The Language of Toxic Leaders: Leading by Complaint
One flawed approach to leading people is leading by complaint.
Complaints point out the failings and deficiencies of teams. They are particularly noxious and obnoxious when they are pointless pontifications on the obvious. They diminish people’s trust in their complaining leaders.
Everyone recognizes the language. It’s the language of We don’t… We aren’t… We lack… We have gaps… We can’t… We’re falling short… We’re behind… We suffer from… We aren’t keeping up with…
It doesn’t matter how sincere or accurate these assessments are. They are toxic if people interpret them a fatal or debilitating prognosis. The prime downside is that this language has no power to inspire change, innovation, or greatness.
One of the chief grievances of leaders who manage by complaint is that their team somehow mysteriously seems to lack proper motivation, alignment, and drive. These leaders have no idea this language brings this about exactly what they complain about. This is unconscious complicity. It is a phenomenon taking up expensive real estate in their blind spots.
Driving toxic language is the conscious or unconscious assumption that underperforming teams have an intrinsic motivation deficiency. This is the assumption they have all the knowledge, skills, standards, and resources they need — and they just don’t care to perform better. This leads to the next layer of assumption that sufficient blame and shame are excellent performance motivators. It’s an interesting idea. There just isn’t evidence to support this. In fact, the evidence is otherwise.
Feeling blamed and shamed precipitates self-defensiveness, which means trying to care even less if that’s possible. If caring less isn’t possible, then not caring longer could be. Either way, toxic language has no power to provoke caring more. People only care more when they believe more — not less — in themselves. Human beings stop caring when they feel helpless in making things better.
The functional opposite of complaint is not praise. It is not going around trying to convince or cajole people into assuming they’re doing better than they are. When people see through false praise, it deepens their distrust of their leaders, diminishing their ability to care more.
The opposite of complaint is curiosity. It’s asking more than telling. It’s finding out what people find easy and hard — and why. This opens space for new questions that can lead to small experiments that can make what’s hard easier, and what’s easy for some easy for others. Small experiments engage what we have to try new things.
Human beings are wired to solve problems if they know how to solve them and feel invited to solve them. Small experiments give them ways to solve problems and the invitations to do so. Teams progress in performance one small experiment at a time.
As they see their own tangible results and progress, they don’t even need leaders pointing out the obvious. They don’t need to be patronized with platitudes of praise. All leaders need to do is convene people in learning from their experience and move forward through the next iterations of small experiments.
