Addressing An Abrasive Leadership Style By Warren H. Phillips, Ph.D.
A Case Study on an Abrasive Leadership Style
An abrasive leadership style can impact a company in many ways. The good news is that it IS possible to help these leaders to hone their skills. It is also possible to create a culture where everyone feels valued.
So what does an abrasive leadership style look like?
Abrasive leaders:
- May make sarcastic remarks to employees
- Demeans employee in front of others
- Loses their temper with employees
- Don’t see how others perceive them
- May deny or minimize the impact of their behavior
- Lacks empathy for the impact of their behavior on those around them
- May have been inadvertently rewarded by the company for their aggressiveness
- Are often afraid of imperfection or incompetence
- May be an excellent individual contributor but lacking in leadership abilities
- While it may not seem obvious, these brilliant but difficult leaders care immensely about their organizations, and their own, success
The Impact of an abrasive leadership style
The overall impact of an abrasive leader can be far reaching for a company:
- High rates of employee turnover
- Low morale among employees
- Increased costs in managing this high turnover
- Fielding complaints about a difficult leader
- Reduced productivity due to employees not wanting to engage with this person
- Chronic drama among employees
- Legal issues related to difficult relations among staff
With an abrasive leadership style, employees may begin to struggle with this individual. Oftentimes there is a tension that becomes unbearable. High rates of turnover leave an organization struggling to determine what the issues are. In some cases employees may take legal action due to this hostile workplace.
In this case study we’ll take a look at the experiences of John, as well as his coworkers.
John
A Promotion
Let’s begin by taking a look at John’s story…
John was promoted to director of the sales division at his company approximately 18 months ago. John has been a very successful sales person for many years and is often known as a “go-getter”. He’s been able to aggressively close deals with multiple customers over the years.
John is known as a “no-nonsense” guy. He is known to cut to the chase. He doesn’t waste time with small talk and is highly detailed and hard-working. This has served him tremendously well in his job for as long as he can remember. However, John is beginning to question the wisdom of accepting this new role as a director.
Frustrations
He’s progressively becoming more frustrated with his direct reports. He is finding that sales meetings “go nowhere” because nobody talks. People seem slow or unable to come up with new ideas.
In addition, several of his salespeople seem lacking in their knowledge of products. They seem to lack an ability to follow through on assignments and details.
Several of his salespeople seem pleasant enough. But John feels they waste a fair amount of time discussing their weekends, favorite sports teams, and family lives with each other and even with their customers.
John is getting concerned that sales have plateaued. In addition to this two of his salesforce have requested transfers to other areas of the company. This in turn would leave him shorthanded and slow sales even further.
John knows what needs to happen in order to increase sales, meet their sales goals, and continue moving the organization in a profitable direction.
He has shared with his direct boss about his frustrations. His concern is that he can’t get more collaboration, buy-in, and execution of the organization’s sales goals from his team.
In fact, during the last three years sales were slowly, but steadily, increasing in the organization. But John is worried that his boss will blame him for this plateau.
Ashley
Ashley is a senior salesperson and direct report of John. She has worked with this organization for nearly 20 years and is a well-respected and highly successful salesperson.
In fact, she exceeded her sales goals every year for the last seven years. She has generated some of the most innovative sales strategies for the business.
Ashley’s Concerns of John’s Leadership Style
Ashley is a proud member of this company. She is vitally committed to the products they sell, the profitability of the company, and the happiness of her customers. At least this is how Ashley “used to describe herself” until 12 months ago.
When John first took over as the Director of Sales Ashley was somewhat concerned. She’s known John for several years. While he is admittedly a very successful salesperson he often comes off as aggressive.
He is very direct, straight to the point, heavily focused on details, and moves fast in beginning and closing a sale. This has worked well for him as a salesperson with most of his clients.
However, Ashley is concerned about how flexible John might be in working with people who have other styles and in leading the team as a whole.
Ashley knows that Leadership involves several important skills such as:
- Listening to other’s ideas
- Creating an environment that feels safe for people to generate new ideas and brainstorm together
- Coaching people to be their very best
A Major Incident
For the first few months things on the sales team went fairly well; however, about one year ago during one of their meetings there was a notable incident.
John was trying to get new ideas for a project and, initially, things were going well. Several ideas were being suggested.
Members of the team started to get up and move around the room. They began writing ideas on the whiteboard and joking with each other.
Suddenly, John stood up. He told everybody they needed to quit wasting time. That is was time to get down to business, and that he was tired of all the “horsing around”.
The room went silent. No further ideas were shared.
Ashley tried talking to John later that day about the meeting.
She was shocked at his response. John had shared how frustrated and angry he was with her team members’ lack of innovation, and their seeming ignorance about the very products they were selling.
Ashely tried to explain that it was actually his outburst that shut everything down.
At this time John became defensive saying, “Listen…I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’m a top producer and I know what needs to be done.
What I need is a team that is willing to get down to work. It’s time to stop messing around, and take this company’s mission seriously. I’m fed up with everyone’s socializing and daydreaming.
I’ve been writing about this in weekly memos to everyone. We need to MOVE on the initiatives that I talked about in the meeting. I’m not going to take the fall for everyone else’s incompetence!!”
A Birdseye View
The story of John and his team members is, unfortunately, neither unique nor rare. John’s leadership style is often referred to as abrasive and results in a serious negative impact on organizations.
In a recent CCL survey 74% of successful executives reported having at least one intolerable boss in the past. The Gallup poll reveals that abrasive leaders are the “primary reason why employees quit”.
The Impact of a Abrasive Leadership Style
We know that an abrasive leadership style results in higher rates of absenteeism in the workplace, lowered morale and productivity, and increased legal actions for hostile work environment and discriminatory behavior.
At its most extreme, abrasive leadership can lead to retaliation, sabotage, and even aggression in the workplace. In a 2012 SHRM survey:
- More than 51% of organizations report “bullying” incidents
- 73% of organizations report verbal abuse (largely by their leadership)
- 62% of organizations report malicious lies, gossip, and rumors as part of the environment
In looking at statistics we find the fact that 27% of human resource professionals have actually been a target of bullying in the workplace.
Yet, only 57% of those who are targeted in bullying and abrasive workplaces generally report their experience.
What Can Be Done to Help Abrasive Leaders?
Good News
The good news is that there is definite hope for John and his team as well as abrasive leaders and their employees all over the world.
There are many specialized programs that can help increase leaders emotional intelligence and emotionally intelligent behavior in the workplace.
One such program, which is effective in significantly improving the leadership skills and workplace behavior of 82% of the abrasive leaders surveyed. This program is called “Boss Whispering”.
Boss Whispering
What is Boss Whispering and how could it help John and his sales team?
Boss Whispering is a leadership coaching program that specializes in helping abrasive leaders understand:
- WHAT the negative perceptions of their leadership style are
- WHY these negative perceptions exist
- HOW to make these negative perceptions go away for good
Step 1:
This program follows a set of very specific and well-tested procedures. This feedback begins with the abrasive leader’s direct supervisor sharing feedback with the leader.
This feedback is about complaints, concerns, and issues that have come to the supervisor’s attention. It includes a clear message that these behaviors must stop. If the identified behaviors do not stop, this will lead to negative performance reviews, or other forms of discipline, up to and including termination.
The critical issue in this step is that organizations understand that they must evaluate their employees and leadership not only on productivity and task performance but also on their workplace behavior towards others.
Once the abrasive leader understands the seriousness of the situation they can then be offered coaching, either internally or externally.
Step 2:
Next, the leader must meet with their coach. At this time they will have an opportunity to have any and all questions answered by their coach.
In the end, the leader clearly understands the confidentiality of the coaching process. Confidentiality is crucial in this process in order for a leader to genuinely and comfortably do the important work that is to come.
Basically, the coach explains that they will not share any details of their discussions or work together with anyone (including the person who hired the coach) under any circumstances.
This leadership coaching is truly for the improvement of the leader’s skills. This process will likely result in improved relationships and productivity in their direct reports and team members.
Step 3:
Once all questions about the process have been answered, a 360 evaluation must be done.
In this process, the leader chooses several people whom they believe will be able to provide feedback about their performance and behavior.
The leader also understands that the coach will interview additional people, of whose identity the leader does not know.
Once the 360 evaluations are done, all information is de-identified and shared with the leader in order to help them understand WHAT the positive and negative perceptions are of their leadership style and workplace behavior.
This phase is critical and may often be the toughest part of the process for the leader.
Thus, it is important that this process be given time so the leader can truly process and understand how they are being seen in the workplace.
Step 4:
Once the leader understands WHAT the perceptions of their behavior are they can now start exploring WHY these perceptions exist. In this part of the process the coach helps the Leader understand the TAD dynamic.
The TAD dynamic is a process, by which, the leader learns how their comments, actions, and nonverbal expressions may be triggering a sense of threat and anxiety in their employees.
Thereby, this perceived threat is also leading to automatic defensive reactions such as fight (coworkers arguing with the leader, losing their temper at the leader, gossiping about the leader, and filing lawsuits) or flight (employees shutting down in meetings, afraid to speak up in the workplace, requesting a transfer, or leaving the company).
Step 5:
Once a leader begins to understand their impact on their direct reports, employees, and team members they are poised to begin watching for these reactions in others AND noticing these reactions in themselves.
For example, if you think back to the story of John and Ashley, John was clearly afraid of being seen as incompetent in his current role as Director of Sales.
He even admitted this, to some degree, when he told Ashley that he was “not going to take the fall” for the incompetence of his employees and team members.
At this point in the coaching process it’s important to help John understand how his own fear of being seen as incompetent in his role has led to defensive reactions of raising his voice, demanding that his sales team do things “his way”, and describing his sales team as incompetent…all versions of a “Fight” defense.
The T.A.D. Dynamic
There are many ways a Leader can change their behavior in the workplace to eliminate negative perceptions, using their understanding of the T.A.D. (threat, anxiety, defense) dynamic.
For example, once John understands how he is impacting his workplace (i.e, shutting down his employees and shutting down innovation through his “fight” behavior) he can learn what anxiety looks like in himself and others.
He can then look for those signs in his team members and, instead of interpreting it as incompetence or laziness, empathize with his team members and let them know that he truly appreciates their ideas.
Moving Forward
Of course, in the new process, John will then need to demonstrate this change by allowing others’ interpersonal process and discussions to occur and then incorporating the results of these collaborations, as appropriate, into a strategy for his whole team.
This is just one example. However, there are many ways leaders can change their behavior so it changes the negative perceptions others hold of them for good.
If you would like further information about Boss Whispering or other leadership coaching approaches click here.
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