A Different Take on Toxic Leaders

Toxic Leaders and Our Mindset

Have you ever experienced that when you first meet someone new at work or school, you start seeing them constantly in the next few days? They were always in the same rooms and hallways you frequent, but you didn’t notice them before. This is because of an interesting part of your brain called your Reticular Activating System or RAS for short.

I recently learned about this popular neuroscience term and was fascinated by its applications for leadership, teamwork, and overall human behaviors. Your RAS is a network of neurons in your brain that acts as a filter for sensory information, determining which stimuli reach your conscious awareness, or not. Every day you experience so much sensory input, that there is no way you can pay attention to everything. Your RAS helps with this by prioritizing which things you can visually process. The best way to illustrate this is to consider the following scenario.

Imagine you are looking at purchasing a new car. You head to the dealership and are approached by someone on the sales team. They ask you a series of questions about your desired vehicle including make, model, features, etc. This continues for several minutes until the salesperson asks, “I know you were interested in purchasing a Honda, but have you ever considered a Hyundai? We currently have a deal on the newest model of the Elantra, and it has all the features you are looking for” (I am not sponsored by Hyundai.)

They lead you to their showcase which displays a beautiful blue Elantra. After a thorough inspection, you decide to take some time to think about it. Then on your drive home, you notice that you are seeing this exact model of blue Hyundai everywhere. Is the universe giving you a sign? No. Those cars were always on the road and you were probably driving by them every day. However, now your RAS has received new instructions from your brain that it should start paying attention to blue Hyundais. Your RAS literally controls what you can visually process or not.

Now as interesting as that sounds, I know you’re dying to know what this has to do with leadership. As it turns out, quite a lot. In our modern-day information age, we are exposed to more stimulus than ever before. One of the ways this happens is through social media and other digital content. Tools like LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, and podcasts mean the average person has access to more information than ever before. The problem is that this information is now often curated to the individual’s interests, beliefs, and opinions using algorithms. This then activates our RAS in very specific ways, some helpful, others not so much.

Take for example the rise of mental-health awareness in recent years. I am so grateful that we are removing the stigma of mental health and equipping people with more tools and resources to improve their mental well-being. However, one of the drawbacks of this has been the rise of what I call “sofa psychologists.” People “diagnose” every person they dislike or disagree with as a “narcissist” or “sociopath” because they read some Instagram post on the 5 signs of toxic people. The constant exposure to information can alter our RAS and tell us to look for things that might not serve us. This can cause us to cultivate a very cynical and fearful view of the world because we are now visually noticing only the red flags and not contrary information. This video does a great job of explaining the RAS and how it influences our overall outlook on life.

In the workplace, this looks like an increased fixation on “toxic leaders.”

Our Fixation with Toxic Leaders

As I was doing research for this article, I was amazed at how many articles I found like this one. Every single article revolved around how to spot toxic leaders and manage them. Now don’t get me wrong, this is very valuable information. However throughout my years immersed in the topic of leadership, I have found that workplace content is now over-saturated with this topic. As a result, many people entering the workforce have an overactive RAS that has been programmed to be suspicious and fearful of leaders, only able to see the things they are doing wrong. Thus even healthy, well-intentioned leaders have to work hard to fight the “us vs. them mentality” many of their workers carry. This is also why I believe that building trust is one of the most important skills any leader can have.

Newton’s 3rd law of motion states”

“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

While this is true for physics, when applied to social settings I believe it is more accurate to say that for every action there is an excessive and opposite reaction. The pendulum always swings back farther than the center. A toxic leadership culture in past decades has led to an increase in awareness of such behaviors and a demand for greater accountability. However, where we have landed now is a culture of suspicion and mistrust in many organizations. What compounds this problem is the fact that humans love labels. Labeling someone as a “toxic leader” permits us to skip doing the hard work of defining what the toxic behaviors are, or possibly looking inward to our problems. Then we can simply move the leader to the out-group. It doesn’t serve us well.

I have worked with countless leaders and employees who are self-sabotaging their careers because of an overactive RAS that is only seeing the flaws in their coworkers. Typically this individual will complain about everything that is wrong with their team, yet behind the scenes, they are the very one the rest of their team is trying to avoid due to their defensive and uncooperative demeanor.

So with all that said, where does that leave us? Rather than going on witch hunts for toxic leaders, I believe it is much more productive to equip people with healthy behaviors and boundaries. That way you are more empowered to choose the right workplace and create relationships that are aligned with your values. So here are a few strategies that will help you do that.  

Detoxify your Work

1. Goal-Oriented vs. Reactive Behavior

The first step towards better workplace interactions is to determine whether the toxic behaviors you are seeing from a leader/coworker are goal-oriented or reactive. Reactive behaviors as the name implies, are driven primarily by emotions. They are a reaction to an event that occurred, and they are much easier to deal with if you know the right approach. The individual has simply become escalated because they feel like you don’t care, are not listening, or have threatened a core value of theirs. In this instance, you want to remain calm and not become defensive. Then you want to seek a connection with that individual first and ask good questions that show interest.

How did they interpret that event? How did it make them feel? What do they need at this moment? In most cases, if you focus on their needs first, the individual will de-escalate and become much easier to work with.

However, if the behavior is goal-oriented we need to take a different approach. This is where the individual is engaging in unhealthy behaviors to achieve a certain outcome. Usually, this is from learned experience. If they talk over you, get loud, or ignore you, they believe they will get what they want. This is truly toxic behavior, and this is where the only appropriate response is to set boundaries and demonstrate that these behaviors will not get the individual what they want. If this was coming from your leader regularly, that is where I would start to question whether you constantly want to expose yourself to that kind of work environment.

2. Preferences and Priorities

Remember what I mentioned earlier about labels? Humans love to label what they can’t understand. When we encounter someone at work who thinks and acts differently than us, it can feel threatening and we will often create a judgement-based label, to help us make sense of the situation. That person is: lazy, harsh, flaky, inconsiderate, stand-offish, etc. That may be true, or it may be that they simply have different priorities and working styles than you. We often assume people are more like us than they are and will assess others based on our unique standards.

That is why I do a lot of work with teams helping them understand their unique personality and working behaviors so that they can have more empathy towards each other, and better adapt their approach to fit the styles of others. You can find a great workshop I deliver on that here if you are interested.

For now, what this means is that it is important to invest in your emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Research from psychologist Tasha Eurich has shown that 95% of people believe they are self-aware, yet only about 10-15% actually are. When we develop these skills, it helps us better identify our unique priorities and motivators and how they may differ from others, leading to less judgment and more empathy. This frees us to focus on what behaviors will be most productive at the moment, ultimately improving our workplace interactions.

3. Mind Management

Whether it be your RAS, lack of self-awareness, or things like the fight or flight response that I talked about in this article, many different processes in the brain can skew our perception of what is happening around us. Thus, we need to learn to manage our thoughts effectively.

This is where it is helpful to reframe your thoughts and ask yourself questions like:

• Is this valid or true?

• Am I exaggerating?

• Is there another way to look at this?

Approaching our thoughts from a 3rd party perspective will help us remove the emotional element from the situation so we can assess the situation more rationally. I am advocating for self-doubt here. This is simply approaching our thoughts from an intentional place rather than a reactive one. It’s realizing that your first thought about that event or person, may not be the most objective one. That leader may not be toxic, they may be having an unhealthy response at the moment. Or perhaps you may be engaging in certain behaviors that are contributing to these outcomes.

When we learn to pause and create space between stimulus and our response to it, we are better equipped to choose a productive response. Thus even if a leader does happen to be behaving in toxic ways, you can more accurately assess the individual and make better decisions.

Leaders Come in Many Flavors

Some leaders are toxic, some are healthy, and others sway back and forth depending on the day. Regardless of this, slapping labels rarely produces helpful outcomes. Instead when we learn to better identify which behaviors do and don’t work for us, it empowers us to make healthy choices that best align with our values. It takes the guesswork out, so we can take ownership of our professional journey and decide whether we are willing to stay in a situation, or if we would like to seek out employment somewhere else.

If you are looking to achieve more clarity on your professional journey and reach your goals, or if you are a leader who is looking to improve the quality of relationships in your workplace, I would love to have a conversation about how I can help.

Go ahead and book a free Discovery Call with me to get the process started!