How Bad Leadership Turns Teams Toxic

Simon Carver

Welcome to the human workforce podcast series. Today we are covering a topic that many may experience in their jobs but never really understand its happening until they start to feel a little sick or realize when they wake up on Sunday morning dreading that they have to go into work on Monday. Today we will talk about how bad leadership turns teams and organizations toxic. Many toxic cultures don’t begin with villains. They begin with a bad read. A leader walks in, gets handed a neat little story about what’s broken, and mistakes that story for reality. And that’s the first crack.

Lachlan Reed

Yeah, dead right. It’s usually not some moustache-twirling bad bloke stomping through the office. It’s someone turning up way too certain, way too loud, and acting like the team they inherited is a busted carburettor they’ve gotta rebuild before lunch. And mate, that’s when the wheels start wobbling.

Simon Carver

Exactly. They’ve got urgency before understanding. They want results, visibility, proof that they were the right hire. So instead of asking, “What am I missing here?” they ask, “How fast can I change something everyone will notice?”

Lachlan Reed

That first ninety-day thing can become pure theatre, can’t it? Like a personal branding exercise dressed up as leadership. New title, big entrance, new org chart, new meetings, new slogans. Everyone’s meant to be impressed. But the people doing the actual work are sitting there thinking, hang on, you haven’t even asked how this place runs.

Simon Carver

And that matters, because organizations are full of hidden logic. There are reasons teams work the way they do. Reasons certain controls exist. Reasons one process looks slow from the outside but actually protects quality, service, or trust. If you don’t take time to understand that, you’re not transforming anything. You’re tampering.

Lachlan Reed

That’s the bit. Real leadership isn’t kicking the door in and rearranging the furniture. It’s walking the floor, asking decent questions, carrying the metaphorical yellow pad, and actually listening. Who knows the weak spots? What’s fragile? What’s working better than it looks? What’s already been tried and face-planted?

Simon Carver

Humility can look slow in the beginning, but it’s usually faster in the long run. Because curiosity gives you a map. Ego gives you motion. And motion without a map feels impressive right up until people realize you’re driving them into a ditch.

Lachlan Reed

Beautifully put. And workers can smell it straight away. They know when a leader is trying to learn versus trying to perform certainty. If you come in acting like inherited expertise is an inconvenience, you’ve basically told the room, “I rate my assumptions above your experience.” Good luck recovering from that one,

Simon Carver

There’s also a structural problem here. Sometimes the new leader is only hearing one voice at the top. One sponsor. One version of events. So they inherit not just a role, but a preloaded judgment. This team is resistant. That function is weak. Those people are blockers. Once that frame gets locked in, every conversation becomes evidence for the story they already decided to believe.

Lachlan Reed

And then the team stops being seen as people carrying knowledge. They become obstacles. That’s when culture starts going crook. Not because someone announced, “Let’s make this place toxic.” Nah. It starts because leadership confuses speed with wisdom, and certainty with competence. Even a kangaroo can’t jump over that one.

Lachlan Reed

Once that trust goes, the damage gets expensive real quick. People always talk about culture like it’s a fluffy vibe thing. Free snacks, values on the wall, that sort of gear. But when leaders dismiss the subject matter experts, it hits where it hurts: morale, retention, decision quality, delivery. Proper nuts-and-bolts stuff.

Simon Carver

Yes. Because expertise is relational. If the people who understand the system best are talked over, sidelined, or treated like they’re defending old habits, they stop investing. First they go quiet. Then they disengage. Then the strongest ones start making calls, sending messages, updating résumés. Institutions lose knowledge long before they realize it has walked out the door.

Lachlan Reed

And the rough part is leadership can misread that too. They’ll say, “We’re shaking things up,” or, “Not everyone comes on the journey.” But sometimes people aren’t resisting change. They’re reacting to being ignored by someone who hasn’t earned the right to bulldoze anything.

Simon Carver

A great example is when leaders enter a product-based agile environment and try to force it backward into a more familiar project-management structure. On paper, that can sound tidy. More controls, more reporting lines, more stage gates, more visible authority. But if the original model was built around autonomy, ownership, transparency, and fast learning, that reversal can do real harm.

Lachlan Reed

Yeah, it’s like taking a bike that’s tuned for the trail and sticking shopping trolley wheels on it because that feels safer to you. Sorry, that’s a shed analogy, but you get me. Agile gets dismissed as some software-only fad, when the bigger point is how teams learn, adapt, and own outcomes. Strip that away and suddenly nobody can move without permission slips.

Simon Carver

And when that happens, progress slows in ways that are hard to see at first. Teams spend more time reporting than solving. Decisions rise up the chain. Accountability gets blurrier, not clearer. Morale drops because people feel less trusted. And the organization pays twice: once in wasted time, and again in lost momentum.

Lachlan Reed

Plus the old classic: new leader hires mates from the last place. Familiar faces, familiar methods, familiar language. Feels comfy for them. For everyone else, it screams, “I didn’t come here to understand you. I came here to recreate somewhere else.” That’ll sour a room faster than milk in the sun.

Simon Carver

And from an institutional point of view, that’s not just unpleasant. It’s risk. Service risk. Talent risk. Reputation risk. If your best people leave because they’re no longer respected, the organization becomes more fragile. The public, the customer, the next team in line—they eventually feel that fragility too.

Lachlan Reed

So the lesson’s pretty plain, really. Learn the terrain before you redraw the map. Respect what already works. Ask why a system exists before you rip it out. And for the love of sanity, do not confuse control with competence. They are not the same thing, not even close.

Simon Carver

That’s the heart of it. Leadership starts with listening, not declaring. If you inherit a team, your first job is to understand the work and the people carrying it. Everything better comes after that.

Lachlan Reed

Beautiful. All right, Simon, that’s us for this one. Serious topic, but an important one.

Simon Carver

Absolutely. Thanks for being with us, everyone. We’ll keep digging into the human side of work next time.

Lachlan Reed

Catch you soon. See ya, Simon.

Simon Carver

See you, Lachlan.