Top management has no excuse leaving toxic managers in place. Managers should never be allowed to treat people badly, regardless of their apparent success. And there is enough management literature out there which shows the impact toxic managers make on their teams and on the organisation: high turnover, absenteeism, intimidated, frightened or frustrated employees, to name but a few. The list however is long.
These are all hidden costs and the statistics around them never appear in the annual report. What does appear in them are profits and turnover, and managers are so often measured on these published numbers. So why should top management worry about a few unhappy stressed-out employees, when the results of their toxic managers are so good.
What would happen if the organisation had to report the level of toxicity of their excellent managers? No management would accept year after year to publish that they hire, promote and keep toxic managers in the organisation. What would their justification be? And yet this is what they do? They hire, promote and keep toxic managers in the organisation, only because they do not have to publish the information! What a crazy world we live in. As soon as ‘toxicity’ would be required to be published, these organisation would reclassify their toxic managers from excellent to incompetent and most probably fire them.
A ‘toxicity index’ in the annual report is clearly, impractical, hypothetical and impossible to measure objectively would never be put in place in any organisation. AND YET, management could easily draw up their own acceptable ‘toxicity index’, even if different from organisation to organisation, and identify the toxic managers they would keep, the toxic managers they would help and the toxic managers they would fire, even if they didn’t have to publish it.
BUT they don’t, so I am just theorising. Common sense tells everyone that a successful manager with happy employees is more effective to the organisation, than a successful one with unhappy employees. But some will say where does one draw the line and so nothing is done.
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