Leadership begins with good intentions. No one steps into a leadership role hoping to demoralize their team or damage organizational culture. Most leaders want to guide, support, and elevate their teams. Yet good intentions are not enough. How a leader behaves, whether they are conscious of it or not, shapes team dynamics, performance, and ultimately, results.
Every leader develops their own style over time, influenced by personal values, previous mentors, and past experiences. While there is no single “correct” style, there are patterns of behavior that consistently erode trust, engagement, and performance. Importantly, even seasoned executives benefit from structured feedback to understand the effects of their leadership approach.
Tools like 360° leadership assessments and emotional intelligence evaluations provide crucial data. They offer insight into how a leader perceives themselves, how others perceive them, and where the disconnects may lie. When paired with executive leadership coaching, these tools become powerful mechanisms for transformation.
In this article, you will learn:
- Self-Awareness Is Critical to Effective Leadership
- Five Toxic Leadership Styles That Undermine Teams
- Organizational Culture as Collateral Damage
- The Path to Improvement Through Leadership Coaching
Self-Awareness Is Critical to Effective Leadership
The most effective leaders pursue both self-awareness and accountability. While personality traits and leadership styles are not inherently “bad,” they often become problematic when left unchecked or are mismatched to context.
360° leadership assessments allow leaders to receive anonymous feedback from peers, direct reports, and supervisors. These evaluations measure effectiveness, behavioral consistency, and perceived strengths and weaknesses. Emotional intelligence (EQ) assessments add a complementary dimension by revealing how well leaders understand their own emotions, empathize with others, and manage interpersonal dynamics, including how successfully these leaders incorporate these abilities into their decision making and stress tolerance.
Together, these tools expose blind spots, those often-invisible behaviors that damage relationships or hinder performance. Recognizing these issues is the first step toward change.
Five Toxic Leadership Styles That Undermine Teams
Authoritarian Leadership Style: Control That Kills Creativity
The authoritarian leader believes in control, structure, and hierarchy. In fast-paced or high-risk environments, this approach can deliver clarity and decisiveness. However, when overused, it stifles innovation, discourages feedback, and fosters fear rather than trust. This is frequently most effective situationally to deal with specific challenging times or issues – think sprints more than marathons.
Teams under authoritarian leadership often disengage. They avoid risk, withhold opinions, and wait for direction. Over time, this erodes creativity, slows decision-making, and reduces discretionary effort.
Micromanagement: The Fastest Way to Lose Top Talent
Micromanagement stems from a lack of trust or an inflated sense of precision. Leaders who micromanage often believe they are protecting outcomes. In reality, they signal to employees they are not competent or trustworthy.
This leads to frustration, resentment, and diminished confidence. High performers leave or decrease performance excellence knowing the leader will change or correct the work anyway. Remaining employees stop taking initiative. The team culture becomes one of compliance or avoidance rather than ownership.
Passive Leadership Style: How Avoidance Breeds Underperformance
Passive leaders avoid conflict, defer decisions, and hesitate to provide feedback. This can create a perception of approachability, but it also leads to ambiguity, frustration, and drift.
Without clear direction or accountability, teams flounder. Performance issues go unaddressed. Misaligned priorities persist. The absence of strong leadership creates a vacuum where uncertainty and inefficiency thrive. Overall performance settles into mediocrity and superstars leave to play for a winning team.
Inconsistent Leadership: Mixed Messages, Missed Goals
Leaders who change direction frequently, enforce rules unevenly, or offer mixed messages undermine stability. Employees waste time trying to decode expectations rather than focusing on results.
Inconsistent leadership breeds cynicism. Teams struggle to prioritize. Resentment builds as individuals perceive favoritism or arbitrariness. Ultimately, performance and morale deteriorate.
Favoritism in Leadership: The Silent Culture Killer
Playing favorites, whether intentional or not, destroys team chemistry. When some employees receive preferential treatment, others disengage. Fairness, one of the foundational drivers of trust, is compromised.
Favoritism often reveals itself in opportunities for advancement, allocation of resources, or tolerance for poor behavior. It sends a clear message: performance does not matter as much as relationships. This corrodes trust and fractures team unity.
Organizational Culture as Collateral Damage
Leadership behavior does not stay confined to the team level. It permeates the culture of the organization. As most people will recognize: the fish stinks from the head. When unhealthy leadership styles dominate, the symptoms appear across departments: higher turnover, lower engagement, siloed thinking, and reduced innovation.
Culture is not a standalone initiative; instead, it is the cumulative result of how leaders behave day to day. Left unchecked, the five styles outlined above become embedded in systems, processes, and employee expectations. They shape how work gets done, how people relate to each other, and how success is defined.
The Path to Improvement Through Leadership Coaching
Understanding your style is only the beginning. Sustainable change requires intentional effort. Leadership coaching provides structure, perspective, and accountability.
A coach helps leaders interpret 360° feedback and emotional intelligence data. More importantly, they help translate insight into action. This might include reframing assumptions, developing new communication strategies, or adopting more consistent management practices.
Coaches also hold leaders accountable for behavior change. Unlike one-off training, leadership coaching engages leaders over time, reinforcing new habits and supporting growth in real contexts.
The Metiss Group specializes in leadership and development through tailored leadership training programs, emotional intelligence training, and executive leadership coaching. We work with organizations to equip leaders with the self-awareness, skills, and strategic focus necessary to drive performance and strengthen culture.
One of our favorite clients is led by a CEO who tends to fluctuate between the Authoritarian and Micromanaging styles. We know her well and she really is a fantastic human with the very best intentions. She sees so much incredible potential in many of her team members and has great hope for their growth and achievement for overwhelming success, but her approach was undermining her intent.
She had no idea until she was able to get some perspective on how her actions were perceived, how it impacted their efforts. Once she felt safe to receive the feedback, explore the impact, and pursue alternative approaches, she could begin to see a change in the performance and ownership of her team.
Leadership is not static. It evolves through self-awareness, feedback, and deliberate practice. Whether you are managing a team of five or five hundred, your leadership style is shaping results—positively or negatively. With the right tools and support, every leader can improve. And when leaders improve, teams and cultures follow.
Ready to elevate your leadership impact? Visit The Leadership Academy to explore proven strategies, tools, and coaching that drive real-world results.
