Toxic Leadership Reflection

We have all seen toxic leaders in one form or another in the Special Forces regiment. They demonstrate qualities such as selfishness, distrust, and an apparent disdain for their subordinates. Because this can be so detrimental for the function of the unit, we focus on toxic leadership and try to identify certain individuals who possess these traits in order to prevent it. While this is a very important step, are we focused too much on the individual and not enough on the system? Could there something that we are doing as an organization to bring out these traits in certain people? Instead of only focusing on toxic leaders that already exist, we should be looking into what is creating them in the first place. …show more content…
It has been my experience that toxic leaders share a similar story of some bad experience when they were put in their first leadership position on a team. Whether it was a loss of equipment, incident caused by subordinates, or just how they were treated when they arrived on the team, created an environment of distrust between the leader and his subordinates. I witnessed this first hand on my team.

We were in a heated discussion about a mission we had coming up. The team leader tried to interject with what he thought we should do, but was quickly disregarded by the team sergeant. The team sergeant said that this was his team and he would run it how he saw fit. This was not the first time our team leader was marginalized by the team sergeant in front of the team. What did this do to our captain’s impression of us as NCOs and professionals? Could that have planted the seed of distrust and resentment in our