Psychopathy in Leadership

I've been finding LinkedIn to be more and more helpful to my business career over the past few months. The email updates and articles they put in front of me via email as well on the web site have been consistently topical, insightful and in some cases quite actionable.

I have also joined a series of groups, many of which have their own forums. While my backlog of business books grows, I do manage to find time to intake these snippets of information. Just yesterday, I stumbled across the Harvard Business Review forum which had an interesting discussion on how to handle a "bad boss." While the discussion was started months ago, these types of discussions aren't particularly time sensitive - they are still worth a read. Clearly, there are many detail-oriented folks in the forums as the discussion was quite rich with many "It depends" type answers (which tend to be the most insightful and helpful.)

The most interesting contributions probably came from Dr. Brian Monger.


He provided some psychologist-style input on many of the points raised. It's worth noting that he actually started the post, and provided some moderation all the way through. One of his more eye opening comments was his diagnosis of some of the actions/activities being driven by psychopathy. As in, "your boss is a psychopath." Just to be clear, it isn't quite the horror show of the movies - those folks are typically not psychotic. However, the tendencies of psychopathy are quite marked and it is probably worth understanding.
Wikipedia has a lengthy article on the topic with citations and links galore. Since, I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, I'm not going to attempt to diagnose any of the bad bosses I've had (and sadly there have been many.) But, I did see quite a few similarities between bad bosses and some of the characteristics of a psychopath. The below are ripped shamelessly from the Wikipedia article.

Facet 1 Interpersonal

• Glibness/superficial charm
• Grandiose sense of self-worth
• Pathological lying
• Cunning/manipulative

Facet 2 Affective

• Lack of remorse or guilt
• Emotionally shallow
• Callous/lack of empathy
• Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

And while many of the above, especially the superficiality and overblown sense of self-worth particularly resonated with me, I've seen the emotional shallowness along with a lack of empathy create even more problems in the work place. Not surprisingly, the most common reasons people leave their jobs are centered around things their managers can influence if not outright control, including the manager's own style, approach and personality. And when that style includes the interpersonal and affective facets noted above, it can be an extremely difficult environment for staff and co-workers alike.

The best supervisors I have had typically demonstrate actual charm, tend to question their own self-worth and the quality of their decisions, etc. Leaders that demonstrate empathy and take ownership of everything under their control are those whom I have enjoyed working with the most, learned a great deal from and felt most committed to.

Therefore my question is, why aren't we teaching our managers these types of skills and awareness? I know of no company that consistently pursues such a standard in their managers though some may claim to. At the end of the day, people get the work done, but we don't equip leaders with the right tool kit and awareness to ensure that we are creating the right kind of environment to foster creativity and productivity for our people.

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