#84 How to Deal with Poisonous Leaders

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading and managing and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest on this episode is Shawn Lemson, who specializes in finding blind spots in organizations that affect morale and performance and coaching leaders and teams to become high-performing. He supports clients to build a culture that attracts and retains talented people And that is innovative and agile enough to respond to shifting landscapes quickly. Sean is also the author of the new book, One Drop of Poison: How One Bad Leader Can Slowly Kill Your Company. So Sean, as we were talking about before, first, welcome.

Thank you. It's nice to be here. Thank you.

Yeah. I believe almost everybody has encountered at least one really terrible poisonous leader at some point in their work life. And we just don't know what to do about it. I think our listeners will find this work really valuable for them personally and for their organizations.

That's the feedback I'm hearing from people who are reading it, that definitely touched a nerve for people. So, I'm glad to hear that, and I'm hoping we can make the problem better.

Okay, great. So, let's explore. So, you've noted, you know, in the title of your book, even one poisonous leader can kill a company. So, what are the signs of this kind of leader? What should we look out for?

Well, first, before we, you know, make people upset who are leaders, let me just say that you— that most toxic leaders that I know or know of or have experienced aren't bad people. You know, these aren't people who wake up every day thinking, how can I destroy my team today? You know, they're not, they're not planning on this. They, they actually think they're doing the right thing. They're, they're probably, you know, addressing incentives the company has given them. We can talk about that later, but I, I feel like that's a big thing. Leaders are just doing what they the best they can with what they know. So that, that's a problem also, because it means that you could be a toxic leader and not think of yourself as the kind of person who is a toxic leader, right?

Right.

And it's a bit of a blind spot. So I would say that the best signs that you are a toxic leader, if you're looking at it from your own perspective, is that your engagement scores are really low. I'm assuming and hoping that you're getting your engagement, that your company is regularly measuring engagement. And by regularly, I mean, quarterly, not annually. That's annually is not frequent enough. And that you— those are anonymous, but they're coded in a way that, that we can tell who the leaders are of the organizations that are getting low. That way you can sort of pinpoint whether, hey, this engagement score is low for my group, but as a company we're not, right? So as a way to help that. And so low engagement scores would be one, and another would be turnover being high, right? Any any high turnover, if you're having a hard time holding on to people, yeah, despite what they're telling you as they're way out the door, that, oh, I just found a better opportunity, right? They're probably leaving you as a leader. We don't tend to leave leaders that we really like.

Yes, yes, yes.

So that's how you tell if you're, if you're the leader. If you're the company and you want to spot bad leaders in your company, then those engagement scores are going to be helpful for that, and the turnover will be helpful for that. You're probably more likely to spot them in those ways as a company. So HR or doing those kinds of studies will be able to take action. Yeah.

Well, I really like both of those, Sean, because they're both objective, data-based things. You know, it's not just like people are saying you're a bad guy. It's what— just look at the data, you know?

Yeah. I like to say to leaders, you know, I usually trick them. I'll say, what are the traits that all leaders have? And they'll always give me, you know, courage and vision and all these other things, right? But it's actually, the real answer is followers. All leaders have followers. If you don't have followers, you're not a leader. You can have all kinds of direct reports and none of them will see you as a leader, right? But you could also have no direct reports and everybody sees you as a leader. So, you know, turn around and look, do I have people behind me who are following me or not?

Yeah. I love that. And you probably don't know this, but one of my books is called Leading So People Will Follow.

Yes.

Love it.

Yes.

It's like how— what we're wired, I think, to, to see certain characteristics as being followable. It's like, I want to sign up for this person, you know?

That's right.

And see it. I'm not signing up.

Yeah. The interesting thing is the science behind that, the science behind what makes people want to follow others. And hence what motivates them to perform well has been around since the '50s, '60s. We've known what to do, right? But we just keep resisting it, and we're resisting it because of the kind of twisted incentives that we have in, in the market now.

Well, let, let's talk about that. I think that leads right into the next question, which is, how, how do these people keep their jobs? You know, what, what are companies doing wrong in this area?

You're right, that does lead very nicely into this because What's happening is companies are holding leaders accountable for the outputs of their teams, but not for the, the wake of destruction they've le— they've left to get those outcomes, right? A good example is I worked with a company where the, the organization had terrible engagement scores, like 160 employees, and it was some of the lowest engagement in the, in the company. And yet this person, this leader, Was really good at doing PowerPoint decks upward that talked about how great the wins were for this organization over and over, and her leaders let that be enough. Right? They're like, oh great! You know, I call in my book I have ten archetypes of toxic leadership, and this one that I'm talking about now is called the peacock. It's people who go to their upper leaders and spread their feathers to talk about how great they are and how great their teams are, and the leaders are sort of hoodwinked. Their leaders are hoodwinked by that. So one of the reasons why these people keep their jobs is because their leaders allow that to happen. If I were that leader's leader, I would say, hey, this PowerPoint deck looks amazing, but your engagement scores are some of the lowest in the company.

Exactly.

And we're having high turnover. It's costing the company a lot of money to replace these people who are leaving, people who we spent a lot of money to try to hire and train. And that cost is actually offsetting these wins you're bringing us. So what we care more about is the engagement scores because we have full faith that if your teams are highly engaged, you'll give us these wins. Those wins are gonna come with an engaged team just like they would come from a disengaged team, except in a disengaged team, we lose people. And in the engaged team, we have highly motivated people who wanna help us solve the problems.

That's great. I've seen that so much over the years, especially coaching leaders. There are some people And everybody in the company kind of knows it, who are really good at managing up, who aren't good at managing across and are terrible with their people. They're just like either slave drivers or they're, you know, whatever.

And that's the peacock.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Okay. That's really helpful.

And hopefully those 10 archetypes will help people spot themselves. That certainly early readers of my book, beta readers of my book, were able to tell me, oh, I kind of spotted myself in One of these, and it's really great if you can do that because then you can start to figure out that's not serving me at all.

You know, yeah, yeah. Oh, I love that. It's not serving me. Not that I'm a bad person; it's just not working.

It's not right.

Me, the company, the people work for me.

Yeah, and it's not a zero-sum game, right? It's not like I can only get these outcomes my company wants from me if I abuse my teams, right? Yeah, I can get these outcomes from my team, my company. with highly engaged teams just as well as I can get them without the highly engaged team. So, yeah.

So how do I operate differently in order to do that? Which then leads to our 3rd question, which is what I always say, we're going to have practical outcomes in this podcast. So what can our listeners do? And I'm going to— the question that I shared with you before was, what can listeners do to protect themselves from leaders like this? But also now I want to know, What can leaders do to— if they do recognize themselves in your archetypes, what can they do to make themselves non-poisonous? You know?

Good, good questions. Okay, so first, if you're measuring— if you're not measuring engagement at all, do it and do it quarterly. That's the way that I would begin. But I would caution people not to do it unless they're serious about doing something with the results. So it'd be like, you know, if you, if you knew your relationship wasn't going well and you said to your partner, hey, what can I do to make it better? And they give you this list of things and then you ignore it. That's actually worse than never asking at all.

Yes.

So don't ask the question unless you're ready to take, you know, action on the answers. And then once you have those scores, try to decide whether the problems are localized or whether they're all across the company. So if they're localized, then you know you've got leaders that are having— that are— that need some coaching, right? We're not— we're not talking about firing people here. We're just talking about these are leaders that don't— they're— they're— they're doing something that's not serving them or the organization. Let's help them turn that around. So bring in coaching, somebody like me or a company like mine to help with leaders. Then if it's— if it's more global, like in other words, if it's across your whole company, then Then you're gonna probably wanna start doing some focus groups. One of the mistakes I see leaders make in this area, senior leaders typically, is they get low engagement scores at the company and then they think, well, okay, we know what's wrong. We'll come up with a way and we'll just, we, we go into our cave, we all talk about what we're gonna do, and we pop out and roll out some plan to the, to the workforce.

Right.

And most of the time, I'd say probably 70% of the time, that is off the mark.

Right.

And what ends up happening is employees just roll their eyes and go, that's what they're going to do about this, really? So you're better off to have focus groups with your employees. If you need to bring in a third party to help with those, you know, that's one of the things my company does. But you can bring someone in like us to help us act as a go-between to collect that information and help make sure that the, that the employees are bought in on and played a part in coming up with what the solution is. And I would say another cautionary tale about engagement is make sure that you are watching out for psychological safety issues. So when I see really low participation on the engagement score, like we sent it out to 100 people and 10 people responded, that's already a sign of, of disengagement and low, you know, psychological safety.

And people assuming that there are gonna be repercussions, that it's not actually safe. Yes.

That's right. It's not safe to speak up, or, and/or, it doesn't make a difference. When I speak up, nothing changes, right?

Yeah.

So, fear is sometimes indicated by a perfect score, believe it or not. So, that's another thing that I watch for. If I see a team with high participation and everybody gave a perfect score, I'm suspicious, right? I'm not saying it's not that way. That's fantastic if it is, but I would certainly reach out and spot-check that information to make sure this wasn't a team— contractors tend to, for example, rate really high.

Yeah.

Because they're on a 1-year job interview. So, they tend to rate, and this is the greatest company I've ever worked for in my life. I'd never change a thing. You know, you're not gonna get really great engagement, uh, data from, from people who don't feel like they, they're safe.

Wait, I, I love that. And I wanna pick up on that cuz what I've found over the years, and I bet you've seen this too, is that in the healthiest companies, people generally say positive things about the company and about the leader and then they also say, here are the ways it could be improved, or if we just did this one thing differently, or one thing that I don't like is that— because they feel safe to do that. They like it, but they feel safe to say how it could keep getting better.

Well, yeah. And one of the things I think leaders mistake is— and this is a big mistake, it's, it's, it's a big blind spot— is they mistake engagement, high engagement, for happy. High engagement is not happy. I could have some Very unhappy employees who are really interested in making it better. Those people are highly engaged.

Right? That's a pretty distinct—

Disengagement is when they no longer care anymore. They're throwing their hands up. They don't— they're not gonna try to help you change anything because they're probably already on LinkedIn looking for another job.

That's great. I completely agree with that. So there's some great quote that says, the opposite of love is indifference.

Yeah. I love that.

Right.

Yeah. Well, and, and, uh, I think Patrick Lencioni, the one who wrote The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, he likes to say, the most dysfunctional teams I've ever worked with never argued.

Right.

Yeah.

Which is a great way of saying, you know, that dysfunction is often captured in silence.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Well, so give us a little bit. This is all so helpful, Sean. If, if I read your 10 archetypes and I go, ooh, I'm a little bit number 7, what do, what do I do?

So the shortest answer I can give you, and I mean, I, I, I know we're, we're crunched for time here, but the, the, the main thing that is to focus on your leadership mindset. Okay? So I know I'm not gonna just say this like some passing thing. A, a mindset is made up of values, beliefs, and principles. So what are the values that I have about myself, who I hold myself accountable for? What are the beliefs that I have about people? So example of beliefs I hear from leaders are, Things like, you know, when people aren't— are working from home, they're just goofing off, as a belief. Another one is people work better under a deadline. I've heard that one. You know, leaders have— these are things they can't prove, but they believe to be true. Okay?

Yeah.

And then the last thing is principles. And principles are like how we wrap up our values and beliefs into some kind of Ten Commandment-like thing. You know, ever, or we always, or we never. You know, either we're I always tell the truth. I, I always treat people the way I want to be treated. You know, these are good examples of principles. Okay.

We—

what— here's where this all becomes very powerful. Our behaviors stem from our mindsets. We do, we do what makes sense to us, and what makes sense to us is built upon our mindset. To give you a drastic example of this, serial killers are doing what makes sense to them.

Yes.

If we look at their beliefs and their values and their principles, we would find that their behaviors make total sense. They're not right, but, but they feel right. And that's the big danger spot for a leader is because you'll be standing there feeling right. It'll feel like I'm doing what makes sense to me. But what you don't realize is it's not serving you in the end. And so the way I, I challenge leaders to change is I challenge them to take apart their mindset. And I have a worksheet in the back of my book that helps leaders do this, but basically, what are your values? What are your beliefs and what are your principles around leadership and other people? And then figure out how your behaviors are making sense there and figure out if there's a belief you could challenge that might cause you to behave differently. Because I can tell you, if you change 1 or 2 beliefs, your behavior will change automatically.

100%. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Well, I, I can't, I could not agree with you more. So much of, in, in my company, the coaching we've done over the last 35 years, we, we talk about when we coach executives, we're helping them change behaviors. But you can't do that without getting down into mindset because—

That's right.

Behaviors arise out of values and beliefs and principles. I, I could not agree more.

Yeah. And isn't it funny that we, this is exactly what we want from our employees as well, right? We can command them to behave a certain way. But if we don't change their mindset, we aren't really getting who they are. Right. And, and so when we talk about, you know, motivating employees and getting them to buy into your, your vision and all of that, we're asking them to change their mindset. Yes. And then their behaviors will be, I'll start thinking about problems, solutions to the problems for the company in the shower. Right. Because I have, I am just so on board with your mission.

Oh man, this is so great. This is one of these times when I think, Maybe I should do an hour-long podcast. But anyway, we have to stop. And this has been— I just— everything you've said is so practical and so actionable, which I think is wonderful, you know? So thank you so much. Thank you.

I hope people get that from the book as well.

Yeah. And so listeners, if you'd like to learn more about Sean's work, you can go to motivatedoutcomes.com where you can also buy his book, One Drop of Poison: How One Bad Leader Can Slowly Kill Your Company. And to find out how Proteus helps leaders to become more effective and followable, just go to proteusleader.com and click on topics and choose accepted leader. So thank you, Sean. This has been great.

Thanks for having me. I really had a good time with this.

And thank you for listening, everyone. And until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, Join us at theprudentiousleader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.