Toxic Leadership

Colonel George E. Reed of the United States Army War College writes about Toxic Leadership and its effects on subordinates as well as different ways to identify, avoid, and handle Toxic Leadership. In 2003, Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White asked the U.S. Army War College (AWC) to address how the Army could effectively assess leaders to detect those who might have “destructive leadership styles.”1 The most important first step in detecting and treating toxic leadership is to recognize the symptoms.            The terms toxic leader, toxic manager, toxic culture, and toxic organization appear with increasing frequency in business, leadership, and management literature.  Analyst Gillian Flynn provides a particularly descriptive definition of a toxic manager; he is the “manager who bullies, threatens, yells.  The manager whose mood swings determine the climate of the office on any given workday.  Who forces employees to whisper in sympathy in cubicles and hallways...