A few weeks ago a friend told me a story of a city volunteer board with important work to do that had reached a serious stage of paralysis and disarray because of the chair persons leadership. Committee members were wounded, demoralized and unable to move forward.
The city called in a psychologist.
The psychologist met with the nine members separately, handed them a piece of paper and asked them to write down 10 leadership behaviors of the chairperson; complied the info and went to city management.
The psychologist then met with the nine as a group and said this:
The top three behaviors and attitudes all nine of you listed are 3 of the seven diagnostic criteria for a sociopath. Of the rest of the things you listed the other four key diagnostic criteria were covered by most of you.
You have one healthy choice, resign as a group.
They did on the spot, which freed city council to fire the chair person and give the committee members room to heal, gain understanding and move forward. There is no doubt organizations of all kinds attract toxic leaders who do not lose a wink of sleep over the pain and havoc they inflict on everyone around them.
The Schismatic Bully, a guest post by Mary Clara at Father Jake Stops the World, lays out the harm to individuals and organizations. Just like in families, this kind of leader she calls bullies are clever and have a narcissistic need to embed themselves into structures and organizations.
Churches are more vulnerable because of trust and the culture of nice.
While this is written for church goers, I think all of us can identify with this kind of toxic leadership, we’ve seen it in work place, volunteer groups.
We all can identify.
As an aside, here is post musing on whether Bill Clinton is sabotaging Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House. Did Bill sink Hillary on purpose?
Read it through before thinking of dismissing it, there are surprising insights about human nature. I’m inclined to think his behavior isn’t conscious, it’s well entrenched, and I am not sure self-awareness is possible or that he is able to stop.
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As Christians we need to be fully aware of how our actions affect those around us. When one has a strong relationship with God, they are concerned more about others than self. I think that is the biggest problem in society today. We are more concerned about ourselves than we are about other people. If we would focus on others, many of the problems today would fix themselves.
The Schismatic Bully was an interesting post. It highlights a problem that especially faces any organization that relies on imposed authority as part of its governing structure, which includes virtually all churches. That is that as soon as a person gets power, their ability to hear other people and empathize with them is severely damaged, as noted in this article in the WaPo.
And it doesn’t even have to be imposed authority. We Quakers don’t rely on imposed authority of any sort, yet the history of Quakerism is rife with bullying behavior. But I think it’s certainly more problematic in organizations that have an authoritarian structure, loose as it might be in the case of the Anglican Communion. (I speak as an ex-Episcopalian who still regards the communion, with fondness, as the exemplar of a creedal church.)