Identifying Toxic Leaderships and the Impacts of Their Detrimental Behaviours

1. Identifying Toxic Leaderships and the Impacts of Their Detrimental Behaviours Leaders are important people who help lead the population or a group of desired followers toward a positive goal, growth, improvement, and learning. A leader is a responsible person who takes on the role of overseeing several essential duties that are expected of them. Be it providing the much-needed support, help, training, managing, guiding, motivating, encouraging, and many others, leaders are inspirational, influential, and impactful people from whom many meaningful, transformational, and fundamental experiences can be learned as life lessons. As there are two sides to every face, and two sides to every coin, the same principles apply to leaders as well. Not all leaders are capable of leading a team or group successfully. At the same time, it can also be said that not all leaders are meant to lead as they may follow a certain style that does not fit with the group, team, or individual they manage, especially if the latter are dynamic and culturally diverse. When these types of leaders don’t want to conform or change in ways where an individual can grow and improve, or if they aren’t flexible or transformational in their leadership style to best fit the group they’re responsible for, they can end up being quite toxic and detrimental to their team. This impact of toxic leaders can have serious and adverse effects that may or may not leave several permanent impacts on the individual or team. Therefore in this article, the identification of toxic leadership traits in dynamic and culturally diverse workplace environments will be explored in detail, how the effects of toxic leadership traits can be detrimental and harmful, and how this can impact their teams. Importance of Identifying Toxic Leadership Behaviors: In a workplace environment, where professionalism, focus, and a formal air of behavior should be followed, a leader can be many things. They can adopt any type of leadership style and use those qualities to lead their department, team, group, company, or establishment. Toxic leadership in organizations, especially in dynamic and culturally diverse workplace environments, where a group or an individual seeks guidance, learning, mentorship, growth, and improvement from a leader, employees allow themselves to be placed in a trusted environment and under a trusted authority so that they can have a surrounding that is healthy and positive for their work, well-being, growth, and performance. Unfortunately, toxic leaders do exist. Learning to identify the red flags beforehand or at the earliest possible time can provide an individual with the option to exit or stay wary of certain triggering behavioral points. Identification of toxic leadership can also help the team in

2. approaching and reporting toxic behaviors and the unhealthy environment that is being formed that deters them from reaching and achieving their duties, goals, performance, and growth. For more interesting topics and shared insights, visit The Europe Entrepreneur. Identifying Red Flags in Toxic Leadership: Several red flags and signs of toxic leadership behaviors can be identified immediately or they can be identified well into the duration or process of their leadership tenure. The various characteristics of toxic leaders can be identified as follows. Narcissistic personalities or behaviors can be quite selfish and apathetic when it comes to being a leader. This won’t do much help to both the leader as well as the employees and the relationship would be very toxic. Communications will be distorted, and absent, and there will be a lot of misunderstandings taking place as well impact work duties and responsibilities. Inflexibilities and Micromanaging are red flags that can be identified in toxic leadership traits. No one likes to be micromanaged and have their employers at the back of their necks throughout every passing second or hour of their work time. Inflexible to change, time, guiding, and monitoring can be a cause for frustrated employees which would eventually lead to burn-out. Bullying and discrimination are very negative attributes that a leader can have pertaining to how they treat their dynamic and culturally diverse team members. Bullying and discriminating against anyone is wrong. Moreover, when it is done in a workplace environment by a leader and someone who holds some level of authority or precedence over others, it goes against organizational policies and breaches the code of conduct. Several other directly impacting traits are - creating conflicts, apathetic attitudes, arrogance, dismissive, unencouraging, derogative speech, disrespect, and negative projections are examples of toxic leadership behaviors that can affect the well-being of employees and can disturb them from their usual lives or styles of working. The Detrimental Impacts: Toxic leadership behaviours and traits can have detrimental impacts on employees and team members. The mental health, and physical health of employees can be affected which can disrupt performance levels, growth, and the work duties of the employees. This toxic behavior can also leave deep psychological effects such as inculcating or developing the need to seek these types of negatively authoritative leaders out to work under them.

3. Decreased work, low energy, disinterested mindsets, low self-esteem, monotonous workdays, prolonged exhaustion, sudden burst-outs, severe burn-outs, depression, high stress, and low productiviness are some of the impacts faced by employees working under toxic leaderships. To Conclude: When leaders are meant to impart nothing but positivity to their employees, there are some other leaders with the leadership traits that can be quite negative, severe, and harmful. Toxic leadership behaviors can leave an individual, team, and even the environment around them negative and mentally afflicting. Trying to figure out and identify who your boss or leader is by their behavior and how they engage with you as well as how they treat others, and difficult situations, can be one of the things that you can do. Leaders who are supportive, influential, empathetic, understanding, and just show that they want to help you are the ones who will also be remembered more highly regarded. So, what kind of leader are you? What kind of leader would you want to work alongside?