Poison in the Field: A Reflection on Toxic Leadership

My Grandmother Ivens made the best carrot cake in two counties. A kind and clever farm woman from East Tennessee, she used her mother’s recipe, baked in a bundt ring, and slathered in a quasi-caramel of butter and brown sugar. And it was positively stuffed with black walnuts. That bittersweet nut was far too assertive for my palate. I ate around them until I knew better.

I once asked her to leave them out. I told her they taste like dirt, and she laughed and said, You must be a tomato! They don’t like black walnuts either. . . I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but she also agreed to leave them out, so I was happy. As I’ve gotten older, joined the workforce, had a kid, I’ve come to realize that my Grandmother was right about most things. As if to underscore the point, I recently learned that indeed, tomato plants do not like a black walnut tree. In fact, it kills them.

Apparently, Walnut trees release a toxin into the soil around their roots that can stunt or even kill plants up to 80 feet away. And it’s a gnarly way for them to go. The toxin inhibits cellular respiration, literally suffocating them. I suppose it’s an effective method to minimize competition, leaving all of the available resources for the walnut tree.

And, I can’t help but be reminded of some toxic leaders I’ve encountered in my career. Black Walnut trees produce impressive fruit. But that outstanding product comes at a heavy cost to the rest of the plants in the field. It’s much the same with toxic leaders. Sometimes they make great things happen for the business. They can nail a KPI, hit a deadline, or deliver a winning pitch. But along the way, they poison the soil.

Under Black Walnut leaders, great employees wilt. The chronic denial of vital resources and support erodes their confidence. It can be suffocating. And, eventually, many will leave. All that is bad for business. Putting aside the human part, it’s inefficient and expensive to churn through people, then hire and onboard new ones, just to churn them out all over again. It’s also inhumane.

The best companies I’ve encountered value growing people from the inside. While at Funsize we took a gardener’s approach, providing a rich soil that’s full of the experiences each individual needs to learn. We also developed our career ladder and design disciplines to be a framework for folks to grow on, like a tomato cage for budding designers.

For a recent case in point, a number of designers wanted to sharpen their visual design skills. So, we coordinated with an industry veteran to run a 4-week course to teach visual design theory and give them a safe place to practice outside of client work. Shortly after the course wrapped, we paired one of the students with a more experienced visual designer to practice her new skills on a project. Less than a year later, she’s creating radical new data visualizations for assessing disaster risk.

In my experience, ongoing success isn’t about the one tree that produces a rare fruit, it’s about cultivating an orchard full of fruiting trees.

Now, I don’t mean to hate on the black walnut itself. Rich and earthy, that little dude brings big flavor. It’s certainly what sets my Grandmothers’ cake apart from the crowd. But it is a shame that fruit comes at such a cost. If it were my field, I’d pick the tomato every time.

Photo by Feey on Unsplash