Your company's best assets are your top performers, who contribute directly to your business growth and profits. Interestingly, they're also the first to leave at the earliest signs of dysfunction, since they're skilled enough to find better opportunities elsewhere.
The best employees often quit because of bad leaders or managers. A BambooHR survey found that direct managers continue to rank as the top reason employees quit a company.
By the time you detect signs of bad leadership, your best people have already left. You end up spending more time and resources getting new employees on board, only to see the cycle repeat.
In this post, we'll look at how bad leaders can cause irreparable damage to your business, and how you can detect and coach such leaders to become more employee-centric.
TL;DR
- Signs of bad leadership are hardly visible or loud. They can be sensed through subtle patterns, such as a lack of accountability, favoritism, credit-stealing, and a lack of transparency.
- One of the top signals of bad leadership is when your top performers start leaving before your poor performers.
- Toxic leaders are often detected using a checklist of generic symptoms. But each team is aligned with its leader's core values in its own way, often without the team even realizing it.
- Fixing toxic leaders requires a deeper understanding of leadership blind spots, the values and beliefs of leaders and team members, and the alignment gaps between them.
- Learn how R180's values and behavioral assessments help spot these patterns with structured data before your best talent decides to leave.
What Counts as "Bad Leadership"?
All leaders have their flaws, and not all flaws qualify as bad leadership. One or more flaws, such as a lack of accountability or unawareness of blind spots, are common among new leaders and often get sorted out with experience.
The spectrum of bad leadership ranges from poor to toxic. As we discussed, poor leadership is often attributed to skill gaps or a lack of experience, which can be addressed through necessary training and leadership aids.
However, bad leadership becomes toxic when the team members can no longer survive under their leaders. Every workday becomes a battle to deal with, including a lack of trust in leaders, bias and unfairness, conflicts and disputes in every conversation, and a general decline in morale.
Toxic leadership can be attributed to the behavioral patterns and ingrained values/beliefs that define a leader’s character. Such toxic traits require significant effort to reform, but by then the damage is done, and several good employees have left.
12 Signs of Bad Leadership to Watch For
Your best people leave first under toxic leaders because they can easily foresee the uncertainties of working under them every day. Even if you are not working with such leaders on a daily basis, you can easily identify if your teams are silently suffering under their leaders.
Look out for these hints whenever you chance upon your team leaders and their reportees to deduce how their teams are functioning.
1. Micromanaging instead of trusting the team
New teams may require their managers to guide them at every step to meet work standards, but this should ideally change over time. Not every single work task requires the manager to hover over and boss your employees.
If a manager can’t delegate a task without digging deeper and monitoring every chore, it often signals low confidence in his team members. Employees who lack the autonomy to apply their skills and proficiency in their jobs often cite micromanagement as a reason to quit and switch to another team or company.
2. Taking credit, deflecting blame
Leaders often build a brand image for themselves by taking credit for their team’s success, sometimes without crediting the members who made it possible. This credit-stealing is one of the primary reasons trust in leaders goes down in a jiffy.
In contrast, a bad leader immediately shifts blame to one or more team members when the team fails at work. This ping-pong approach to adapting situations to suit their image makes employees feel stuck under a toxic leader.
3. Feedback only flows one way
A good team culture ensures that feedback flows from leaders to employees and vice versa. Toxic leaders expect their employees to diligently act on the feedback they receive, but cannot accept criticism or suggestions from them.
For instance, team members request that their leader allow them to work from home two days a week based on the team’s workload. But the leader gets to decide the two days, depending on their convenience, to which the whole team must comply. Such incidents strip teams of their flexibility and freedom.
4. Favoritism runs the room
We have all seen the classic bad leadership trait where the leader always relies on one or two subordinates on the team, recommends them for several benefits, and makes decisions based on their opinions alone. Unfair favoritism stems from conscious or unconscious biases arising from the leader’s relationships with team members.
Favoritism becomes a problem when other good employees get sidelined by the leader’s favorites, affecting their productivity and day-to-day team dynamics. You can detect favoritism when leaders consistently take certain names for credit and shift blame to a select few on the team.
5. Communication is inconsistent or contradictory
Communication is often a common weak spot for several leaders, since most issues arise from a lack of clarity in conveying task expectations and progress to team members. Clear communication can be practiced over time, but inconsistency arises when the leader is unaware of what the team must do.
Not supporting their opinions and decisions with the right evidence, and often changing their speeches to support their superiors or favorites, shows that the leaders are not trustworthy in the words they say.
6. Leading through fear instead of motivation
Employees work productively when they feel safe while working under their team leader and with team members. A work environment driven by anxiety, fear of compliance, and deadlines hanging like a sword over the head indicates clear signs of bad leadership.
Employees’ overall well-being is most affected when working in a fear-driven environment, and leaders who fuel fear in the name of compliance only worsen things. Ideal leaders work to create an engaging environment where constructive criticism helps the team grow.
7. Avoiding hard conversations
Bad leaders clearly avoid discussions or conversations when they are incapable of providing solutions or getting the required support. It is in such situations that they try to shift blame to their superiors or subordinates rather than stating their own position.
Even simple problems that could have been resolved in a few days linger on for weeks or months without clarity, making the team members anxious or normalizing working under such leaders. But the best people, who have several opportunities outside, do not succumb to this normalization and choose to leave at the earliest opportunity.
8. Zero Self-Awareness
Blind spots in leadership often cause even good leaders to be projected as employee-unfriendly. However, such leaders strive to identify these blind spots and reflect on how they can better align with their team’s values and beliefs.
But bad leaders do not attempt to identify or analyze their blind spots and remain adamant that their beliefs and perceptions are right. This rigidity in remaining unfaceted, even as the whole team is aware of alarming red-flag leadership behaviors, can cost such leaders their best and most loyal employees.
9. Protecting hierarchy over outcomes
Bad leaders often make decisions to satisfy their own hierarchy of leaders and reporting managers, so they appear efficient and loyal. In this course, they often forget to prioritize and align with what their team members actually need or what is right for them.
Such leadership-pleasing practices without proper evidence and research-based data often cause the teams to redo work, resulting in a waste of time and effort. What leaders assume will protect their hierarchy and satisfy upper leaders often proves fateful for both them and their best employees.
10. Empathy missing in action
Team members expect their leaders to be empathetic enough to understand their requirements, values, and beliefs so that they can work together in harmony. However, bad leaders try to prove that it is only their way or the highway, which will always work.
Ironically, such leaders claim that they are all ears to hearing their subordinates' concerns and do their best to make them feel safe at work. But these words do not match their actions.
11. Resistance to new ideas
Just as bad leaders wish their team members would align with their core values and beliefs, they expect their team to accept every new idea they propose. In contrast, the leader always finds reasons to reject all possible ideas proposed by the team without analyzing their feasibility.
Such a timid response to new ideas kills the team’s creativity, and they slowly become neutral, not participating in innovative activities. Creative people who love innovative challenges use this as an opportunity to exit and move to a better place.
12. Development stalls under them
An easy hack to detect a bad leader is to check how the team and its members have grown over the past one or two years. Check the following parameters to see how the team has grown.
- How many members in the team have been promoted in the past year?
- Were any team members recognized companywide with appreciation?
- Did the leader alone get rewarded, or were the team members included as well?
Answers to similar questions indicate whether progress has actually occurred under the leader. If none of the team members show the right signs of growth, it can be an alarming sign of toxic leadership.
The Real Cost: What Bad Leadership Does to a Team
When employees find their leaders do not resonate with their thoughts, feelings, and active opinions, their overall morale reduces. For high performers who have been actively engaged while working at the company, being under a bad leader can undo years of goodwill.
A bad leader can trigger several instances of burnout, lowering team morale, leading to disengagement, quiet quitting, and subsequent attrition of loyal and top performers working under them.
In addition to pushing out the best people, bad leaders tend to attract the wrong people, mostly those who think alike or agree with them. Such employees often turn out to be poor performers who tolerate dysfunction and remain neutral just to stay in the job. This pattern slowly changes the team and the company’s culture.
In terms of actual costs, less optimal leaders cost organizations as much as 7% of their total annual sales. Almost 32% of a company’s voluntary turnover can be attributed to bad leadership, and replacing a good employee costs around 3 to 4 times their salary package.
Why "Good" Leaders Turn Toxic
In reality, not all leaders are toxic or bad from the beginning. Some efficient leaders have tried their best to learn and improve themselves. Organizations mostly see toxic leadership as an innate character flaw.
However, such toxic traits often stem from leaders working under pressure, trying to please superiors based on what has always worked, and being unwilling to go the extra mile. The real driver of toxicity is usually misalignment of values and blind spots that leaders do not notice.
When leaders possess the right skills but fail to wield them under work pressure, day-to-day stress, and other pressures, they cannot see their blind spots and fail to realize how their team looks up to them.
Traditional methods, such as anonymous feedback surveys and leadership reviews conducted by HR business partners, often receive employee complaints that leaders dismiss as politics and do not account for in leadership evaluations. HR teams mostly intervene only after the damage is done, by which time most of your best employees have left. Now they must focus on the next hiring cycle while ignoring the elephant in the room.
Bad leadership patterns are not just behavior; they're a blind spot that needs to be addressed with the right data showing that the leader is actually deviating from their ideal path.
How to Improve Bad Leadership
The good news is that toxic leadership traits can be changed. With the right data and accurate employee feedback, HR and group leaders can hold team leaders more accountable and help them overcome their blind spots to improve performance.
Ask for specific, behavioral feedback
Leadership feedback surveys must include more to-the-point questions so they are easy to analyze and provide accurate insights for leaders. Do not stick to open-ended questions, such as “How is your manager doing?”
Instead, ask questions like “What is one thing I did this month that made your job harder?”, or “Was there a time I said something that made you feel I was wrong or misunderstood you?”
Separate intent from impact
Underestimating the emotional tone of team members is a common trait that can make a leader be perceived as bad. When providing feedback, leaders must be cautious about how they communicate, highlighting the intent with which the feedback must be taken.
Resonating with and empathizing with your reportees helps you develop a clear intent with which to provide your feedback and ensure a safer impact.
Fix one behavior at a time
We saw how several factors and patterns contribute to toxic leadership, which can mean the leader must undergo a complete transformation. But a change in leadership personality amid hectic business schedules is easier said than done.
That is why self-awareness, followed by simple day-to-day practices focusing on one behavior at a time, helps bring small yet significant changes that make a leader plausible.
Don't rely on annual engagement surveys alone
Those half-yearly or annual feedback surveys, retention surveys, or engagement survey results come very late after many of your best people leave or have already started disengaging. By the time you come up with initiatives to improve engagement, your toxic leaders will have done more harm and will continue to believe that they are still the best.
Develop more accurate employee feedback channels to assess their leaders through periodic, short-burst pulse surveys.
Build accountability upward
Bad leaders view accountability as agreeing with their own bosses and preaching the same to their employees. This is where leaders need effective review structures and strategies to better analyze their performance.
- Are leaders able to grow personally while helping their employees grow?
- Is the leader successful in convincing senior leaders to implement genuine initiatives that will benefit their team members?
- How is the leader balancing differing decisions and opinions between superior leaders and employees?
Similar character evaluations help reveal how a leader remains accountable to both their bosses and team members.
Get outside insight, not just self-assessment
Leadership self-assessments are error-prone because the leaders may be completely unaware of blind spots. What may appear fair to a leader and their actions may not be perceived the same by the team members.
360° insights from team members, the leaders’ bosses, collaborators, the team’s client representatives, and many other stakeholders help provide a clear idea of a leader’s behavioral patterns and leadership abilities.
How Revaluate180 Helps You Spot and Fix These Patterns Before You Lose Good People
Instances of bad leadership in the company often come to light only through exit interviews, when employees give first-hand accounts of how their leaders behaved and what pushed them to quit. But by then, it's too late to undo the damage, and several others may follow suit soon after.
While still with the company, employees often refrain from discussing toxic leadership, fearing abuse of power and authority. Feedback surveys do very little to gather leadership insights and can't help monitor changes in patterns over time.
That's why it's important to collect evidence-backed data on what's happening in a team between the leaders and each member. R180 uses a structured, values- and behavior-based team assessment to surface alignment gaps, decision drivers, and engagement risks before they lead to attrition.
The assessments help identify "value blockers," the blind spots that drive certain leadership behaviors, without relying on gut instincts or guesswork. These clear leadership insights give leaders a data-backed picture that pushes them to work harder on themselves, rather than ignoring it as they might other survey feedback.
If you already have a hunch that your leaders could be a problem, it's best to act on that and stop your best people from leaving, rather than planning to rehire for your vacancies.
