Transforming Toxic Leaders

Transforming Toxic Leaders Alan Goldman Stanford University Press, 2009 184 pages, Hardcover, WE NEED THE PRICE HEREAt the heart of this book is the idea that destructive leadership carries a huge cost in terms of human- and economic health, and by early detection it must be prevented from destroying value. The term 'toxic' in the title refers to destructive and dysfunctional leadership styles infecting an entire organization. The word 'transformation' implies remedies for turning value destruction into opportunities. To that extent, the book meets its goal.Seven anecdotes from the author's personal experience illustrate the points and give lessons on the management of anger, grievance, coaching, revolt, recovery and insubordination. The audiences for whom this book is appropriate are human resources department personnel, MBA students taking HR courses could benefit from the case studies, and corporate board members and corporate officers could use the cases to contemplate their own behavior and to detect early warning signs among their peers. The anecdote dealing with anger describes a brilliant heart surgeon who has no tolerance for any person less accomplished than himself, and who is a perfectionist with an abrasive personality on top ofthat. His medical specialty put this person into a position of leadership by definition. The hospital administrators can't afford to fire him without undermining the reputation of the institution on one hand, and they can't put up with him without risking revolt among the ranks and lawyers waiting in the wings with legal action. This scenario can occur in any other industry or setting with the same consequence. The intervention that brought this case to closure included giving the man a lighter leadership role in people terms, and a greater leadership role in his professional specialty. Parallels can be found in industry where brilliant engineers may be paid as much as corporate officers, receive the same perks, but have little or no administrative responsibility. Another example relative to the filing of grievances involves an organization traumatized by dictatorial managers pushing work schedules to the limit of human endurance. Here the top managers are driven by correcting declining earnings at the expense of employees, some of whom comply to secure their own survival. One hatchet man quits and subsequently reinvents himself. The remedies involved leadership coaching and system-wide healing.Transforming Toxic Leaders starts with a useful matrix of symptoms and remedies preparing the reader on what to expect in the seven chapters that follow. Seven anecdotes give the book a story line and report on the author's personal experience as a coach and psychiatrist. These stories cover different industries and all presumably refer to large organizations. Given the current government intervention into the free market on the notion of "too large to fail", it occurred to the reviewer that such symptoms may be a case of "too large to manage", which could be the focus of another book. With each chapter having a summary at the end, the reader walks away with a good understanding of the issues at hand. After the identification of so called "toxins", the author provides 125 strategies for overcoming such issues as demagoguery, emotions, life and death leadership, and the re-invention of the leader; all of which are very useful. In one case bankruptcy ends a dysfunctional corporation. But was the cause of death entirely dysfunction, or was it old age, or both? Corporations are human-made structures and appear to have lifecycles similar to that of their creators, i.e., birth, adolescence, maturity, and decline. Toxin removal at the maturity stage can probably prolong corporate life, but it most likely can't prolong corporate life forever. Most useful for the casual reader, however, are the suggested remedies, or detoxifications, that apply to general situations. …