Toxic Leadership in CSR: A Nightmare for Employee Well-Being
Pros
Some teams are doing good work.
Cons
The CSR team lead along with his one down ‘manager’ are extremely problematic. The current Team Lead demonstrates poor managerial skills, avoids accountability, and regularly shifts blame onto team members for missed targets or errors, even when these stem from his own oversight or lack of initiative. He is one of the most ineffective and toxic managers I have worked with and contributes to no actual work and spends most of time writing long emails to the team for no reason. He makes unrealistic demands and provides no help or support to complete the tasks. Team members are frequently spoken down to, dismissed, and treated with little to no respect. Psychological safety is non-existent under this leadership. He does not meet with the team and avoids any sort of interaction due to his lack of awareness on what to do. There is a toxic work environment created by favoritism and disrespect. There are certain privileges that are only reserved for him and his ‘manager’ while the others aren’t given WFH or even leave in times of emergencies while the company policy allows it. There is zero support or guidance from him and mails are sent saying ‘do not come to me for guidance’. There are no set processes even for projects that have been running for over eight years. The lead conveniently blames his one downs for his lack of competence even for things that were to be done way before a team member has joined. There is severe micromanagement that happens so much so that we would have to update on the teams’ group when we would be away from our desks to use the washroom. The attrition rate in the team is high and about 9 people have quit the team because of their toxic behavior. Several employees have raised formal and informal complaints about this behavior over time. Unfortunately, there was no action taken creating the impression that poor leadership is tolerated – or worse, protected.