Toxic leaders affect companies, and governments. How to deal with them

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Toxic leadership is characterised by a number of familiar traits: unwillingness to take feedback, lying or inconsistency, cliquishness, autocracy, manipulation, intimidation, bullying, and narcissism. The toxic leader can - if allowed to run rampant for long enough – destroy organisational structures over time and bring down an entire organisation. This applies to countries too.

There are a number of reasons for this. The most obvious is that a toxic leader can influence organisational culture through aversive action. This can include flouting organisational processes, rewarding loyalty over competence, normalising socially unacceptable behaviours like infighting, and by breaking down trust and eroding clear lines of authority.

A toxic leader’s other, more insidious, influence is through what they do to the relationships between people around them.

Psychologists, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, describe how two factions typically develop in an organisation once the deviant leader’s ascent has begun. One faction consists of supporters, pawns and patrons. The other is made out of people who remain true to their principles, realising they have been used and abused, or that the organisation whose ultimate goals they still support is in danger.

If it sounds familiar it’s because South Africans are spectators to exactly this kind of factionalism. In recent months pro and anti President Jacob Zuma factions have been involved in increasingly energetic mudslinging matches.

For many, Zuma represents the quintessential toxic leader. Whether one is for or against the president, it remains that he’s at very least a controversial figure, and criticism of him has been known to lead to reprisals.

The good news is that toxic leadership can be overcome. When it’s understood and challenged, it can be dismantled or reformed.

The toxic environment

Where there is toxic leadership, the ethics of the working environment are compromised. Typical behaviours are abuse of privileges, theft, violence and verbal abuse. Any number of these can be recognised from news reports around South African politics.

Scandals over the awarding of government tenders, the mismanagement of taxpayer funds and the maintenance of corrupt relationships are now an all too familiar reality in South Africa.

But a toxic leader does not absolve employees who choose to engage in deviant conduct. Ministers and private sector supporters who choose personal gain or corrupt relationships remain responsible for their own choices. Of course, it’s much easier to make the wrong decision if it’s the dominant way of doing things in a particular environment.

Such behaviour may be rooted in financial gain, or lie within the culture of an organisation. The motivation to achieve results may spark greater numbers of people to either actively harm, or passively ignore, the welfare of others to achieve their desired end.

This is why the removal of a psychopathic leader doesn’t guarantee the eradication of toxicity as it’s likely to be entrenched at lower levels of organisational leadership by the leader’s sycophants.

Fighting from the bottom up

The responsibility to move against toxic leadership doesn’t lie with an individual, but concerns the organisation as a whole.

In the public sphere, this responsibility extends to society as a whole.

Crucial to overcoming the toxic leader’s negative impact is for other members of the organisation to remain firm and loyal to their principles, and to take a united stand.

If people are able to stand together against toxic leadership, the leader may leave of their own accord. Once this happens individuals in the rest of the organisation need to cleanse the organisation by distancing themselves from the leader’s negative actions.

Another way of tackling toxic leadership is to find out who they answer to, if it’s not immediately apparent, and appeal to this authority. Bullies are not always swayed by open dialogue or whistleblowing, but may answer to a higher law if this is done formally and armed with the facts. In the case of an errant public servant, this may be achieved through, for example, the judiciary and institutions like the Public Protector.

If all these fail, there are ways to manage the situation with the toxic leader in position. It’s necessary to understand the leader’s history to analyse how they got to this point. Share this with key decision makers. This is vital because a core aspect of the solution is to establish a coalition of like-minded individuals who understand the leader’s negative impact.

The coalition should not take a punitive, antagonistic approach, but rather a supportive one, using appropriate benchmarks and timelines that reflect the goals of all key stakeholders.

Much of what’s observed in the corporate world applies to leadership in the public sector. With proper interventions, a valuable level of accountability can be brought into the workplace and to service delivery.

The accountability of leaders can be increased through forums like townhall meetings to force them to think deeply about their behaviour and decisions. Where politics is concerned, visible performance management like this can do wonders for the well-being of citizens.

It’s also critical to establish mechanisms to protect people speaking up against leaders – the whistleblowers – as their actions should be free of fear, such as loss of income.

With protection mechanisms in place, employees and citizens alike should be able to freely raise issues and protect both themselves and their ideals, whether their concerns relate to a private company or a government department.

Linda Ronnie, Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and People Management, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

South Africa needs help

State capture, corruption, treason, racketeering, and more, all happening in this beautiful country, South Africa. The people need help, we need to be set free from greedy leaders who have no consideration for the poor people but only fill their pockets.  

 It is a fact, today, there are more people in South Africa who do not have a job, a home, or even food to eat.  Yet wasteful expenditure by government and their allies continues, and soon the situation will explode into a civil war. How much more can ordinary people endure?  Mmusi Miamane, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, is calling on people to help stop this abuse.   Here is his letter and if you want to help, you will be saving a country from doom.


       

30 May 2017 

Fellow South African,

Today I laid serious criminal charges of treason, corruption and racketeering against Jacob Zuma, members of the Gupta family and several cabinet ministers.

This comes after a string of emails were leaked over the weekend that show the extent to which Zuma and his ANC cronies have given over control of our state to the Guptas.

These are most serious crimes against the people of South Africa.

WE NEED YOUR HELP TO SEE THE GUPTAS AND JACOB ZUMA IN HANDCUFFS. 

  The outcome of the ANC’s NEC meeting once again illustrates that the ANC cannot self-correct. 

Your donation will help us pursue court action against Zuma, the Guptas and all those involved with violating the integrity of South Africa.

  CLICK HERE TO DONATE AND HELP US FIGHT THE CORRUPT IN COURT.

Our only hope is in the DA. Help us realise a new beginning for South Africa.

Mmusi Maimane,
DA Leader

Rubbish dump is a hazard for some but a lifeline for others

“I know that the discarded food could be dangerous to the health of me and my child, but I don’t have an option.”

By Joseph Chirume
30 May 2017

Isaac Gabriel and Hilton Goliath make an income from a garbage dumpin Paterson. Photo: Joseph Chirume.

In the small farming town of Paterson, 70 kilometres from Port Elizabeth, residents say a poorly managed dumping site poses a health hazard. However, other members of the community scratch a living out of the rubbish.

Concerned residents say construction companies, including municipal vehicles, dump not only garbage but soil and gravel close to their houses on the road that leads to the site.

Maria, who would not give her surname, wants the site fenced off. She says, “It is very shocking that big companies are openly violating the municipal by-laws. They are not dumping in the designated area. The trucks just dump their rubbish close to our houses … The road is filled with rubbish… The whole area has an unbearable smell.”

She says dogs and animals come to scavenge and people also collected rotten food from the site. “There is always fire at the dumping site … It pollutes the environment,” she says. She also complains of stagnant water that has turned black at the dump.

But 40-year-old Hilton Goliath, who lives alone in a shack in Moreson, says, “The dumping site is a source of income for many unemployed residents here. There are very few job opportunities in this town. I spend most of my time on the dumping place where I collect valuable things, like metal cans, wooden pallets and food.” He says he resells these, but the local scrapyard “offers very little money compared to those in Port Elizabeth”.

Elmarie Gouza says she collects food at the site. “The money that I get from the informal jobs [she does domestic work] is not enough for the upkeep of my child. This is the reason I am looking for valuables that includes food from this rubbish. I know that the food could be dangerous to the health of me and my child, but I don’t have an option. These restaurants throw away raw meat and tinned food here. I first clean the meat and boil it. I put some spices to make it smell good. It is helping me very much, because the food is free and tastes very good.”

Isaac Gabriel, who collects old shoes and clothing at the site, says, “Many people despise me because they say I am scavenging and scrambling for food with animals. There are many dogs, wild pigs and cats that also look for food on this dump site.”

Spokesperson for the Sundays River Municipality Vuyiseka Mboxela said, “The dumping site is amongst the key priorities that our residents have raised during the public road show meetings. They raised that the dumping site should be secured and fenced. So it is an area that we are to act on soon after the budget has been adopted.”

“Even with the highest economic disparities that our country at large faces, a dumping site cannot be what we condone as a way of survival for our communities,” Mboxela said.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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It's 30 years since Cuito Cuanavale. How the battle redefined southern Africa

Rebel UNITA troops walk through a field twenty miles from the front line at Munhango, Angola April 29, 1986.
Reuters/Wendy Schwegmann

Thirty years ago in southern Angola, four military forces were mobilising for the largest conventional battle in Africa since the Second World War. It was a battle that would have huge consequences for Angola, Namibia and South Africa. Indeed it has been referred to as a turning point in southern African history.

On the one side was the Angolan army backed by Cuban forces and Soviet advisers. On the other was the South African backed Angolan rebel movement fighting to overthrow the government.

The rebel Union for the Total Independence of Angola, better known by their Portuguese acronym Unita, had been one of the three liberation groups fighting Portuguese colonialism. But it is the pro-socialist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) which won power in 1975 and formed the government.

With western support and arms supplies from South Africa and the Reagan administration, Unita’s campaign to topple the government turned Angola into a Cold War battleground. The climax of this was the battle at Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola that lasted from March 1987 until the end of June 1988.

There are still fierce arguments about how important the battle was, who won and whether the South African army was really defeated.

That those who fought in the battle should have wildly different interpretations of its importance is not surprising. This is brought out strikingly in a new edition of Fred Bridgland’s book The War for Africa: Twelve Months that Transformed a Continent. Originally published in 1990, it’s an account, primarily from the South African side, of the military campaign that reached its climax at Cuito Cuanavale.

Contesting narratives

The ANC and it’s leader Nelson Mandela, the Cubans and the Angolan government claim the South African army was decisively defeated. The veteran ANC military intelligence chief Ronnie Kasrils, described it as

a historic turning point in the struggle for the total liberation of the region from racist rule and aggression.

But many South African who fought in Angola swear that they were never defeated, as South African author and academic Leopold Scholtz noted in his book on the battle.

Objective observers declared the end to have been a tactical military stalemate between the allied forces on either side. But it was a stalemate that led to major strategic realignments with huge consequences for the whole region, leading to the independence of Namibia, the withdrawal of South African and Cuban forces from Angola and the eventual dismantling of apartheid.

Nelson Mandela lauded the result of the battle during a visit to Cuba in 1991 to thank Fidel Castro for supporting liberation struggles in southern Africa. The future president of South Africa said in his keynote speech:

The decisive defeat of the racist army in Cuito Cuanavale was a victory for all Africa. This victory in Cuito Cuanavale is what made it possible for Angola to enjoy peace and establish its own sovereignty. The defeat of the racist army made it possible for the people of Namibia to achieve their independence. The decisive defeat of the aggressive apartheid forces destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor.

Stalemate in Cuito Cuanavale

At the time of the campaign and the key siege of Cuito Cuanavale, Bridgland was a journalist with unrivalled access to the rebels. Through the rebels, he also got access to South African Defence Force (SADF) in southern Angola. He says that the chief of the SADF, General Jannie Geldenhuys, gave him unfettered access to his officers and men on the frontline.

His account of the Cuito Cuanavale campaign is detailed and fascinating, but clearly written from one side. It was impossible for him to report from the Angolan government and Cuban side. The South Africans had been in Angola almost continuously since their unsuccessful bid in 1975 to put UNITA in power.

Their present objective was to weaken the socialist-oriented Angolan government, stop it from supporting the ANC and the Namibian Swapo movement. The aim was then to create a buffer to stop Swapo guerrillas entering South Africa-occupied Namibia.

The fighting lasted from initial skirmishes in March 1987, through the smashing of the Angolan army advance at the Lomba river in September-October 1987. Then followed the siege of Cuito Cuanavale by the South Africans and Unita from January to the end of March 1988. It ended with the Cuban bombing of the Calueque dam on 27 June 1988.

The battle for Cuito Cuanavale ended in stalemate with the SADF and Unita unable to overrun the Angolan positions and the Angolan-Cuban force unable to continue the offensive. The South Africans admitted to losing 79 dead, with two Mirage fighters and one Bosbok spotter plane shot down, plus three Olifant tanks and four Ratel armoured vehicles destroyed, as Bridgland describes in his very detailed book.

Politics by other means

The combination of being fought to a stalemate in the battle, and the heavy loss of life and material that couldn’t be replaced, was something South Africa couldn’t ignore. On top of that was the attack on the Calueque dam which demonstrated Angolan and Cuban air superiority.

Taken in the context of the domestic political violence, the growing economic crisis and international pressure, the results of the Cuito Cuanavale campaign were crucial in persuading the leaders of South Africa’s National Party to cut their losses. They did so following talks with the Soviet Union, Angola, Cuba, Britain and the United States.

This led directly to a ceasefire agreement on the total withdrawal of South African and Cuban forces from Angola. Also agreed was a timetable for UN-supervised elections in Namibia, leading to independence in March 1990. By this time, the ANC had been unbanned and Mandela released.

Cuito Cuanavale was not a military victory for any of the combatants. One must view it in the light of the maxim of the 19th century military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz that war is the “continuation of politics by other means”. There was never going to be a decisive military victory in southern Angola.

The battle of Cuito Cuanavale was a turning point, but one that needs to be taken in context.

Keith Somerville, Visiting Professor, University of Kent

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Facebook's new anti-fake news strategy is not going to work – but something else might

Have you seen some “tips to spot fake news” on your Facebook newsfeed recently?

Over the past year, the social media company has been scrutinized for influencing the US presidential election by spreading fake news (propaganda). Obviously, the ability to spread completely made-up stories about politicians trafficking child sex slaves and imaginary terrorist attacks with impunity is bad for democracy and society.

Something had to be done.

Enter Facebook’s new, depressingly incompetent strategy for tackling fake news. The strategy has three, frustratingly ill-considered parts.

New products

The first part of the plan is to build new products to curb the spread of fake news stories. Facebook says it’s trying “to make it easier to report a false news story” and find signs of fake news such as “if reading an article makes people significantly less likely to share it.”

It will then send the story to independent fact checkers. If fake, the story “will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to a corresponding article explaining why.”

This sounds pretty good, but it won’t work.

If non-experts could tell the difference between real news and fake news (which is doubtful), there would be no fake news problem to begin with.

What’s more, Facebook says: “We cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves — it’s not feasible given our scale, and it’s not our role.” Nonsense.

Facebook is like a megaphone. Normally, if someone says something horrible into the megaphone, it’s not the megaphone company’s fault. But Facebook is a very special kind of megaphone that listens first and then changes the volume.



The company’s algorithms largely determine both the content and order of your newsfeed. So if Facebook’s algorithms spread some neo-Nazi hate speech far and wide, yes, it is the company’s fault.

Worse yet, even if Facebook accurately labels fake news as contested, it will still affect public discourse through “availability cascades.”

Each time you see the same message repeated from (apparently) different sources, the message seems more believable and reasonable. Bold lies are extremely powerful because repeatedly fact-checking them can actually make people remember them as true.

These effects are exceptionally robust; they cannot be fixed with weak interventions such as public service announcements, which brings us to the second part of Facebook’s strategy: helping people make more informed decisions when they encounter false news.

Helping you help yourself

Facebook is releasing public service announcements and funding the “news integrity initiative” to help “people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online”.

This – also – doesn’t work.

A vast body of research in cognitive psychology concerns correcting systematic errors in reasoning such as failing to perceive propaganda and bias. We have known since the 1980s that simply warning people about their biased perceptions doesn’t work.

Similarly, funding a “news integrity” project sounds great until you realise the company is really talking about critical thinking skills.

Improving critical thinking skills is a key aim of primary, secondary and tertiary education. If four years of university barely improves these skills in students, what will this initiative do? Make some Youtube videos? A fake news FAQ?



Funding a few research projects and “meetings with industry experts” doesn’t stand a chance to change anything.

Disrupting economic incentives

The third prong of this non-strategy is cracking down on spammers and fake accounts, and making it harder for them to buy advertisements. While this is a good idea, it’s based on the false premise that most fake news comes from shady con artists rather than major news outlets.

You see, “fake news” is Orwellian newspeak — carefully crafted to mean a totally fabricated story from a fringe outlet masquerading as news for financial or political gain. But these stories are the most suspicious and therefore the least worrisome. Bias and lies from public figures, official reports and mainstream news are far more insidious.

And what about astrology, homeopathy, psychics, anti-vaccination messages, climate change denial, intelligent design, miracles, and all the rest of the irrational nonsense bandied about online? What about the vast array of deceptive marketing and stealth advertising that is core to Facebook’s business model?

As of this writing, Facebook doesn’t even have an option to report misleading advertisements.

What is Facebook to do?

Facebook’s strategy is vacuous, evanescent, lip service; a public relations exercise that makes no substantive attempt to address a serious problem.

But the problem is not unassailable. The key to reducing inaccurate perceptions is to redesign technologies to encourage more accurate perception. Facebook can do this by developing a propaganda filter — something like a spam filter for lies.

Facebook may object to becoming an “arbiter of truth”. But coming from a company that censors historic photos and comedians calling for social justice, this sounds disingenuous.



Nonetheless, Facebook has a point. To avoid accusations of bias, it should not create the propaganda filter itself. It should simply fund researchers in artificial intelligence, software engineering, journalism and design to develop an open-source propaganda filter that anyone can use.

Why should Facebook pay? Because it profits from spreading propaganda, that’s why.

Sure, people will try to game the filter, but it will still work. Spam is frequently riddled with typos, grammatical errors and circumlocution not only because it’s often written by non-native English speakers but also because the weird writing is necessary to bypass spam filters.

If the propaganda filter has a similar effect, weird writing will make the fake news that slips through more obvious. Better yet, an effective propaganda filter would actively encourage journalistic best practices such as citing primary sources.

Developing a such a tool won’t be easy. It could take years and several million dollars to refine. But Facebook made over US$8 billion last quarter, so Mark Zuckerberg can surely afford it.

Paul Ralph, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science

This article was originally published on The Conversation.