Leader Detoxification: Strategies for Transforming Toxic Leaders and Organizations

The best solution for toxicity problems is transforming toxic leaders through detoxification. Author Alan Goldman describes detoxification as "the umbrella term for directly addressing dysfunctional decisions, policies, oversights, miscalculations, avoidance behavior, and leadership and follower behaviors that contaminate employees and operations."

Detoxification is a complex process that involves both leaders and their organizations and is a "process that calls for coaches and consultants who are able to identify the multiple sources and players that contribute to toxicity within a system." Without assistance, leaders should refrain from attributing the cause of dysfunctional behavior to a single event or person.

A troubled leader may wield an extraordinary level of toxic influence; however, the detoxification process often uncovers multiple and interdependent sources. Even the most poisonous acts may be symptomatic of orders dispatched from the top of the organizational hierarchy making the source of toxicity less obvious at first glance.

In fact, blaming the most visible and obvious cause and perpetrators and responding slowly to dysfunctional behavior are actually ways to accelerate toxicity and make it extremely difficult to address internally. Goldman says, "The shock and dismay expressed by clients who identify their organizational pain as already reaching into the lymph nodes of their operations is testimony to the need for a detoxification process that incorporates affective coaching and consultation."

The most successful consultations result in collaborations between internal or external consultant and organization, and stimulate positive transformations of both the toxic leader and the company. There are deficits and negative organizational behaviors that must be overcome by toxic clients in order to reach a state appropriate for a positive transformation.

There can be numerous roadblocks, rationalizations, pseudo-interventions, ulterior motives, and acts of sabotage and resistance that can undermine the best of intentions. Organizations that suffer from high levels of toxicity are immersed in systems of deficit thinking and behavior that affect leadership, human capital, operations, and policies.

When deficient systems engulf the workplace, negative organizational behavior becomes the rule. A myriad of dysfunctions can affect relations between leaders and subordinates, research and development, work teams, and customer service, and result in a toxic system.

These can include prolonged conflict, sabotage, the abrupt hiring of mercenary CEOs, and savage overnight re-structurings. These acts all constitute extreme deficits and are on the short list of prime sources of toxicity in many organizations.

This article was based on the book "Transforming Toxic Leaders" by Alan Goldman. The book summary is available on the Business Book Summaries website.