Toxic Leaders

Posted by Ricki Sharpe on March 31, 2007  
Filed Under Leadership

One healthy development in the recent study of leadership is a new appreciation for the lessons taught by bad leadership. Barbara Kellerman, James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and Jean Lipman-Blumen, Thorton F. Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Organizational Behavior have both recently taken on the task of what makes bad leaders tick.

Kellerman’s Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, Harvard Business School Press, 2004, distinguishes between incompetent leaders and corrupt ones, a valuable reminder that there are many ways for leaders to fail.

In Lipman-Blumen’s book, The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why we follow destructive bosses and corrupt politicians — and how we can survive them, Oxford University Press (2006), she reminds us that, most of the time, we choose our bad leaders, they do not kidnap us. She argues that the main reason we are attracted to bad leaders is that they soothe our fears, a hypothesis worthy of further study.

Both authors raise the important issue of the havoc that can be wreaked by effective leaders with a perverse agenda.


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