their own definition and standards of leadership - see above description).  The Divisive leader often subjects these individuals to public humiliation, resentment, and ridicule until they leave the organization.

4. Insular Leaders - These leaders form cliques and go to great lengths to make sure that their "followers" (those loyal to the leader) are shielded and enjoy special treatment/privileges.  Conversely, those individuals who are outside this group are targeted for ridicule and/or derision.

5. Hypocritical Leaders - These leaders live by a certain code ("Do as I say, not as I do") and rarely practice what they preach.  

6. Enforcement Leaders - These leaders continuously seek the approval of their superiors without regard to their own direct reports' welfare.  There is a difference here between taking a so-called "enterprise-wide view" (in other words, at times, the best decision for the entire organization may not be the best decision for the department and/or division) and blindly following the direction of the superior (which has been called "brown nosing"!).

7. Callous Leaders - These leaders are similar to Enforcement Leaders with one exception.  Here, the blatant disregard for the welfare of their direct reports stems, not from a desire to please their own bosses, but due to the lack of empathy.

8. Seniority Preference Leaders - These leaders are very similar to the Insular leaders, but the preference for special treatment and/or privileges is based on the length of tenure in the organization rather than their own "followers".

9. Credit-hog Leaders - These leaders take all the credit for success, even when that credit should be someone else's (often one of their direct reports).

10. Blame-shifting Leaders - These leaders shift all the blame for failure on to their direct reports.

Lt General Moore's list is longer than Barbara Kellerman's for sure, but both lists have a lot in common.  And it appears that Lt General Moore is more of a splitter than a lumper.  As I look back on my career, I've encountered (either directly or indirectly) examples of almost every one of these types of toxic leaders.  

So, how do we, as leaders, deal effectively with toxic leaders who may be colleagues and/or direct reports?  I go back to an article in the Harvard Business Review, "Stop Making Excuses for Toxic Bosses".  The first step is to recognize toxic behavior when it occurs (preferably, before it occurs).  Once we witness the toxic behavior, we should neither excuse it or tolerate it.  As the saying goes, "What you permit, you promote."  They only way to stop the toxic behavior is to simply not tolerate it.  As a matter of fact, one study found that toxic behaviors that are excused or otherwise dismissed generally get worse and more frequent. Given the implications of toxic leaders on employee turnover and morale, organizations should strictly adhere and follow a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to toxic leadership.