8: Now What Can Organisations Do to Address and Manage the Influence of Toxic Leaders and Toxic Humans?

In this chapter, we will start to look at what organisations can do to tackle the malign influence of toxic humans and toxic leadership. To do this, we will reflect on the negative consequences of Systemic Toxic Collusion and look at how toxicity can impact people during the various stages of their career in an organisation.

In their fascinating paper ‘The toxic triangle: Destructive leadership, susceptible followers, and conducive environments’, Art Padilla, Robert Hogan and Robert B Kaiser showed how three principle areas (or ‘domains’) come together, with their associated elements, to cause destruction (and toxicity):

We have seen in Chapter 2 how narcissistic leaders behave, while in Chapter 5, our stories of toxicity in organisational systems and of toxic leaders in Boards and senior roles – underscore the elements we see represented in Fig. 1 below – especially a lack of checks and balances and the existence of ineffective institutions. It is also worth noting the mention of ‘charisma’, which has been the target of a lot of bad press in the management and leadership literature. I think that charisma is a two-sided coin – positive on the one side but not-so-good on the other. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review about The Dark Side of Charisma. Here's a particularly fascinating extract: