Friday morning I got a chance to discuss and learn leadership principles from experienced male leaders from every walk of life. The room consisted of doctors, lawyers, preachers, deacons, principals, teachers, entrepreneurs, fathers, and husbands. Friday’s topic was over toxic leadership, the characteristics of toxic leaders and how to overcome toxic leadership.
Signs of Toxic leadership
We discussed the two main types of toxic leadership, which are the Narcissist leader and the Machiavellian leader. First, signs of a Narcissist leadership style primarily include love attention, seek positive feedback, feel entitled to position or power and have an unrealistic sense of achievement. Machiavellian leaders are skilled at manipulating others, emotionally cold, prone to aggressive behavior, engages in deception, and a pretense of concern for others. Also, toxic leaders perceive disagreement as rebellion, deals in absolutes, and regards honesty as disloyalty.
How to overcome
The characteristics of toxic leadership were excellent insight and caused me to perform a self-examination of my leadership practices. However, I gained the most from the study when discussing how to deal with toxic leadership correctly. Unfortunately, a lot of us will have to deal with some form of toxic leadership at least once. During that season we were advised not to become the disgruntled employee but to remain active, tenacious toward our work, and a pleasure to be around. This will keep you from succumbing into the toxic culture, which will negatively affect your job.
Jamal,
ReplyDeleteThis post was insightful and enlightening to read. First, I think it is crucial as future school leaders to sit with other leaders in their perspective fields to receive advice. I think toxic leadership is something we have all dealt with at some point in our schools. Your analysis of the narcissist leader and the Machiavellian leader are types of leadership I have dealt with in the past. At the time, I did not know how to confront those leadership styles; therefore, I voiced my opinion about the leaders to other staff members. They gave me the same advice you mentioned to combat toxic leadership. Toxic leadership has the adverse effect of bringing down the morale of the school culture. Therefore, toxic leadership can impact student achievement. As a future leader, I believe in engaging dialogue with my subordinates about the types of leadership they respond to the most. In doing so, I believe this will be a factor to keep the culture of the school positive and not toxic.
Jamal, this is very interesting! Was this a workshop you attended or was it offered through your school....I would love to be part of something like this.
ReplyDeleteHey Bernardo,
Deleteit was a lesson presented during our Men's Friday morning bible study at Elizabeth Baptist Church in Cascade. The ladies have a similar study too.