Break Free from The Snare of Toxic Leaders
Book Review: Professor Jean Lipman-Blumen shows how to escape the allure of toxic leaders.
With the complexities of the world as we know it, don’t know it, and perhaps can never know it, we shall understand one another and ourselves better by seeing the world, from time to time, through one another’s spectacles.
~Jean Lipman-Blumen
Be it in business, academia, national, or international politics, leadership affects every one of us directly or indirectly.
John C. Maxwell in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership explained that “leadership ability is the lid that determines a person’s level of effectiveness.”
The lower an individual’s ability to lead, the lower the maximum potential he might reach and the lower the level of his effectiveness. And as it is for individuals, so it is for businesses, non-profit organizations, and even national governments.
Why do we need leaders?
As explained by Dr. Jonathan Sandling, we all need leaders because “we are predisposed with an inherent need to be guided, nurtured, and supported throughout our lives.”
Leaders provide us with;
Security: A leader’s first duty is to remove threats and barriers.
Purpose: Give the people vision and a sense of belonging.
Achievement: The goals and targets that need and must be accomplished.
So, as our leaders go, so we go
It, therefore, follows that for us to survive and flourish as individuals, businesses, or nations, the subject of leadership must be on the front burner of our concerns. All the time.
What do nations like United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and other progressive countries have that my country, Nigeria, doesn’t have? This was the quest that led me to read this book. And the answer I found was that, while the others have great forward-looking leaders, toxic leaders permanently bedeviled my country and many other “Banana Republic” nations in Africa. Full stop.
Two burning concerns
First, who is a toxic leader? Professor Jean Lipman-Blumen describes a toxic leader as somebody who has a poisonous effect on the people or the organization he leads. Simply and painfully put, toxic leaders always leave us worst off than they met us.
Second, why are traumatized and suffering followers every so often permanently enamored by those same toxic leaders? The answer to this question led me to study Professor Lipman-Blumen eponymous volume on the subject.
In The Allure of Toxic Leaders, Lipman-Blumen convincingly explained how followers are complicit in the hatching of toxic leaders. This book, like Professor Phillip Zimbardo’s — The Lucifer Effect changed my perspective completely.
This tour de force of a book is not one you can get through in a hurry. Like The Lucifer Effect, Lipman-Blumen’s The Allure of Toxic Leaders analyze the corrosive dynamics of toxic leaders and the followers who propel them on to the undoing of us all.
Are you already caught in the deadly spell of a toxic leader?
Most times, the toxicity of a leader is not fully known at the beginning. Among her other insights, Lipman-Blumen explained how poisonous leaders first lure us away with defective visions. She also pointed out early warning signs that will help us ward off or escape from such leaders and their destructive influences.
Toxic Leaders Offer Defective and Toxic Visions
Toxic leaders often push us to take heroism to the extreme. They do this by offering us visions that are noble and positive for us and our group, but detrimental to innocent others.
They offer visions that promise to make us large at the cost of making others small.
They offer visions that turn evil into moral virtue or moral virtue into human weakness.
They insist on crushing or eliminating your opponent so that you or your business can survive. And they do this without any guarantee that such destructive forces will not be turned against even those who do not bear them any ill will.
The vision they offer makes you see others as enemies who must be destroyed. Toxic leaders do not make room for divergent groups to live and let live, politically, racially, religiously, or economically.
Their visions expect from us unreasonably large amounts of time, money, and other resources. Toxic leaders also insist we make unwholesome compromises in terms of justice, character, truth, integrity, freedom, family, and friends.
They are unconcerned about the future. “Will the vision stand the test of time and history?”
Their vision can never withstand the “illusion test”. For example, do they make life better for us at the expense of others or without giving consideration to others,
Know the Early Warning Signs of Toxic Leaders
These are sure giveaway signs of a toxic leader or potentially toxic one in the making.
An initially appealing leader inflicts harm on perceived enemies or competitors.
Arrogance and excessive pride.
A lone ranger or only taking advice from a narrow cycle of “yes men”.
Using people to do his own dirty work and afterward dumping them.
Mistreating the lowest and the weakest within the group.
Failing the “golden mean”, he either engages in destructive excesses or cannot show effective leadership action when such is most needed.
Becoming evasive or engaging in outright lies or refusing to be held accountable.
Passing the buck, blaming others for his or her own misdeeds.
Acting to further only his own interests at the expense of the groups’ interests.
Dubious and questionable acts cloaked in fake nobility or altruism.
Poisonous leaders are so alluring because they readily promise us simultaneously the possible and the impossible. They promise us illusions of security to calm our fears and keep us safe.
“A toxic leader may first emerge as our savior, vanquishing our enemies — be they our business competitors, a faltering economy, our political opponents, or our global neighbors. Only later do we realize that the leader is using the same power, unchecked, against our associates, our friends, our families, and eventually us.”
Here are the strategies Professor Lipman-Blumen offered as our escape route.
Escaping from the grip of toxic leaders
Don’t let your existential anxieties and situational fears hold you hostage. Followers should enroll in “the school of anxiety” (a la Soren Kierkegaard). There, they can learn new ways of connecting to their own creativity, become more resilient, and grow from the confrontation with their complex anxiety.
“Finding the leader within” and strengthening democratic Organizations. Followers need to rethink their stance vis-à-vis all leaders. By this, followers must stop being passive, obedient followers — who wait for the leader, any leader, to direct their actions. Followers must move from the dependency of followers to the independence of proactive constituents.
Followers should demand leaders who dis-illusion them. Great leaders are those who refuse to give free reins to their followers’ illusions. They will rather puncture them. They expose their followers to responsibilities through which they learn, grow, and develop resilience.
Followers must stop their addiction to leaders who come with grand or even grandiose visions. True, we need visionary leaders to catapult followers to heights they never thought possible. But a leader with a vision that goes beyond self-improvement to perfect purity often implies “removing the stain of a tainted “other” or becoming great at the expense of making others small.” Followers must reject the we/they dichotomy.
Appreciating the other in terms of mutual humanity is the task and the trouble.
~William Faulkner
When we see others as part of ourselves, we will understand their motives, strength, and frailties. We recognize that we also have in equal or more measures the capacity for the darkness that we attribute to others. What makes us different or even worse than them is whether or not we act on it.
As we so realize our own capacity for darkness, the need to annihilate the other will disappear. Seeing the common humanity we share with others will help us to break out of the we/they dichotomy which toxic leaders manipulate to spark cohesion among their own followers and bind them to their leaders.
Our search for truth and meaning frequently cloaks itself in multicolored garments of achievement, righteousness, justice, and purity. But these truths can also lead us astray. The “truths” for which we would willingly die can be merely death-dealing falsehoods. Consequently, we should welcome the discomfort of competing for “truths” in our schools, politics, organization and in our lives.
We should welcome the discomfort of competing “truths” in our schools, in our politics, in our organizations, and in our lives. These alternative truths stretch us, make us seriously ponder new ways of thinking, and help us conceive creative solutions.
Leadership must be re-conceptualized as a responsibility to the group, nation, family, or organization and we must prepare all members to partake in that role. When we stop regarding leadership as a privilege that comes with perquisites and powers. This approach will attract the right people with the right leadership potential to come on board.
Final Thoughts
Like moths ensnared by the bright light of an all-consuming flame, people do often get caught away in the fiery ill wind of toxic leaders. These brief insights shared here are just my own personal understanding of the lessons taught by Professor Jean Lipman-Blumen.
It is my hope that they will help you identify and take action against the noxious advances and influences of toxic leaders in your community, company, business, organizations, and all other human endeavors.
SOURCE
Lipman-Blumen, Jean (2005). The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians — and How We Can Survive Them. New York, USA: Oxford University Press
Another version of this story from the author was originally published on Medium.