One Drop of Poison: How One Bad Leader Can Slowly Kill Your Company

You loved your job... your boss... your coworkers. Then it happened. A new leader was brought in from the outside and things began shifting immediately. It was no longer safe to say what was on your mind and office politics became a second job, leaving you exhausted at the end of the day. The outspoken high performers began leaving the company in droves and you could feel the culture becoming toxic underneath your feet. Just when you thought it couldn't get worse, your new leader brought in cronies from their previous job to fill key leadership positions. Sadly, leaders you admired began leaving to "explore other opportunities." Now you dread work and are thinking about doing the same.

In One Drop of Poison, executive and team performance coach Sean Lemson dives deeply into why this is so common in organizations today. Lemson explores how companies poison their own success by hiring or promoting people with counterproductive mindsets into leadership positions. These leaders cost companies a significant amount of money that no financial reporting accounts for. They destroy their companies from the inside out through loss of talent, low employee morale and engagement, and the erosion of trust-leading to lower performing teams and companies that struggle or fail to innovate.

Most toxic leaders don't wake up every morning thinking, I wonder how I can destroy my teams today! Most are doing what makes sense to them without realizing that it's toxic. They are one drop of poison that's destroying trust, engagement, and performance. And if that drop of poison is high enough in the organization, it will spread until the whole culture is toxic. A recent study found that toxic cultures are ten times more likely to predict employee departure than compensation. If having talented employees who innovate is important to your business, you can't afford to allow a single drop of poison into your organization-never mind accidentally be one.

In One Drop of Poison, Sean Lemson explores what he calls the ten toxic leadership archetypes:

• The Chess Master
• The Peacock
• The Ladder Climber
• The Micromanager
• The Invertebrate
• The Drill Sargeant
• The Data Freak
• The Bottom Liner
• The Squirrel
• The Graveyard Whistler

He captures the toxicity of each of these styles of leadership, offers examples of what a healthy mindset about leadership looks like, and shows you how to make that actionable so you can avoid being the toxic leader or teammate in your organization.

Whether you're a leader who wants to get this right or an employee who's suffering from a leader who is getting it wrong, Lemson has you covered with impactful advice on how to spot your own toxic leadership behaviors and change them, how to manage up when you have a poisonous leader, and how to spot the moment to move on. He also touches on the key role that human resources and finance inadvertently play in the creation of twisted incentives that can make even good leaders act toxically.

Don't wait another minute to start your organizational detox... One Drop of Poison is the antidote you need!

Sean Lemson is a team and leadership performance coach. He is a certified executive coach with over a decade of experience helping leaders become people others want to follow. His peers call him "the Team Whisperer" as he has a reputation for being able to turn around some of the most dysfunctional teams. He specializes in team psychology and how it relates to engagement and performance.