How to be a Toxic?Manager

Management articles usually aim to teach us how to be better managers?—?but never how to be brilliantly bad.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with and learning from a diverse range of managers. About half of them were brilliant leaders, inspiring me with their wisdom and guidance. The other half, however, taught me valuable lessons on what not to do. This stark contrast between good and bad management has been instrumental in shaping my understanding of effective leadership.

It’s important to note that these bad managers never set out to be terrible. Like all of us, they were navigating the complexities of their roles and the pressures of getting things done. However, in their pursuit of success, some adopted a bullying and abusive approach. They became narcissistic and selfish, embodying the cartoon image of leading from the back, blaming others for every failure and claiming every success as a personal triumph.

I was responsible for deploying Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) controls in multiple businesses. These controls were mandated for public companies after the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals when poor financial controls created a material risk for the stakeholders who lost all their money.

The controls to be audited covered around 112 factors in change management, operations, development, and security areas of a business and aimed to ensure adequate independent controls to identify and expose malfeasance.

Building Your Toxic?Fiefdom

Knowing what is best practice helped me quickly identify the opposite. Some toxic leaders would segregate controls into a bureaucratic structure where nobody but them had end-to-end decision-making responsibilities, and previously effective managers were drowning in bureaucracy and red tape.?

Some even fired competent direct reports they saw as threatening their position. Thus, they became indispensable, as they couldn’t be replaced by the drones they had working for them.?

For a toxic manager, busyness is your friend, as you can stress and destroy previously competent functions and achieve ultimate control?—?they will leave or abandon their professional work ethic.

The other benefit of eliminating end-to-end controls in your fiefdom is that you can adopt a friends and family policy of corruption, where invoices for services are not sent or collected, and your grateful friends will reward you appropriately.

Avoiding Disaster

However, be careful when dipping your nib in corporate ink. Capital expenditures such as a personal bathroom or bedroom adjacent to your office are necessary to justify the long hours you spend in the office. They can be used to relax with subordinates of the opposite sex, but they can have unintended consequences.

The expression “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” has been the experience of some male managers who slept their way through the so-called customer care department.

When it looks like a dog and barks and wags its tail?—?it is probably a dog.

I have identified and rooted out toxic leadership when decisions were made to purchase lower-performing solutions that were more expensive than alternatives. Be careful of corporate oversight and those helpful corporate seagulls who easily expose amateurish, corrupt behaviour.

Feathering Your?Nest

One of the challenges for the effective toxic leader is that companies today don’t last forever. So you will need to get another job one day soon.

A study by McKinsey found that the average lifespan of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared.

So, as you maximise your personal benefits in your current enterprise, be careful of those you have walked on and dispensed with, as you may well meet them in another life. I think of it as a bit like when you are stopped for speeding and the police will nail you?—?the best solution is to reverse over them a few times and ensure you avoid the penalty. With those staff you have crushed, make sure they cannot haunt you in the future, and they stay crushed?—?a bad reference used to help.

Conclusion

To be an effective toxic manager, you must divide and conquer all opposition. You can achieve this by forcing your more professional colleagues to give up.

Remember, busyness and bureaucracy are your friends that distress your enemies and de-stress you.