Learn tell-tale signs of bad management to make sure your team isn’t suffering.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Some of the most toxic managers I have worked with had no clue they were contributing to a toxic work environment. Otherwise pleasant to talk to, these managers seemed to genuinely care about their people. However, what appeared on the outside was not in tune with what went inside their teams. Their good intentions didn’t always translate into the right action. Their behavior was rooted in flawed assumptions about what contributes to toxicity. When thinking about a toxic work environment, most of these obvious examples come to mind: Obsessive, micromanaging boss who controls every single aspect of the working hours. Aggressive behavior with temper issues, bullying, putting people down, or embarrassing them in front of others. Shutting down people and their ideas. Critiquing them for speaking up, telling them to stay quiet, keep their heads down, and do their work. Too much people-pleasing, playing favorites, and engaging in office politics. Working long hours is promoted and considered necessary for success. Highly competitive, encouraging unethical practices to win at all costs. Employees are willing to throw other people under the bus as long as it serves them well. Antisocial behavior like being callous, cynical, and disrespectful of others or lying and being deceitful to exploit others. Disagreements are looked upon as a sign of disrespect. Blame games and name-calling are the norm. Looking through this extreme lens of toxicity makes most managers discard the notion that they could possibly be also contributing to one “Thank God! I am not on this list. Phew!” While these toxic behaviors might be the ones getting the most attention, there are other subtle behaviours, things that managers do or don’t do that also contribute to toxicity. These unhelpful behaviors may not get as much attention since they don’t necessarily drive people crazy or be the reason for extreme stress at work. Nevertheless, they have an impact on employees’ well-being. “The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor,” writes Marcus Buckingham in First, Break All the Rules. Disgruntled employees cost companies billions of dollars each year. You don’t want to be the one contributing to this cost, especially if you believe you aren’t someone who engages in toxic behavior. So, even if you are a great manager who really cares about your employees, open yourself to the idea that your actions might be unintentionally contributing to a toxic work environment. Being self-aware and showing a willingness to accept reality can help you identify the role you play in supporting the toxic culture, even if in small ways and build strategies to combat it. Your actions might even encourage others to prevent toxic culture in your company from taking hold. A good part of a manager’s job involves moving the organization forward by driving results. What happens though when the manager is so blinded by outcomes that she fails to look at the behaviors that produced those outcomes? Everyone likes to have people on the team who have an uncanny ability to produce outstanding work, but what if your high performers aren’t easy to get along with and exhibit behaviours that annoy others. What if they are the source of toxicity in the team? They might be easily agitated when people make mistakes, expect others to work at their pace, pass sarcastic remarks, challenge their intelligence, belittle their skills, or demean them when things don’t work out the way they expected. “Sometimes really talented people have heard for so long how great they are, they begin to feel they really are better than everybody else. They might smirk at ideas they find unintelligent, roll their eyes when people are inarticulate, and insult those they feel are less gifted than they are.
