1: What Are ‘Toxic Humans’?

For us to be able to strategise on how to tackle toxic humans effectively, we first have to define what we mean by the term ‘Toxic Human’. In her 1996 book Toxic Leaders: When Organizations Go Bad, the author and academic Marcia Lynn Whicker described three leadership styles: these were trustworthy, transitional and toxic. She goes on to define toxic leaders as follows:

I think this offers a useful way to think about toxic leaders – especially the reference to the abuse of the leader-follower relationship. We will return to this later. The idea that toxic leaders leave things worse than they were before is something to which I think we can all relate: we are well aware, for instance, that human history has been scarred by the actions of numerous tyrannical rulers, dictators and politicians – from every corner of the globe. For many of us these people are something more than simply toxic leaders or toxic humans – they are monsters. They have murdered and plundered their way into our collective conscience, demonstrating behaviour that most of us would accept goes far beyond what we might characterise simply as ‘toxicity’. The mere mention of Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and Idi Amin Dada, immediately, fills us with revulsion as we connect these individuals with atrocious and unforgiveable crimes against humanity. Would we have the same reaction at the mention of infamous captains of industry whose actions are reprehensible but who are clearly in a different class of awfulness to the three individuals I have just mentioned? I don't think so. And while there are definitely politicians and business leaders in our world today who arouse strong negative feelings for many people – would we always label them toxic humans? We might actually be tempted to call them sociopaths and narcissists, may be even psychopaths – but as with any kind of attempt to categorise people, we need to take great care with respect to our terminology and characterisations of people. So it is with the term ‘Toxic Humans’. In this book, we will use the term to denote people who display the kind of leadership that is poisonous for organisations and whose behaviour undermines, threatens or damages people. In her book The Allure of Toxic Leaders – Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians – and How We Can Survive Them (2006), Jean Lipman-Blumen talked about toxic leaders consistently exhibiting toxic traits while routinely engaging in dysfunctional behaviour – and in an article in the Ivey Business Journal from 2005, she wrote: