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The need to silence your critics only reveals how weak and fragile you
Here’s how to really handle a toxic boss
From being a buffer to taking a stand: how to handle your toxic boss
There are many strategies you could deploy when faced with a difficult leadership situation. Which one is right for you?
Who hasn’t had to deal with a difficult boss at some point or other? To leadership consultant and Washington insider Dr Margie Warrell that’s all part of the ride.
“I don’t think anyone in their career can say they’ve gone through and haven’t had a boss where they could see some significant problems,” she says. “Everyone’s had that experience. I sure as heck have.”
A toxic boss can take many forms: maybe they’re a micromanager, take all the credit for everyone’s ideas, they’re overly critical or just emotionally dysregulated and suck all the energy out of the room.
New research from Macquarie University, published in the Journal of Business Research on Monday, showed narcissism at the top crushes innovation and reduces how connected employees down the chain feel to the company.
Faced with toxic or otherwise inept leadership, you have a few choices. You could build a shell around yourself. You could blow a bubble of positivity, try to encompass your team and buffer them from the storm. You could manage up. You could fight the power. You could quit.
Some of these options overlap or complement each other; some are in direct conflict. Knowing which combination of moves to make and get the best outcome can be half the battle.
The bomb shelter
Genevieve Gregor says following your own ethical north star won’t steer you wrong. Sitthixay Ditthavong
Sometimes, when things get dicey, your first instinct might to be to hunker down and wait it out. While being strategic and taking time to think through a situation from all angles can be a good idea, at some point, you’re going to have to make a move, Genevieve Gregor says.
As a former distressed debt banker at Goldman Sachs and current chair of the board at Noumi (where she’s credited with helping pull the dairy giant back from the brink) Gregor knows a thing or two about strategy, leadership and when to make your move.
It really depends on everybody’s circumstances,” she tells BOSS. “The job market’s not massive in Australia, so sometimes you have to take something that isn’t quite there to get into the next thing.”
Or stay in a job you’re not in love with. But Gregor is, at her core, a problem-solver, so she’s never been one to sit still in a bad situation. And she wouldn’t recommend you do either.
The buffer
Executive performance coach James Laughlin says you’ve got to “take your MEDS”.
But maybe you’re not ready to pull the trigger on a solution just yet. If you love the people around and below you, you’re a culture builder, and you think there’s potential to make real change, you might find yourself in a role as the team buffer: what Warrell calls “the emotional centre of the office”.
She discusses this concept a lot with clients, whether that’s global chief executives or on Capitol Hill. (Often in a political office, the chief of staff is the only grown up in the room, hemmed in on one side by a character-filled politician, and on the other by junior staffers beavering away on nothing but caffeine fumes and a passion for democracy.)
Warrell says the advice she gives them can be really useful for anyone looking to manage a difficult boss and recalibrate the mood in the rest of the team.
“Chiefs of staff often have to manage multiple crises,” she says. “They need to stay calm and not get hysterical because everyone is looking to them for emotional stability.
“You need to have a maturity and an emotional management. You are essentially the thermostat – you’re setting the temperature. Emotions are contagious.”
Executive coach and author of Habits of High Performers, James Laughlin, says you’ve got to “take your MEDS”. That’s mindfulness, exercise, diet, sleep. That’s the basic formula for staying in control of your reactions in a stressful work environment, he says.
“Emotional mastery is how I word it – that’s what we’ve got to nail,” he says. “Because toxic bosses feed on reaction. But high performers, they stay calm.”
The adjustment
The concept of “managing up” has been around since the 1980s – and it’s stuck for a reason. This vintage piece of career development advice encourages you to learn as much as possible about your boss’s goals and management style, and then adapt your interactions to make that relationship as mutually beneficial as possible.
When your leader’s behaviour is causing ructions, Warrell recommends taking a cool look at what’s motivating those actions.
“Recognise that your boss is human,” she says. “They’re vulnerable and they’re insecure. So how do you make them feel a little more secure? How do you become someone who’s trusted that they know they can trust, that isn’t going to make them look bad?”
If you want to influence upwards, work out a way to give your boss an “easy yes”, she says: “Here’s what I’ve thought through. Here’s an agenda. Here’s the approach I’m thinking of doing. Sell it to them in a way where it’s clear why this will make them look good.”
Gregor agrees. “You have to think of all the tools in your toolkit that could get it done,” she says – there’s no place for ego.
“You think, how else can I get this to work? How else can I get someone to understand my point of view? How else can I get aligned? Would it help if it’s not coming from me, but it’s coming from someone else? My words, but in somebody else’s voice? I don’t have to take credit for an idea, not at all.”
The stand
But what if you’ve done all that and the poison is still leaching, infecting the business and the team? How do you know when it’s time to speak out? And how do you do it?
Gregor says when it comes to the crunch, you know.
“Bad behaviour, if it keeps rolling on, the consequences just keep compounding,” she says. “So for me, when it’s clear that there is bad behaviour or something that’s wrong with the business, or a bad decision has been made, the sooner you act the better. You have to call it out pretty quickly.”
If this is the path you have to go down, calling out bad leadership requires a coalition. “You can’t make a decision by yourself – unless you complete the top of the tree – so you have to get consensus,” Gregor says. “You have to get buy-in for that decision.”
But if you can’t get everybody else to see what you’re seeing, and sometimes you can’t: “Well, it’s my reputation, my integrity, on the line. I have to leave,” Gregor says.
The exit
And following your moral compass, doing the right thing, does pan out in the end, says Gregor. She should know.
Gregor left a decade-long career at Citi Australia during the 2008 global financial crisis after management refused to consider options that might retain jobs.
“We had done an amazing job in Asia and in Australia, growing our businesses,” she recalls. “We weren’t part of the bad debt scenario. Everywhere else in the world had bad debts. Ultimately, though, the company needed to survive, and word came down from New York that we needed to sack 60 per cent [of our people].
“I said to my bosses, what if we could restructure? Everybody go part-time, keep the team together? I’m happy to take a pay cut. Let’s go three days a week. Everyone reduces their pay.”
When she couldn’t convince them, she resigned. “My logic was, if I want people to work for me, they’ve got to trust me. I was the main breadwinner in the family. It was pretty stressful. But ultimately, I backed myself and that was the right ethical and moral thing to do.”
And people remembered it. Gregor says that decision, made on principal, actually helped her career in the long run. People appreciated the courage of the decision.
Laughlin agrees. He says you need to be “radically clear” on your own values and priorities, and let those guide your decision-making when it comes to finding a path through a toxic leadership situation.
“When you can do that, you tend to not get dragged into a toxic boss’s storm as much,” he says. “And walking away from a toxic environment isn’t quitting, it’s choosing an environment where you can thrive.”
