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Avoiding Toxic Leaders

With primary elections having come and gone, and midterm elections only eight weeks away, the news and media outlets are once again chock full of profiles of would-be politicians. Attempting to sort through the onslaught of campaign coverage – in your morning newspaper, on your web homepage, on the nightly news, even stuck to your neighbor’s car with a bumper sticker- is no easy task.

So, why bother? The obvious answer is that the democratic process lays the foundation for our civil liberties and freedoms. Slightly less obvious, and certainly more cynical, is the fact that this countryToxic desperately needs strong leadership right now. The threat of terrorism has produced a level of anxiety in this country that is impossible to ignore. So how can voters separate the Kings and Gandhis from the Ralph Reeds and McGreeveys?

Jean Lipman-Blumen, author of The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians – and How We Can Survive Them, dedicates a chapter of her book to discussing how to identify the warning signs of toxicity in a leader.

As Lipman-Blumen expains, the line between good and bad leadership can be blurry. She warns that leaders, “both good and bad – create enterprises in which we can feel we are living most intensely, were we are completely present in the moment.” Bad leaders take advantage of these tense moments, of the human desire “to participate in a noble vision…that very yearning for exhilaration that positions us within the grasp of toxic leaders.” Lipman-Blumen continues by outlining the following questions which are useful in helping the public detect toxic seeds in the current political discourse:

▪ Is the vision noble and positive for you and your group but detrimental to innocent others?
▪ Have multiple groups, with different needs, vetted these choices and subjected them to second and third opinions to determine whether there is benefit to most and harm to none or very few?…

Lipman-Blumen also outlines how to detect the first symptoms of toxicity in a nontoxic leader:

▪ Does the leader begin to keep his or her own counsel or take counsel only from a few advisors or only from yes-men and flatterers, like Shakespeare’s King Richard II and U.S. president Richard Nixon?…
▪ Does the leader begin to disguise dubious actions or decisions as noble and altruistic?

Educate yourself
before you vote and be careful to separate toxic visions and leaders from those who will ask hard questions and look beyond obvious answers.

The Allure of Toxic Leaders
is now available in paperback.

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