Toxic and egotistical leaders and their followers

Citation

Allio, R.J. (2007), "Toxic and egotistical leaders and their followers", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 35 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2007.26135cae.001

Toxic and egotistical leaders and their followers

Toxic and egotistical leaders and their followers

Robert J. Allio is a principal of Allio Associates, located in Providence, RI (rallio@mac.com). His article “Bad leaders: how they get that way and what to do about them” appears in this issue.

The Allure of Toxic LeadersJean Lipman-BlumenOxford University Press, 2005

In this compelling and carefully-documented work, the author attempts to explain why we “follow destructive bosses and corrupt politicians.” Rather than focus on the leader’s behavior, Lipman-Blumen calls our attention to the behavior of followers.

The book is segmented into three parts. Part one is an exposition on the psychological factors that drive our search for leaders. These include a need for authority figures, a desire for security and certainty, and a need for membership in a community.

Part two explores how willing followers keep toxic leaders in power. Her taxonomy includes benign followers, the leader’s entourage, and malevolent followers.

Part three proposes a number of strategies to “liberate ourselves.” These include counseling the toxic leader, and a number of more seditious approaches: quietly working to undermine the leader and, finally, working with others to overthrow the leader. A final exhortation for followers is to “free ourselves from illusions and become a self-reliant constituency.” Unfortunately, the author provides minimal guidance on how to achieve this utopian state. Not surprising, since history books are full of failed follower examples!

Nevertheless, The Allure of Toxic Leaders is a scholarly work, exceptional in its detailed analysis of the leader-follower pathology, and bolstered by numerous case histories. This is not an airplane read, but one that merits the reader’s thoughtful perusal. It makes my list of the best leadership books of recent years.

Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris is Wrecking Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the TrapMathew HowardKaplan Publishing, 2007

In the view of Mathew Howard, wrecked companies and careers are the inevitable result of executive hubris. His bold thesis is that hubris may be “humanities’ cardinal sin,” a condition so imbedded in our culture that it is a “latent force within each of us.”

Ego Check strives to pin many leadership failures on the donkey of overconfidence. His exhaustive list of examples range from corporate executives (at Apple, Merck, AIG, and others) to individuals. He suggests, for example, that grade inflation gives students a false confidence in what they know. And overconfidence by investors leads them to believe that they can beat the market.

Hayward identifies four sources of leadership hubris or “reckless self-confidence”:

1. 1.

   Getting too full of themselves (exemplified by Steve Jobs and John Sculley).

2. 2.

   Failing to get out of their own way: isolation brought about by a false sense of confidence (exemplified by Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard).

3. 3.

   Kidding themselves about their situation and acting on minimal feedback (Ray Gilmartin at Merck).

4. 4.

   Failing to manage tomorrow today (NASA’s handling of the Challenge and Columbia disasters).

His primary prescription for avoiding the pitfalls of false confidence is to create foils – groups or individuals that can give honest and timely feedback to the decision-maker, and his illustrations of successful foil relationships is excellent.

The author fails to elucidate clearly the intrinsic sources of hubris, and his designation of hubris as the universal cause for missteps is simplistic. Nevertheless, Ego Check’s many case histories provide us with rich material from which we can formulate our own explanations for cause and effect in the executive suite.