Preventing Toxic Behaviour

A natural response to the recent Gregg Wallace allegations would be to want to double down on efforts to ensure that toxic and inappropriate behaviour from leaders is always flagged and addressed. But perhaps the most important lesson we can learn is to not do this. Or at least not just do so. Because as important and laudable as these efforts are, just concentrating on flagging toxic behaviour will never be enough and will always be doomed to be a case of locking the gate after the horse has bolted.

The reason for this is that toxic and inappropriate behaviour is a symptom of something far broader, far more common, and – potentially – far more dangerous. And so it is this other thing, then, that organisations should be creating processes to flag for if they wish to keep their people – and their profits – safe. The challenge is what this other thing is. Because it is almost an unmentionable. Something always there but rarely acknowledged, and even then, not fully. And it is power.

For all power is undiscussed, there is a lot of research on it. What it reveals is that power changes everyone who holds it, no matter what their level. The only question is how much they are affected by it. This is driven partly by contextual factors and partly by personality. But there are two key things that power does to everyone.

The first thing is that power creates distance between leaders and the people they lead. They may not feel it; they may try to compensate for it, but it is there. On the plus side, this makes it easier for them to take a helicopter view and see things more abstractly. But it also means they are more likely to generalise and stereotype, more liable to objectify others and view them as resources, and less able to see things from their perspective or understand how they feel. So, power inherently reduces leaders’ ability to connect with others and understand them, and thus also – critically – to accurately gauge their impact upon them.

The second thing power does is change how people feel about themselves. Having more power tends to increase self-esteem and confidence and can even lead to a more positive body image. There are many traps in this for leaders, but ego and over-confidence stand out. These, in turn, tend to lead to three separate tendencies: an inflated sense of the correctness of one’s opinions, a tendency to believe you are better than average at important things, and an overestimation of how much control you have over outcomes. The effects of these tend to include over-optimism, reduced curiosity, and a tendency to discount others’ advice and feedback. And what makes this worse, of course, is that when people have power, the others around them are less likely to be fully open with them, too.

One way of summarising all this would be that power affects your judgement in non-positive ways and reduces your ability to recognise this through getting good feedback. That may sound overstated. But it really isn’t. The statements in the two paragraphs above are backed by decades of research.

So, imagine a leader walks into a new role with some outdated values or inappropriate assumptions. They probably don’t start off as toxic or improper. Most people don’t. They become that way over time, gradually evolving – or devolving – that way as the effects of power cause them to become more extreme versions of themselves. But because we don’t talk enough about power or prepare leaders sufficiently for what it can do to them, we don’t catch enough of these cases where not-positive behaviour gradually slips into unacceptable behaviour. What, then, can we do? Three things stand out for starters.

First, in addition to creating processes in which employees can raise red flags about toxic or inappropriate behaviour, we need to develop processes for raising broader amber flags for the affects of power. This would need to be done with care and would probably be better positioned as a protective mechanism rather than a process of complaint. But if we want to stop toxicity before it happens, we need to find ways to stop the underlying process rather than the toxicity itself.

Second, we need to invest in preparing leaders for the effects of power. I have rarely seen a development programme that openly talks about the perils of power and how to deal with it. If we want things to change, this needs to change.

Third, when selecting individuals for senior leadership roles there needs to be an explicit conversation about how the individual may be affected by the power of the role and what the power may reveal within them.

And this may be the most uncomfortable element here. It is often said that power corrupts. And it does certainly affect and change people. But power doesn’t really corrupt. What power really does is to reveal and amplify what is already inside people. This doesn’t mean we need some kind of moral policing of candidates. But, imagine a candidate who was known to be a ‘bit of a character’. Well, perhaps they could be given more support to ensure that this side of them was not inappropriately fed by the power of their role.

Addressing each of these elemenst has challenges. Leaders are typically quite defensive to acknowledging and talking about the negative effects of power – or at least, as they may affect them personally. And suggesting that toxic and inappropropriate behaviour might have the same underlying cause as more morally innocuous things, such as inadvertently leaving an employee feeling uncared for or accidentally discouraging someone from speaking up with a good idea, may seem distasteful to some. But if we want to stop the seeming endless trail of reports of inappropriate conduct, we need to start addressing the underlying causes. And it is the very sensitivity of the task that means it is one that only HR can do.

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Nik Kinley is a London-based leadership consultant, assessor and coach with over 35 years of experience working with some of the world’s biggest companies. An award-winning author, he has written eight books, and is currently working on his ninth, exploring how power affects leaders.