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What You’ll Discover About Toxic Leadership:
* How the severity, frequency, and duration of toxic leadership behaviors impacts employees’ perceptions of honest compensation, safety, and sense of belonging
* Why credit stealing is a top relationship deal-breaker and morale killer
* How bias drowns out facts with preconceived notions that either favors or disadvantages employees
* How if employees are not being intentionally included, they risk being unintentionally excluded
* How toxic leadership behaviors create unwritten rules and fear based environments
* And much more.
Host Hanna Hasl-Kelchner
Hanna Hasl-Kelchner is a champion for fairness in the workplace. She helps organizations gain clarity to make more informed decisions by reducing complex concepts into sensible, bite size pieces. Hanna accomplishes this as a business strategist and through her writing, speaking, consulting, and popular syndicated podcast, Business Confidential Now.
Hanna brings a unique perspective to the table, growing up in an entrepreneurial family and running a business before age 30 and blending it with decades practicing business law. Those experiences enabled her to successfully bridge the gap between the two disciplines during her career as a trusted advisor to influential decision makers ranging from startups to the S&P 500, Big Tobacco, and the White House. She has also been on the faculty at two top-ranked MBA programs: The Duke University Fuqua School of Management and the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Leadership and Management episodes.
Contact Hanna and connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
UPDATE: Her new book Seeking Fairness at Work is now available on Amazon.
Part 1: Unveiling the Truth: Workplace Fairness Myths vs Reality
Part 2: The Key to Retaining Top Talent: A Fair Work Environment
Part 3: Why Low Employee Engagement is Not an Employee Problem
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5 Toxic Leadership Trends that Kill High Employee Engagement
There are five toxic leadership trends that kill high employee engagement, and most managers don’t even realize that they’re doing it, that they’re having this negative impact on employees.
But just imagine how much better and more productive the workplace would be if even one of these toxic leadership habits could be toned down. Let’s talk about that.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner.
And today we’re going to continue with part four of the five part sneak preview of my new book, Seeking Fairness at Work Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention, and Satisfaction. If you missed the first three episodes of that series, no worries. I have links to them in the show notes, and I’m going to give you a quick recap.
In part one, Unveiling the Truth, I explain how fairness is not an unreasonable expectation, how even as children, we understand that implicitly, and as adults, the ability to recognize unfairness or experience it never leaves us. We know it when we see it. Fairness is something we expect in all of our relationships, including the workplace, employee, employer relationship, because they’re based on an implied social contract.
And if we want more than a transactional relationship and want to build trust so that we have more cooperation and enthusiasm, that’s why in part two, the Key to Retaining Top Talent, I dove into the need for good faith and fair dealing in our relationships. How the covenant of good faith and fair dealing are part of every contract, including the implied social contract.
And what they basically mean is that we’re obligated to play nice. Good faith means being honest and protecting safety, and fair dealing means providing reasonable support so as not to interfere with the goal of the relationship.
Those covenants of good faith and fair dealing parallel Abraham Maslow’s research on human motivation and his hierarchy of needs that you may be familiar with. At its most basic level, we want to satisfy our physiological need for food, water, shelter, and physical safety. That’s what honest compensation, for example, helps us achieve.
And fair dealing parallels Maslow’s next rung on the Hierarchy of Motivational Needs, which is the need for esteem and a sense of belonging. Sense of community. So last week, in part three of this series, we analyzed how low employee engagement is really a response to what workers encounter in the workplace.
Because even though managers have the positional power to set the rules, employees still have their own expectations under the implied social contract. And those basic motivational needs expressed by Maslow. Expectations of good faith and fair dealing as reflected in honest compensation, safe workplace conditions, and the need for reasonable management support. And so it’s no surprise when those motivational things aren’t being met. Engagement drops like a rock.
And that’s why today I’m going to share with you the five most common toxic leadership behaviors managers don’t even realize they’re doing most of the time, things that betray good faith and fair dealing, and some of our basic motivational needs. These toxic leadership behaviors typically come disguised as the norms nobody wants to talk about.
Remember how when you started a new job and you’re trying to figure out how things work? You may have been handed an organizational chart. And sure, that diagram of boxes and reporting relationships can tell you a lot about how authority and control is distributed. But you soon learn that each dotted line and solid line is a microclimate created by the people occupying those roles, and how nice they play with each other.
It’s the quality of those connections that explains why an employee can have a great working relationship with one supervisor, and a terrible experience with their replacement, even though they’re doing the same high caliber work in exactly the same job.
Now, if you’ve been in the workplace for any length of time, you learn that organizations tolerate certain habits or idiosyncrasies that deviate from the mission statement. You know, those aspirational statements that talk about treating employees and customers with dignity and respect and obeying the law? Who’s going to argue with that? Nobody. Right? Okay.
But at the same time, these organizations excuse uncivil conduct from certain people in power, or they turn a blind eye to open secrets. It’s a double standard, and the people engaging in such toxic leadership get treated as sacred cows. It all feels very unfair, but it’s what employees end up navigating every day and how things really work in an organization. They’re the norms nobody wants to talk about out loud the unspoken rules employees are afraid of, and you learn about them the hard way or, if you’re lucky, through whispers in the hall.
They tank employee engagement because they generate fear. And it’s incredibly stressful, and it keeps you from doing your best work when you’re in a fear based environment.
Now, I know some listeners may be thinking, well, that’s just too bad. That’s the way it is. Buckle up buttercup, life’s unfair. Get used to it, I get it.
But, on the other hand, as a manager, as a leader, it’s important to get work done through others. You simply can’t do it all by yourself. You need cooperation, and fairness greases those wheels. Think about it. Fairness really isn’t about charity, as some people might think. It’s really smart business.
All right, so what are these toxic leadership habits that employees feel are unfair? Well, they fall into five broad categories, and each one of them operates on a continuum. So when we talk about them, it’s important to keep in mind that the degree of damage done by any one of these depends on the severity, the frequency, and the duration of this type of behavior, this toxic leadership habit, because even small slights over an extended period of time is the equivalent of death by a thousand cuts. It’s very, very stressful and it causes people to pull back.
All right, let’s get to it. Five hot button categories or what I call the common workplace norms nobody wants to talk about: 1) unapproachable ability, 2) lack of recognition, 3) bias, 4) poor conflict management, and 5) poor workload management. Now let’s tackle these individually.
You know, it’s easy to dismiss these toxic leadership behaviors when they’re viewed in isolation one at a time, and to discount complainers as overly sensitive and whiny. But when we look at these together, it’s easier to appreciate how they punch holes in our profound human need for good faith and fair dealing and negatively impact employee engagement.
Take unapproachability, for example. Being unapproachable is off putting and alienating. It affects employees sense of belonging and esteem because it creates distance, making it harder for them to connect and get information or the help they need to be successful on the job. A heavy travel schedule, a closed door, even power walking from point A to B can send a message. I’m busy. Not now. And it begs the question for the employee. Well, okay, but when?
How we communicate with each other can have a huge bearing on approachability. Is the tone dismissive or intimidating? Is the conversation abrupt or cut short? The impact can be especially acute for remote workers when you have infrequent contact and maybe terse exchanges that can leave them feeling adrift and wondering whether they’re being taken for granted, or whether what they do matters at all.
If workers feel ignored, they may be afraid to ask a question out of fear that they’re going to be considered incompetent, and they may be afraid to raise an important problem until it’s too big to hide and, of course, then it becomes more expensive to fix.
Even nonverbal behaviors can convey a really powerful message. Make a U-turn in the hall because a manager forgot something could be an innocent move. But if it happens every time, they see their least favorite person can feel like a slap in the face to that person. Because shunning is a form of isolation, it negates the sense of belonging by making people invisible.
Oh come on, you may think, these are such minor things. This stuff happens all the time. Managers are busy.
That’s true. It does happen every day. And that’s exactly the problem, because it may be minor to the leader, to the manager, but it’s not trifling to the employee when they don’t have an opportunity to access the support they need to do their best work.
They need to know when management is time for them, and unavailability runs counter to that covenant of fair dealing in the duty not to hinder an employee’s performance under the implied employee employer agreement. Not being able to access necessary information or resources in a timely manner does exactly that. Being unreachable too often is demotivating, and research shows that absentee leadership is actually more isolating to employees than being treated poorly.
So fairness is really about having reasonable access to management support. That’s a fairness factor, and it’s actually one of many fairness factors I highlight in my book. Actually, there’s over a hundred of them.
Now let’s talk about lack of recognition. That’s another toxic leadership behavior that tanks employee engagement. Because fair recognition is about being seen and given a voice. It’s a motivational form of esteem, and often thought of in terms of wages raises promotions.
But a lack of recognition can also occur by playing favorites among employees or ignoring raised hands at meetings. That’s just an example. It marginalizes an employee’s sense of belonging and, like unavailability, whether it happens and how often it happens factors in to how damaging it is to the workplace relationship.
The lack of recognition can happen in other ways besides just wages. Could also be credit stealing, not providing feedback, bias, microaggressions, and bullying because it’s really about being seen and heard.
Typically, recognition falls into the category of wages and raises promotions. That gets the lion’s share of attention because it affects our ability to earn a living so that we can meet those physiological necessities that Maslow talks about, and also our psychological need for esteem. Because the more money you make typically is associated with more prestige.
The degree to which that kind of compensation represents honest compensation also influences our perceptions of whether employer is acting in good faith. Sometimes organizations engage in wage theft, the practice of not providing workers with honest compensation, whether it’s through miscounting hours demanding off the clock services or even mischaracterizing their status as salaried when they really should be hourly. It’s not only unfair, but it can cross the line into being illegal.
Not paying workers in a timely fashion can be a problem. Each jurisdiction has different labor law requirements, and it really makes it incumbent on management to understand and follow them.
Equal pay for equal work is another component of that. It goes even further, taking recognition into a sensitive area of bias and particularly unlawful discrimination. Yet looking at the issue from purely a recognition perspective, the unwillingness to level the payroll playing field communicates through disparate compensation that one type of person, rather than the value of their work product, is seen as more worthy of financial recognition.
That devaluation belies the notion of honest compensation, and it also attacks an employee’s ability to earn a living and esteem. That’s why the failure to provide equal pay for equal work is fundamentally unfair, and leaders really can’t reasonably expect blind loyalty from workers that they openly see and treat as second class citizens, especially when those same people who excuse unfair pay practices would be so upset if their own work product were disrespected the same way due to stereotypes beyond their control.
Credit stealing is another form of not giving proper recognition, and it’s probably the most destructive way managers, short circuit recognition and their ability to connect with employees. It’s a big deal breaker and a morale killer.
Research finds that part of the value of our ideas is the prestige it confers on us. So when a boss takes unfair credit for an employee’s idea and doesn’t give them attribution, the boss essentially robs the employee of the ideas reputational value, conferring it onto themselves, to put more prestige on themselves. It’s stealing and it’s dishonest. And boy, is it a flagrant violation of the implied social contract.
Children as young as six years old care about their ideas, and they’re deeply attached to them. And what that means for us as adults in the workforce is that on an instinctive basis, we know taking someone else’s work without giving proper credit is just plain wrong. It’s unfair, and it’s no surprise that resentment builds and employee engagement goes down when someone cheats an employee out of recognition for their work.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s the boss who passes it off as their own idea pockets the credit and financial reward. Or this is my favorite, the colleague who misappropriates an idea during a meeting and is praised. You know you just love that one. You say something, it gets ignored. Maybe you even get shot down. But then a few minutes later, somebody else says the same thing and they’re the hero. And you just know that six year old inside you is screaming in white hot anger. It is infuriating. It is wrong.
And worst of all, wielding power for personal gain, to amp up your own reputation at someone else’s expense, sets up a win-lose dynamic. Collaboration and a sense of belonging, as well as any kind of psychological safety takes a back seat when people are afraid of being cheated.
Now, why it happens is often a form of bias, and bias drives a stake into the heart of fairness. Why? Because it drowns out facts with preconceived notions that either favor or prejudice individuals due to factors beyond their control. Bias is basically a form of tribalism, and how it impacts our sense of belonging and esteem in an organization depends on whether or not we’re part of the in-crowd.
When bias reveals favoritism, it promotes privilege and elevates a sense of self and a perception of superiority. When bias exposes intolerance, it disadvantages employees by attacking their esteem. It can even threaten their physical safety and ability to earn a living with behaviors ranging from microaggressions to bullying to outright discrimination and or sexual harassment.
When I interviewed neuroscience educator Sarah Peyton on this program a while back, she shared some really fascinating research with me about power differentials between majorities and minorities in the workplace. She said the more that we’re different from 70% of the predominant workforce composition, the more we lose our foothold in the organization’s power structure. So, for example, if 70% of the employees are white males and you’re a white male, you already have an easier time fitting in and connecting.
If you’re not a white male, it’s harder. How much harder? How much bias will you encounter? Well, it depends.
What’s critical about Peyton’s finding is how it highlights the importance of acceptance and inclusion by coworkers as central to an employee’s sense of belonging. Fairness is really about legitimate acceptance and inclusion, and it doesn’t happen by osmosis or by itself.
If employees are not being intentionally included, they risk being unintentionally excluded because obeying and conforming can mask implicit, unconscious, or systemic barriers, such as glass ceilings that dampen full employee participation. The pressure to conform and obey to gain a toehold in a sense of belonging is incredibly strong, especially in fear based environments — those that have a lot of these unwritten rules.
Back in the 1980s, when I first joined the workforce as a young lawyer and yes, I’m dating myself here, but bear with me. A lot more women were flocking into the workplace, and the whole idea of diversity was frankly, nothing more than tokenism and fitting in. The male power structure really wasn’t too welcoming of a minorities point of view. They didn’t want to hear it. The message we got through, subtle and maybe not so subtle cues, was that women should be seen and not heard. Organizations wanted the appearance of diversity, and if we insisted on having a voice, it was really in our best interest to parrot the party line and not be disruptive.
Now, suppressing or minimizing our voice, appearance and even values so as not to offend the sensibilities of the dominant white male power structure is something minorities of all stripes initially faced, and sadly, a lot of them still do because they don’t want to be targets of microaggressions, bullying, discrimination, or harassment. But unfortunately, the benefit of diversity and full employee engagement is lost without an inclusive culture to support it.
And what that means for fairness in the workplace is that fairness is about treating your least favorite employee the same as your favorite.
So to recap, toxic leadership behaviors and unwritten rules that we’ve talked about so far are unapproachable ability, lack of recognition, and bias. But there are two more, right? I talked about five at the beginning. Two others are poor conflict management and poor workload management.
Bullying is often the result of poor conflict management because people just don’t know how to do it properly. When expectations go unmet and bad news is delivered or disappointing performance observed, it is so easy to interpret it as a threat. But when leaders respond with an emotional outburst, it sends people diving for cover. It’s extremely difficult for an employee to feel secure or have a sense of belonging when a manager is shouting, screaming, or cursing at them and even worse, humiliating them in front of others.
You know, it makes you reluctant to raise a problem or deliver bad news because you’re going to get blamed or maybe even lose your job. So the blame game is not constructive problem solving or conflict management, and neither is retaliating against an employee who brings a legitimate concern to management’s attention.
What’s worse is when management pretends there’s no problem. That’s gaslighting, challenging an employee’s perception of reality and claiming they’re overreacting to sensitive, taking things too personally. But ignoring a problem or trying to shift responsibility doesn’t solve anything except destroy employee engagement.
One time, when a head of a consumer focus group got hostile phone calls and really unreasonable demands from an irate client about scheduling and test results, he asked a supervisor to just do him a favor and call the client and talk to them about their expectations. The daily bullying from the client was so bad he even threatened to quit if they didn’t make the call. But his bosses did nothing. They let him fend for himself, and that lack of support left him feeling really isolated. He told me later, “you can only put up with being yelled at for so long.” And as promised, he gave notice. And he said that as soon as he did, this huge weight lifted off his shoulders because the hostility he kept encountering from his client was so incredibly stressful and threatening. Poor conflict management can have a huge, huge impact on employees.
And last but not least, I want to talk about workload management. It’s another huge way organizations fall short of meeting their duty of fair dealing and providing reasonable support to not interfere or fail to cooperate in an employee’s job performance.
Sometimes the lack of support is viewed through a really narrow lens of not offering enough rah-rah encouragement, or a pat on the back and appreciation for a job well done. And then it kind of gets shrugged off as a kind of warm, fuzzy coddling real adults shouldn’t need, and management doesn’t have time for.
But inadequate staffing or inadequate raw materials, not making accurate information available in a timely fashion — they also qualify as a lack of meaningful management support in terms of workload, as do insufficient training, unclear communications when instructions are vague or incomplete. And so fairness really is about giving employees the reasonable support to do their job successfully.
Micromanagement fits the bill here because it interferes with someone trying to do their work by always looking over their shoulder and second guessing their work. You really need to be able to respect an employee’s skill and their need for autonomy.
Even certain goals can signify a lack of support and poor workload management, and it can be one of the most insidious ways leaders undermine employee engagement. Because nobody likes to fail, and we hate being set up to fail about things beyond our control even more. It’s the very essence of unfairness.
Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not talking about stretch goals here. Stretch goals are a good thing. They’re aspirational and there’s nothing wrong with that. But even aspirational goals need periodic reality checks. Otherwise they make management look out of touch and incompetent.
I have a friend who used to work at a large electronics manufacturer that set an annual 10% cost cutting goal for each component sourced through their purchasing department. Now, in the early days of a new product commercialization, when product volumes keep increasing year after year, competitive bidding among qualified vendors and volume discounts made that 10% reduction realistic and practical.
Economies of scale can and should be leveraged in the early stages of commercialization to negotiate more favorable pricing as higher volumes lower individual unit costs, right? Makes sense. But volumes eventually plateau and taper off when a product cycle matures and it gets eclipsed by 2.0 versions. Right. Something newer. And so at that point, vendor profit margins have already been squeezed razor thin by each preceding year’s volume purchases.
So it’s really unreasonable to expect continued 10% cost reductions year after year when volumes are decreasing. At some point, a vendor would be selling the product at a loss, and frankly, they’d be not only responsible, but crazy to do that. It’s not business. However, the raises and bonuses of the employees in the purchasing department who were specialized and organized by product line were contingent on continuously getting that 10% savings every year, no matter what.
Over time, it meant they got penalized for product cycle maturities that were inevitable and totally beyond their control. Many transferred to a different department or left the company when blamed for not achieving what had now become impossible.
When you run into situations like that, like one executive told me, he goes, “you just stop banging your head against the wall. The wall is still there, but you feel better.” In other words, you stop trying your hardest. You back down, you obey, you conform or you leave.
I understand that managers often want organizational culture to grow organically, expecting it to be nurtured by the company’s vision and mission statements. Those great missives that espouse aspirational values such as dignity, respect, obeying the law. I mean, who could argue with that? No one. Those things set boundaries for what’s encouraged, discouraged, accepted, and rejected by the organization. But they’re just aspirational words.
Actions speak so much louder, and an organization’s culture and its ability to create an environment that encourages and supports employees to do their best work depends on management, on leadership. Yet it’s their use of power that enables these unwritten rules. The norms nobody wants to talk about determine how things really work in an organization. Yet we’re reluctant to talk about power or scrutinize it. We have a lot of deference to it and fear retaliation, and that makes it taboo to question or challenge it.
But given its role in the norms nobody wants to talk about, those toxic leadership behaviors that tank employee engagement, we really don’t have much choice but to talk about it. Our discussion would be totally incomplete if its role were ignored.
So that’s where we’re going to be headed next week in part five, when I’ll explore How to Keep Positional Power From Being a Huge Achilles Heel. Because the more we understand about power, the more we can use it responsibly to advance the mission of the organization and improve employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention. I hope you’ll join me next week.
And in the meantime, I thank you so much for listening today. A transcript of this episode can be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com. And if you missed the first three parts of this series, those links are also in the show notes.
For a lot more on this topic, including a five part strategy for improving employee engagement, retention, and satisfaction. My new book, Seeking Fairness at Work, will be available starting next week on April 18th, so circle your calendar now.
If you found today’s episode thought provoking, be sure to tell your friends, share a link and leave a positive review. I’ll be back next week to continue and wrap up this five part series. So until then, have a great day at an even better tomorrow.
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