Of Recent Interest—
The Allure of Toxic Leaders:
Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt
Politicians—and How We Can Survive Them
By Jean Lipman-Blumen (New York: Oxford UP 2005)
Reviewed by Daniel Liechty
Most of the time we assume that leaders lead and followers follow. It is a rather straightforward and uncomplicated process. Looking more closely, we see that followers in many ways choose the leadership they want, and will discard leaders who do not lead in the way followers want to be led. There is a bit of the leader being led by the followers in this view. Thus politicians (continued on page 3) increasingly rely on polling data before taking any position or making any decision, while many sectors of the market economy eschew moral responsibility for their products, insisting that they are only providing for people what people themselves clearly already want. Most books on the topic leave us at one or the other of these two levels of understanding.
Lipman-Blumen coined the phrase “toxic leadership” to designate this extremely bad sort of leader. Here she is not talking about incompetence, lack of foresight, or run-of-the-mill mismanagement. She is talking about leaders as predatory sociopaths. In business, these are the people who, for personal gain and aggrandizement, unapologetically bilk and destroy the companies they are hired to lead; who cook the books to inflate stock prices, then use their insider information to sell their own shares just days or hours before exchange regulations would make them culpable for doing so; who raid company pension funds as if they were a private treasury. In politics, these are the people for whom no malevolent act is out of bounds in the name of gaining and holding power; who sell access to the highest bidders; who pursue policies that abjectly favor the investment class while maintaining a populist rhetoric and scolding others for raising issues of class warfare; and who take us into prolonged and unwinnable wars on the basis of flimsy and false intelligence hyped to appear as solid information.
Bad folks, to be sure. Yet even people who see clearly through the fog of their fear and propaganda will continue to give loyal support for such leaders. Lipman-Blumen thus takes us to a different level of analysis altogether. What fascinates her is not that the people follow leaders, or even that leaders follow the people. What fascinates her is that people will continue to follow leaders, remain loyal to leaders, and vigorously resist change and challenges to leaders who have clearly violated the leader/follower relationship and abjectly abused their power as leaders to the direct detriment of the people they are leading. When we continue not only to tolerate leaders such as this, but to remain loyal followers (the book is full of examples of just this phenomenon), and when such people fascinate us through the media images they project, and we find them positively alluring, Lipman-Blumen suggests there is something of a deeply psychological nature going on and this is the place where her remarkably penetrating investigation takes off, in the central question of the book: What are the forces that propel followers, again and again, to accept, often favor, and sometimes create, toxic leaders?
In the course of the book, Lipman-Blumen comes at this question from many angles. She never jumps to the simplistic conclusion, but always looks for the most well rounded perspective, even if that be more complicated than the sound-bite answers. Lipman-Blumen continually returns to the theme of anxiety as the source of the problem we face. A cluster of chapters examines the internal, psychological needs that we seek to fill in our choice of leaders. These reduce to an underlying need for safety, and the twin needs to stand out as special, on the one hand, and to feel neatly tucked into a caring community, on the other hand. More than anything else, it is in the clever manipulation of these needs that leaders are able to exploit situations of leadership in toxic directions.
These needs for safety, specialness and community are all expressions of deeply rooted existential anxieties, which, drawing repeatedly on the work of Otto Rank, Ernest Becker, and various aspects of Terror Management Theory in social psychology, Lipman-Blumen suggests is itself a manifestation of death anxiety. Death anxiety here is understood psychologically and emotionally as encompassing not only anxieties about physical death, but also social ostracism and other symbolic forms of death anxiety. Thus, by adroit exploitation of our mostly unconscious death anxieties, leaders hold out the overt or implied promise that submission to their leadership creates the conditions for meaningful living. In the positive sense, we desperately want what such leaders seem to promise. Negatively, we fear the inverse, of life without conditions of meaning. The unconscious nature of both the desires and the fears more than cover for the objective irrationality of our response. Thus when Republican leaders Dick Cheney and Dennis Hastert baldly suggested recently that if anyone but their candidate wins the coming Presidential election, we are much more likely to be subject to terrorist attacks, they are demonstrating the worst aspects of toxic leadership in the political realm.
Another cluster of chapters addresses the many ways in which groups of people openly invite leaders to lead who exhibit toxic characteristics, and coax even relatively good leaders toward toxicity as a condition for their continued loyalty. The fact is, we have created an economic and political system in which toxic styles of leadership have an advantageous edge over other styles of leadership, especially when measured in the short term view by narrowly-defined standards, and with a myopic view of who absorbs the costs and benefits of the administration. Here especially, the role of media in presenting highly stylized images of success is crucial to the social mix in which this process occurs.
Finally, another cluster of chapters looks at ways in which emerging toxicity in leadership can be diagnosed in progress, resisted and reformed in process, and diminished in terms of its negative individual and social consequences. Again, these solutions to the problem point at least as much toward the responsibility of followers and to leaders. Those who eagerly push themselves forward into leadership positions, in business, education, religion, politics, and many other areas of life, almost surely harbor a large pool of potential toxicity within them. It is the responsibility of followers to help them keep this in check, to create systems whose rules also strongly act as a check to emerging toxicity, and also to nurture toward positions of leadership responsibility those who are not so eager to lead. A healthier future will depend on this.
Our culture has already gone far down the path of exalting toxic leaders as heroes to be emulated. Reversing this course will be very difficult, as Lipman-Blumen makes clear. But this is an honest, exciting and important book, offering both startling analysis of the problem and solid, pragmatic suggestions for finding a way forward.
