This post is written by Susan Broomhall, Bright Research and Insights.
- **The problem: **Self-serving, toxic leaders are often the driver behind society’s most pressing social problems.
- **Why it matters: **To be able to solve major issues such as homelessness, climate change, bullying and suicide, we need to look at why the problems exist and are perpetuated in the first place.
- The solution: We must seek to understand and eradicate toxic leadership before being able to tackle wicked problems.
Design theorists Rittel and Webber lamented in their paper, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, that science was developed to deal with ‘tame’ problems whereas social policy problems represent ‘wicked problems’ as complex dilemmas of inherently unsolvable societal issues.
As planners, they argued that social policy has “at least ten distinguishing properties of planning-type problems, ie wicked ones” to which planners needed to be alert.
There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
Solutions to wicked problems are not true or false, but good or bad.
There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot’ operation; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
Wicked problems do not have an exhaustively describable set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways.
The planner has no right to be wrong.
Wicked problem examples
Examples of wicked problems include climate change, pandemics, discrimination, homelessness, suicide and bullying, where all the aspects of the identified wicked problems apply when considering ‘planning’, which here can be considered ‘solution development’. Solution development is the design of a remedy to a problem. For example, homelessness is a social problem and the solution would be for the homeless to have access to a home. Simple, right?
Social problems are wicked (complex, complicated, multi-faceted, multi-layered, agile and dynamic) as opposed to the traditional ‘tame’ problems of the hard sciences primarily because they involve people and people are complex, complicated, multi-faceted, multi-layered, agile and dynamic. These aspects come down to personality types and decision-making capabilities (the psychology of the individual) and their impact on society. So wicked problems are made wicked by people, not circumstances, and just because they are wicked problems does not mean that they cannot be mitigated and managed to reduce harm. So why do we continue to wrestle with wicked problems?
Toxic leadership
Most systems, structures, organisations, and societies are designed in a hierarchical fashion where there is an apex ‘leader’ at the top. It is the ‘top’, for instance a CEO of a company, that authorises the rules and regulations for that structure where decisions (or the results of those decisions) impact a broader mass of people (for example the company staff).
From a social science perspective, wicked problems can be algorithmised back to that one pinnacle point – a decision made by an apex leader. That is, all social problems can be traced back to decisions made by toxic leaders.
A dictionary definition of ‘toxic’ is “poisonous, very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way”, and ‘leadership’ is defined as “the action of leading a group of people or an organisation”. Therefore toxic leadership is where leaders are leading people in very harmful or unpleasant ways.
So how did toxic leaders get to positions of power and how do they retain their position despite toxicity?
One would imagine that you would not choose to ‘follow’ a leader who is harmful to you. However, toxic leaders have established control by governing through rules and regulations that they have designed and authorised.
Rather than a choice to follow, toxic leaders establish systems that enable them to retain control, power, and authority by enforcing a requirement to follow. For example, in an organisation based on promotion, it is the leaders who will decide who gets promoted and on what basis. Where leaders are toxic, they will retain and promote those that agree and fortify their status as the apex leader continuing therefore to perpetuate the toxicity of that leadership. You choose either to comply or not get promoted.
The signs of a toxic leader
Toxic leaders tend not to care about others and have a competitive, autocratic and directive management style (as opposed to collaborative, inclusive, compassionate and co-creative management styles). Their competitive and self-serving agenda makes them perfect candidates to compete callously to the top. Once there, they have all the resources at their disposal to retain control, such as access to lawyers to guide them through legalities and policy loopholes, resources that the lower echelons do not have access to and therefore no capacity to navigate, leaving them no option but to ‘follow the leader’.
Being self-serving, toxic leaders are motivated to make decisions based on retaining power and control rather than benefitting the masses. Oftentimes, solutions to wicked problems may serve to undermine toxic leadership authority by devolving ‘power’, even if that power is simply a preferential choice. Therefore, toxic leaders perpetuate wicked problems rather than mitigate them.
Toxic leaders use an arsenal of tactics to retain control and power and these tactics are used to create a system that enables and protects them. They use ‘smoke and mirrors’ to circumnavigate being held accountable for nefarious decision-making including the manipulation of rules, regulations, legislation and government directives. To disable toxic leaders requires first understanding how and why they get away with it. Therefore to solve any wicked problem, we must first seek to solve the wickedest of social problems - that of toxic leadership.
You can read more about the tactics of toxic leaders in my book Bullying & Harassment - Understanding the Psychological and Behavioural Tactics of the Toxic Leadership Stronghold or follow me on LinkedIn.
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