On Toxic Leaders (Part 1)

(From Voice magazine, Jan/Feb 2016.)

By Kenneth O. Gangel

What Is a Toxic Leader?

A vast percentage of leadership books in both the secular and religious domains deal with how to move from average to good or good to great in your own leadership, or how to help other people on your team do just that. The same analysis holds true in peri­odical literature, both journals and magazines. That’s why Jean Lipman-Blumen’s book hit the market with a crash in 2004. The title alone suggests, one could say, an “alluring” analysis of something we have swept into the corner and refused to look at: The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians—and How We Can Survive Them.

Defective Christian leaders rarely get their pictures in Time or Newsweek for defrauding employees or driving their ministries into bank­ruptcy, but make no mistake about it, we have toxic leaders in our midst. Lipman-Blumen won­ders why people follow such leaders and decides they do so because of a desire for dependence, a need to play a more crucial role in the organiza­tion, and just plain fear.

What allows abused leaders to survive, some­times even thrive? There must be a “buffering sufferer” who takes the sting from the top and softens it for those below. Middle management leaders can protect their people and make it pos­sible for them to effectively carry out their work undeterred by storms at the top.

But that stop-gap solution might not always work. We must understand the biblical and spiritual consequences of toxic leadership and attempt to at least cut the percentage of toxic leaders in the ranks of evangelical ministries. But first we have to begin with an understand­ing of the concept of toxic leadership. To be sure, toxic leaders are better described than defined, but toxicity is a clear term in the English lan­guage and I believe we can make the necessary crossover from the field of medicine to our understanding of leadership.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd edition) defines it as follows. The adjective toxic means “of, relating to, or caused by a toxin or other poison … capable of causing injury or death.” The word comes from the late Latin toxicus and from the Greek toxikon, both meaning poison. The noun toxicity simply means “the quality or condition of being toxic.” The noun toxin describes “a poisonous substance, especially a protein, produced by liv­ing cells or organisms, capable of causing disease when introduced into the body tissues but often also capable of inducing neutralizing antibod­ies or antitoxins.” We could go on, but you get the idea. Toxic often appears in connection with snake venom, alcohol, or fallout in the environ­ment from the mishandling of heavy metals such as lead, or solvents such as carbon tetrachloride.

Characteristics of a Toxic Leader

I have already mentioned a few of these above in my brief allusion to the work of Lipman-Blumen but the list of character­istics seems almost longer than we can treat. Furthermore, the complex blend of these person­ality traits in toxic leaders renders it impossible to pinpoint the exact problem through which the leader injects poison into the organization. The best we can do is acknowledge the presence of a toxic leader, then make an attempt to deal with it in whatever way possible to us at the time. So let me list ten qualities commonly found in toxic leaders in one or more blends, and then deal with each one separately in its own chapter. By the way, I intend no severity growing or declining throughout this list. These are separate entities, each one no less or no more dangerous to ministry than the others.

The Deceptive Leader

For this character trait we need no long sessions of debate or discussion; Scripture provides the perfect example in the third patriarch, Jacob. Surprised? The very fact that some readers thought I would start listing people like Hitler, Mussolini, Mao TseTung, or Saddam Hussein indicates already that we have the wrong concept of toxicity. A person with toxins in his or her body does not necessarily feel those toxins nor know their origin. If you have just been bit­ten by a Copperhead and you can clearly identify the snake to medical authori­ties, there is no guessing involved. But if you just go home night after night with a migraine headache and no physical cause can be found, you might be work­ing for a toxic leader and, sometimes, the toxicity might be deception.

The Autocratic Leader

Leaders given to total control of an organization, micro-managers, dictators, operate that way largely because they have an overly-developed ambition, or perhaps an inappropriate or inordinate ambition. This might be the most com­mon kind of toxic leader in Christian organizations because they can hide behind the authority of ordination, office, or even a particular interpretation of Scripture. They warn you and other members of the staff not to “touch the Lord’s anointed” lest God bring some destructive horror into your life.

The Egotistic Leader

Those familiar with the literature on leadership studies know that virtually every expert indicates leaders must have some touch of ego in order to take the point position and hold it through sun and storm. But let’s not confuse pride of workmanship with flat out arrogance.

The Incompetent Leader

People in a subordinate relationship find it most difficult to harbor the nag­ging thought that the boss might not know as much about their jobs as they do. I’ve spent a good part of my life working with students who graduated and enter assistant or associate positions in churches and other organizations. In some cases they walk into ideal learn­ing situations in which a veteran pastor full of wisdom can help them through the rocky early years. In others how­ever, they sign on with a church cursed by a leadership vacuum in which there exists a “Judges-like atmosphere,” people doing that which seems right in their own eyes.

The Ignorant Leader

A fine line exists between incompe­tence and ignorance. An incompetent leader simply does not know what to do. The ignorant leader simply does not know anything about leadership. He might be a walking encyclopedia in other areas, but incapable of understand­ing a specific arena of leadership. That explains why many faculty cannot func­tion as administrators.

The Cruel Leader

As indicated earlier, our minds immediately dance to this tune when we think about a word as nasty as toxicity in relation to Christian leaders. But thou­sands of people have seen cruel leaders in operation and still suffer the effects. I never fell into the curse of working for a cruel leader, but I did live with a cruel father during the earliest years of my life, so I have some personal sense of this disease.

The Evil Leader

Some leaders simply lack integri­ty and authenticity regardless of their titles. Have we not seen world renowned pastors and television evangelists fall into adultery or theft with some reg­ularity over the last several decades? Furthermore, evil leaders frequently come by their positions circuitously or even violently so their followers operate in fear right from the beginning. We’ll have to take a close look at this one.

The Demanding Leader

Almost all autocrats or cruel leaders are demanding, but not every demand­ing leader practices either cruel or autocratic leadership. In this chapter we will focus on the so-called “perfection­ists” who cannot stand errors in their own lives and ministries and therefore will not tolerate them in others. To be sure, one can more easily work with this person than some of the others, but the toxicity that emanates from such an environment destroys the team spirit we all want to develop in our organizations. Teams thrive on shared commitment. Without it, people perform as individu­als; with it, they become a powerful unit of collective performance.

In every effective team, the members genuinely agree to become account­able with and to their teammates. The dynamic that keeps arising here notes that a working group depends on the performance of individuals, but an effec­tive team is always worth more than the sum of its parts. Leaders who foster team development in the right place at the right time prime their organizations for top performance. As Katzenbach and Smith once wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “The difference between teams that perform and other groups that don’t is a subject to which most of us pay far too little attention (“The Discipline of Teams,” 2005.)

The Reckless Leader

I’m tempted to say here that one can spot reckless leaders most clearly by lazi­ness, but we know of many other forms of recklessness. We all find it difficult to serve lazy leaders if we are aggres­sive and eager to get the job done. But recklessness or carelessness can intro­duce toxicity to any organization. Titus learned this firsthand about two thou­sand years ago and we can profit from his experience.

Kenneth O. Gangel was Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Dallas Seminary and former Professor of Christian Education at Calvary Bible College, Kansas City, MO. Kenn also was a member of IFCA International. He went to be with the Lord in 2009.