COR Insights

When the tenured leader is the toxic leader creating a toxic environment, and their toxicity is a derivative of retirement insecurity, is the fashion retail organization employing this leader responsible for this dilemma? Where will they go? Where will they “end up” if they vacate their leadership role?

Left unchallenged by the employer, the query of the tenured leader has shown likely to evolve from simply creating self-serving obstacles for others to also questioning which initiatives, inclusive practices, mentor-mentee relationships, or even budding leaders this insecure tenured leader could stifle to save her or his own position?

In candor, a number of these leaders would not be considered Orators objectively. By captive audiences of direct reports, sure, but as independent figures in the marketplace of fashion retail public speakers, no. As a Toxic Star, the recommendation for ongoing leadership development may have been suppressed by the leader’s leader. We have seen this when the toxic leader is among peers who have risen to their senior roles as a collective effort or within parallel timelines. Either circumstance favors the suppression of ongoing development, therefore fostering a senior leader ill-equipped to mentor the next generation of fashion retail leaders or to even brand themselves as a subject matter expert. Consider these circumstances the origin story of the Toxic Star.

We acquired the term Toxic Star from the writing of Adam Grant featured on Linked In. His post read,
If your organization has toxic stars, you don’t just have a culture problem. You also have a broken reward system. In healthy organizations, the impact people have on others is a key factor in their pay, performance, and promotions. If you’re an asshole, you’re not a success.

The tenured Toxic Star in leadership is incubated by their current organization; nourished by the broken reward system and protected by the micro-organizational culture of their store, team, or corporate station. An assertion can be made that this star is well aware of the opinion that their current leadership practices and style of team interaction would not be embraced by the next organization, be it a legacy brand battling to balance the optics of fashion heritage with the newest wave of publicized ethics commitments, or be it a brand wading the waters of post-COVID workforce realities and the expectations of the new consumer. Plainly, the next organization would not be so welcoming of a new potential liability.

So, they stay. The tenured toxic star remains in place, detouring the path to leadership for incoming leaders who would offer the company a breadth of new possibilities. They exist as the bottleneck of cultural progression; a purveyor of harmful practices. In addition, the unfortunate experience of many senior leadership hopefuls is reduced to navigating the toxic leader‘s inconsequential rituals and entwined web of allies. The purpose of this entwinement is to both contain and to conceal toxic practices which favor the plans and ambitions of the select few in the toxic star‘s workplace social circle. A second purpose continues to escape the vast majority of fashion retail human resource professionals, and that is, to insulate the messy effects of this top-down toxicity.

In Linda Rodriguez McRobbie‘s The Bullies Are Back, Gary Namie of the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) writes,

…in the US at least, [workplace bullying]is on the rise: according to a January 2021 survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI), 30% of US workers reported being bullied, up from 19% in 2017. Bullying, as defined by the WBI’s survey, is a pattern of repeated mistreatment, abusive conduct, or work sabotage that humiliates, intimidates, or harms the targets and interferes with their ability to work. “It’s gotten worse,” confirmed Gary Namie, head of the WBI, which has conducted this survey every five years since the late 1990s.

While it should probably go without saying, I will say it anyway: there are no benefits to bullying in the workplace—not to the people suffering it or the employees witnessing it, and not to the company’s bottom line. It does not make organizations more competitive, weed out the weak, or give anyone an edge. It cannot be justified as “just the way things are done” or by the idea that because some workers dealt with it, everyone should—that it’s a kind of “paying dues.”

In 2023, how is fashion retail still celebrating the success of tenured leaders who detour future leaders to soothe their own personal insecurities?

Study after study attempts to decode the interpersonal effects of the tenured toxic star. Attempts at developing actionable solutions continue. We inch closer to a solution by accurately assigning bully as their qualifier. But, a void remains where we should know the right next steps of departure for this category of leader from affected organizations.

When listing solutions, there is transitioning from corporate leadership to an advisory position with a Big 5 consulting organization, the caveat being the rumored impact of this leader’s behaviors on individuals within their current organization. Some may consider it unfortunate that this toxic star‘s reputation alone is not a deterrent to their progression into an esteemed consulting role. Outplacement has been widely noted as a bandaid for a broken bone, offering only oversight of obvious next steps such as amending the resume and social media profiles, and standard empathetic gestures coupled with job post navigation assistance and interview prep. Recently coined term “quiet retirement” has been presented as a viable option. Quiet retirement defines the tenured leader’s descent into the background; a voluntary pushing away from the table as the next generation of leaders vie for a seat. In what some may consider a utopian outcome, the toxic star tenured leader may join the ranks of those leaders retiring to pursue their next chapter, often referred to as a Second Act. It is a safe presumption that most fashion retail professionals once or currently led by a tenured leader who is a toxic star hope for quiet retirement in lieu of an involuntary dismissal.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

-Samuel Butler

The responsibility of curating an honest portrait of leadership, particularly of a Toxic Star, belongs to the fashion retail employer. Receptivity to the effects of her or his tenure, and the commitment to reset the culture and the relationships within impacted departments should be owned by leadership senior to the tenured Toxic Star. As an industry, turning away from incubating toxicity dressed up as “boss [expletive]” or “power player”is critical. Every leader’s work is a portrait of her or himself, which includes works done to the detriment of the organization.

Fashion retail organizations preserving their tenured toxic leaders own the dilemma of leadership dreams deferred. With a concerted effort, fashion retail decision makers can set in motion an era of establishing the next generation of leaders while sending a clear message of intolerance for cascading destructive practices.