Learning from Toxic Leaders

The two main challenges of toxicity are how to handle it and how to define it. By getting into the heads of toxic leaders, we can understand how they think, their strengths and weaknesses, thus, being able to handle them as well as knowing some specific characteristics that would help us understand why people follow them. The current framework tries to assess toxicity consequences instead of motives. Therefore, the results are always dispersed. A deeper understanding of the motives would contextualize them into defining clearer shades of toxicity. A proof by contradiction method was also used to overcome the definition problem. This was founded on two principles of authenticity and integrity, but it proved theoretically and empirically problematic when deconstructed. Toxicity is always going to be there, so using it personally as a teaching tool and organizationally as a stress test tool would give us valuable lessons, as having toxic leaders around us will demonstrate by contrast the real value of true leadership.