When I was in my corporate sales job I worked out of a remote office, which was for the most part a lot of salespeople who were in the office Monday through Friday. But some, like myself, started to work from home on Fridays. I had been doing that for at least a year when all of a sudden, one of our senior VPs out of another office put out this mandate – no more working from home. Needless to say, we were very upset by this; I will say, I was angry.
Most of us felt like this was a sign of some distrust.
I had been with our organization for over a decade, our team was doing great. I mean, these were high-level, sophisticated salespeople that were professionals, so to put this mandate in place was really very jarring. And we were vocal about it to our VP. So our VP, local there in the office, decided to try to lessen the blow a little bit and started bringing things in on Fridays, including bagels.
The admin would assemble these bagels on a cart, and they were placed in this general seating area outside of that VP’s office. I later found out that the office was calling these bagels “the attendance bagels,” because they felt it was intentional; that it was strategic that these bagels were placed outside of this VP’s office, as a way to see who was actually showing up on a Friday.
Now, I don’t know if that was the intention, but why am I sharing this story with you? Because it is a potential sign of toxic leadership. Toxic leadership we know doesn’t just impact those that are direct reports, but it has a ripple effect across teams and potentially an entire office, if not an organization. There are some really obvious behaviors when we might say, “That’s a toxic leader. I can spot them,” right?
That leader is so power-hungry. Oh, they’re exhibiting narcissistic behavior.
Those are obvious. But what about the subtle behaviors, the subtle traits that you may potentially not even be aware of that you’re doing? Such as, potential favoritism. Think about how you interact with your direct reports. Could somebody say that you’ve got a favorite – or favorites – that could potentially lead to some toxicity on your team? A lack of your own self-awareness is a big one.
I would argue that even if this leader with those bagels had no idea, if that wasn’t their intent, that would exhibit a lack of self-awareness of how that person came across, to allow for people to even think that that was possible. So I encourage you, take a look at your current behaviors. What are some things that might be where you’re not really quite aware?
You might want to rethink some interactions and even slight nuances of your behavior that could potentially lead to some toxicity. We want to avoid the toxic leadership – it’s always the nuances!