Kandahar, Afghanistan, 2010. I was the Weapons Officer of our deployment. The job suited me perfectly: meticulous, by-the-book, anxious to get it right. Cherry on the cake, I was deployed with one of my good squadron buddies, so what could possibly go wrong? For a month or so, it worked beautifully. Then the more I pushed for precision, the more I was met with resistance, and it eventually boiled over into a clash between my buddy and me, in the Ops room, in front of the rest

Leadership gurus will tell you that trust is the foundation of leadership. Patrick Lencioni places trust at the base of every healthy team, while Simon Sinek has built much of his work around the idea that people willingly follow leaders they trust. Yet if we look around the world today, a different picture seems to emerge. Political leaders increasingly rely on strongman rhetoric. Organizations facing uncertainty often centralize decision-making. Employees report higher leve

In my previous article, I discussed how toxic leadership often emerges not from bad intent, but from flawed promotion decisions. This leads to a reality most organizations eventually face: being stuck with an underperforming or, even worse, a toxic leader. At the same time, removal is not always an option due to legal constraints, internal politics, or succession gaps. So what happens then? Organizational blind spots Before addressing toxic leadership, organizations first nee