How to spot a toxic boss
Many business leaders have no idea of the impact they have on the people that work for them. They assume that the results they achieve reflect how well they manage their teams. Or more to the point, they assume that when results are good, it reflects how well they manage their teams. And when results are bad – well that reflects how poor their people are!
As the study of emotional intelligence (EQ) shows us, human beings are much more strongly influenced by others than we realise. We are constantly bombarded by conscious and subconscious signals from the people around us, and we are tuned to receiving and interpreting those signals to assess our own situation.
In the workplace, the person we’re all watching for signals and clues is the boss. The emotional signals that he or she emits are critical to our workplace survival and therefore to the lifestyle and people that our work supports.
So, if they’re all looking at the boss for subliminal signals, is he/she sending out positive reassuring signals? Or are they dragging the team down around them without even realising it? In other words, are they a toxic boss? Here are five indicators to watch out for:
Feedback vacuum
Nobody at work tells the boss about his/her own performance, decisions, and general impact on the business. This is because they fear the consequences. At best they think it will be ignored; at worst that the boss will shoot the messenger. It’s hard to improve when the people that see a person's work first-hand don't feel able to say what they think.
The walk of death
When the boss arrives at the office they walk straight to their desk. They get coffee. They start work. They don’t make eye contact or conversation with the team. The team think the boss is in a bad mood and steer clear. Nobody asks for any important decisions that day. The boss is killing the mood in the team from the moment they arrive. Don’t expect to see a positive atmosphere develop around them, though it may improve when he/she is not there!
After you
In team meetings the team wait for the boss's opinion before speaking. The past has shown them that offering a different opinion to that of the boss is dangerous, so they wait. The boss will only ever hear opinions that match their own, creating the risk that they’ll make mistakes that could have been avoided.
Heroes and villains
The boss makes it clear that there are people in the team who are their favourites, and there’s usually somebody who everybody knows is next in line to be fired. Teamwork and cooperation suffer when people are jostling for position in a clearly identifiable hierarchy of favour, and nobody supports the team member in the firing line.
Rats and sinking ships
A good manager knows that people will leave their team, in fact they actively support talented individuals to grow and move on and up through the business. A toxic manager finds that even the average and poor performers start to leave, and not because you managed them out. High turnover is costly and disruptive for any business and toxic managers create higher than average turnover at all levels in their teams.
How toxic are you?
Are any of these statements a little too close to home for you? If you identified with just one of them - watch out. You could be on your way to becoming a toxic boss, in danger of lowering staff morale, stifling your business creatively and losing staff all together.
Want to improve?
High performing managers understand and apply the principles of emotional intelligence to the relationships that they create with their teams. In a nutshell this means understanding how the people around you think and function, and how as humans, our emotional brain drives our behaviours – start to think of your employees and your relationship with them in this way and you should soon see results.
Research suggests a very strong correlation between management ‘EQ’ and the delivery of better business results. Improving your emotional performance is a sure fire way to increase business results through a better understanding of how to maximise the effectiveness and productivity of your team.
For more information on effective management or using Emotional Intelligence contact Garry Marsh, Director at THM, The Business Training People - visit www.thmbiz.co.uk
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