Stop Accommodating Toxic Leaders
During the past few days, a lot of leadership expert advice has surfaced on how to engage with a narcissistic and toxic leader. The advice essentially boils down to manipulation tactics: how to manage up, how to frame things in ways that appeal to the narcissist’s ego, how to protect yourself while keeping the toxic person appeased. It is presented as practical wisdom. I think it is a problem.
It is a problem because if you want to be part of a high-performing team or a high-performing organization, fostering and accommodating toxic behavior is fundamentally at odds with that goal. High performance requires psychological safety, honest communication, and the ability to challenge ideas without fear of retaliation. None of those things are possible when the team is walking on eggshells around a leader whose ego dictates the atmosphere. You cannot optimize for performance and simultaneously optimize for keeping a narcissist comfortable. Those two goals are in direct conflict.
It is also a problem because the manipulation itself is corrosive. The advice essentially tells you to become a manipulator in order to survive another manipulator. That is not a healthy professional skill. That is a survival mechanism for a dysfunctional environment, and normalizing it means normalizing the dysfunction. When we teach people “here is how you work around a toxic leader,” we are implicitly saying “toxic leadership is a fixed constraint you should adapt to.” It is not. It is a failure that should be addressed, not accommodated.
The long-term damage of this approach is real. Organizations that tolerate toxic leaders – even when those leaders produce short-term results – pay for it in attrition, in disengagement, in the quiet erosion of the culture that actually sustains performance over time. The best people leave. The ones who stay learn to keep their heads down. Innovation dies because nobody is willing to take a risk in front of someone who might punish them for it. Bending the reality and the rules for someone in a position of power is just a poor choice, no matter how you rationalize it.
What should organizations do instead? Address it. Directly. If a leader is toxic, that is a leadership problem, not an employee adaptation problem. Boards, HR, and senior leadership need to hold toxic leaders accountable regardless of their results. This is not idealism – it is pragmatism. The research is clear: psychological safety is one of the strongest predictors of team performance. Every day you spend accommodating a toxic leader is a day you are actively degrading your organization’s capacity to perform. Stop teaching people to survive bad leaders. Start removing the bad leaders.
