The leadership behaviours we excuse and the cultures they create

Written by Jane Arthur-Mcguire, director at Jam People Consulting

“They’re brilliant [slight pause for the but] …. but they have been known to upset people along the way”

Almost every executive team I’ve worked with has a version of this senior leader in their organisation.

 Sometimes it’s about the commercially exceptional executive who leaves their team feeling bruised from vicious feedback about performance. Sometimes it’s the senior leader whose technical expertise is unquestionable, but who creates confusion by constantly changing direction.

Other times it’s the individual who everyone bemoans in private but who brings vision and foresight to the business that feels invaluable.

On the surface, these look like individual leadership issues that should be addressed with individual feedback and clear expectations. But over the years I’ve found myself becoming increasingly focused on the organisation around the leader and asking, 

“Why do intelligent organisations tolerate behaviours they know are damaging?”

They’re not doing it intentionality, they often care deeply about organisational culture and colleague engagement, but somewhere along the way they have made a trade-off they didn’t realise they were making.

They’ve traded long-term cultural health for short-term performance.

We spend a lot of time talking about organisational culture

We’ve worked with organisation to define values, to articulate expected behaviours, to launch engagement initiatives and invest in leadership development. And increasingly organisations are recognising that culture isn’t just a KPI on the People team’s agenda, it’s a strategic asset that influences innovation, customer experience, employee retention and ultimately organisational performance.

Yet, when you strip away all the theory, the measurement and the complex interventions, culture has always been something much more ordinary. In fact, it’s what happens when nobody is consciously thinking about culture at all.

Culture lives in the everyday conversations that people chose to have, or avoid.

One difficult meeting won’t destroy your culture. One impatient comment won’t send talented people looking for another job. Leadership is demanding and complex and nobody performs at their best all of the time.

The problem isn’t isolated moments, its repeated patterns. Where patterns become expectations and expectations become norms and norms become the culture.

People start adapting their own behaviour as a result. They stop offering challenge because experience tells them it won’t be welcomed, they become more cautious and delay difficult conversations, they spend more energy managing personalities than solving problems. It’s rarely dramatic, it’s more like an erosion than a collapse. The changes are incremental enough that each one seems rational in isolation until one day, we’re in conversation with our clients examining why collaboration has declined, why is productivity low, why nobody is innovating, or why they’re losing their top talent.

Hidden, but entirely predictable

It’s easy to see then why it feels like these problems come out of nowhere. Everything seemed to be ok, nothing was visibly that wrong. The natural assumption is that something has changed, and the answer may just be that the pressure has increased.

Leadership at senior levels asks something fundamentally different of people. The visibility is greater, the ambiguity is higher, the scrutiny is relentless. The support structures that existed in previous roles often disappear.

The behaviours that emerge under these conditions can look very different from the behaviours displayed during lower stress times, or during an interview process for example, a point where many organisations unintentionally overlook something really critical and entirely predictable.

The behaviours most likely to derail leadership are not random

They are predictable and are sometimes extensions of the very strengths that helped someone to succeed in the first place. Confidence can become overconfidence. High standards can become micromanagement. Decisiveness can become control. Relationship building can become avoiding necessary conflict. Vision can become distraction.

Most of us have patterns that emerge when we’re under sustained pressure, tired, stretched, challenged beyond our current capability or operating without regular feedback.

Leadership isn’t simply determined by capability. It’s also determined by self-awareness and the ability to adapt and learn from previous experience. Even more so in today’s complex and ambiguous environment where leaders cannot rely on knowing the answer or holding the more knowledge.

Psychological assessment

We’re strong advocates of robust psychological assessment as part of executive selection and leadership development. They shine a light on patterns that are otherwise difficult to see. They help us answer questions like:

• How will this leader respond when the pressure increased?
• What motivates them
• What strengths might become liabilities if overplayed?
• How are they likely to align with the team?
• Where might they need the most support for successful onboarding?

We’ve helped many organisations to avoid costly hiring mistakes because these conversations happen before an appointment was made. We’ve also seen powerful examples where the insights on risk profiles gave an incoming executive and those around them to information to adapt early, to build credibility and strong relationships from the outset.

The assessment itself isn’t the solution, it's the quality of the conversation that matters.

Why ‘toxic leaders’ is a toxic phrase

It’s an easy label. Sometimes an accurate one, but most of the time an unhelpful one. It encourages us to believe that the problem sits entirely with an individual. But when we’re working with organisations, we always encourage them to reflect on:

“What conditions allowed these behaviours to become normalised?”

• What feedback has been withheld?
• What behaviours have been rewarded?
• What conversations have been avoided?
• What compromises have been made over time?

Organisations don’t become the culture they aspire to. They become the culture their leaders create through thousands of everyday interactions.

Interactions that are shaped by predictable behavioural patterns, reinforced by organisational systems and either challenged or tolerated by those around them.

Culture is in equal measure defined by the behaviours we celebrate AND those that we repeatedly excuse.

If this article has prompted reflection on your leadership and culture or if you’re interested in exploring how we can help you identify your leadership risks, develop capability and create the conditions for sustainable success, then please take a look at our website and get in touch by emailing as we'd love to have a conversation about how we could support you.