Toxic Leader

In this past class, we discussed the concept of a toxic leader. A toxic leader, in short, is a person in a leadership position that ends up injuring or hurting the corporation they are working for, either intentionally or unintentionally. In lecture, we briefly touched upon different characteristics a toxic leader may have, as well as different types of toxic leaders exist. 

Over spring break, I managed to come across an example of a toxic leader. This particular person had about 25 children under her supervision, and the children were in a library looking for books. I happened to be working at this library at the time that the children had the ability to look for books. The first thing I noticed was that she left the children in the care of the librarian for most of the given time period the children had in the library. Upon arriving, she then tried to get the children to calm down before they went about the library to select books. After she dismisses all of them, one child comes up to her and asks her how to find a book within his reading level. The teacher simply says that he needs to “eyeball” what type of book may be in his reading level. I overheard this conversation, and politely turned around and told both the teacher and the child that he would need to look for a certain sticker color to find books in his reading level. The teacher then sneers the word “oh”, turns around and walks away from the child and myself.

This person hold many characteristics in common with a toxic leader, which is shown through her behaviors and actions. She is incompetent when it comes to searching in the library for a book in a person’s grade level, based on her advice to the child on how to select a book. She is arrogant to others who try to help her and her followers, as shown by her reaction to my help. She also shows how irresponsible she is when she leaves her children to be supervised by someone whose job does not entail handling a class of students for about half an hour. She holds these characteristics and many more in common with those of a toxic leader. Because she holds a number of characteristics in common with those of a toxic leader, she can be considered one

Based off of some of the characteristics held above, we can place this person into several different categories when it comes to identifying this person as a toxic leader. This person cod be seen as an absentee leader, one who is either physically or emotionally detached from her followers, as shown by her act of leaving the children to wreak havoc in the library. We could also call this person an incompetent leader, simply because she does not know how the system for identifying grade levels for books works, considering the fact that this program has been at this school/district for over five years. This person can also be considered a rigid leader, simply because she did not accept my viewpoint and obviously has no interest in learning about a system that determines the grade levels for certain books.