The toxic manager is (a bit) you

Yes, some managers really are toxic. Manipulation, systematic belittling, humiliation turned into a method. These are extreme behaviors, often intentional or built into the organization itself, and I don’t believe much in their reversibility. If you work for someone like that, no article will fix the problem for you. That is not the subject of this one.

The subject is everything between that tyrant and the ideal manager who doesn’t exist. A huge grey zone, where you drift into negative behaviors without even noticing. Under pressure. Under load. Out of habit. By reproducing, often faithfully, what you went through yourself. I have caught myself there more than once, and it is precisely because these slips are ordinary that they are worth stopping on.

This article is a toolkit in two steps. First, spot the behaviors, because you don’t correct what you don’t see. Then correct them, with concrete moves rather than good intentions.

In an earlier article on management styles, I argued that no style is bad in itself, only badly used. Same logic here. Every style has its degraded version, and the question isn’t your personality, it’s your self-awareness.

Drawing the line: toxic is not the same as negative

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Before opening the toolkit, you have to draw a line.

On one side, abuse. A harmful behavior, intentional or made systematic by the context: harassment, manipulation, repeated humiliation. It’s a pattern, not a bad day, and it’s what everyday language calls a toxic manager.

On the other side, the slip. The Tuesday-morning reflex, the move you make without thinking, the one you’d regret if you could see yourself making it. Taken alone, nothing dramatic. Repeated, settled in, never corrected, it ends up producing the same damage, quietly.

This distinction matters for a simple reason: the grey zone is fixable, the other end usually isn’t. Drawing it has nothing to do with excusing anything. It’s only acknowledging that what follows isn’t here to make you feel guilty, but to make visible what isn’t yet.

What follows is an inventory. Six families of behavior, and within each one several moves broken down along the same pattern: the good intention that justifies it (“I just want to make sure that…”), the warning signs (what I do, and what I see in the team), the hidden cost, then the fixes. Nobody ticks every box. Almost everyone recognizes two or three. That’s exactly the point.

Smothering control

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The common root is distrust dressed up as standards. When the stakes feel too high to let go, you start controlling the how because you can’t do everything yourself. You call it rigor. The team calls it something else.

Micromanagement

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The intention: “I just want to make sure it’s done right.” Nobody describes themselves as a micromanager. They describe themselves as detail-oriented, demanding on quality, present.

The signs: In you: you ask to be cc’d on everything, you reread every deliverable down to the comma, you explain not just what to do but how, in what order, with which tool, and you take over the moment it isn’t done your way. In the team: people ask for sign-off on trivia, nobody takes initiative without checking first, people wait for your instructions instead of proposing.

The cost: You become your team’s glass ceiling. Nobody grows, because growing means making mistakes and you’ve made that impossible. You, you’re saturated, because everything runs through your head. And the day you’re not there, nothing moves.

Fixing it:

• Agree on the what and on the “done” criteria, not on the steps.
• Replace constant oversight with check-in points agreed up front.
• Calibrate your level of control to the person’s autonomy on this particular task, not in general. That’s exactly the axis I described in the article on management styles.

The approval bottleneck

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The intention: “I’d rather take a look before it ships.” You want to avoid the visible misstep, protect the team from a mistake.

The signs: In you: nothing goes out without your green light, you’re the mandatory checkpoint and you’re a little proud of it. In the team: things sit on your desk, people chase you, deadlines slip because of you and nobody dares say so.

The cost: You’ve become a brake inside your own team. Its speed is your review speed. And since you’re the only one who decides, nobody else learns to do it.

Fixing it:

• Define decision thresholds the team can act under without you.
• Position yourself as an advisor people can consult, not a gate they have to pass through.
• Count, over a week, how many times a piece of work waits on you. The number always surprises.

Going over heads

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The intention: “It was faster to ask them directly.” You wanted to save time, or settle a point without bothering the manager in the middle.

The signs: In you: you talk straight to the skip-levels, you give instructions to people who don’t report to you, you undo a call made by someone on your team without talking to them about it. In the team: your managers discover your decisions after the fact, people no longer know who their contact is, the person you bypassed goes quiet or aligns with you over their own manager.

The cost: You hollow out the authority of the people you handed it to. They can’t manage anymore, since you do it for them and over their heads. And you blur the decision paths for everyone.

Fixing it:

• Route through the person, even when it’s slower.
• If you must step in, do it with them, not around them.
• When you’ve gone over someone’s head, repair it visibly: say so, hand them back the call.

Delegating, then taking it back

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The intention: “I could see it was going sideways, I wasn’t going to let it happen.” You delegated, you believed in it, and at the first stumble you took it back.

The signs: In you: you hand off a task then grab it back at the first difficulty, you delegate the execution but not the decision, you “help” so much you end up doing it. In the team: people start things without believing in them, because they know you’ll take over, they invest only halfway, or they stop telling you when something is stuck, precisely so you won’t take over.

The cost: You kill learning at its source. You learn by recovering from a small miss, not by having it taken out of your hands. And you teach the team that delegation, with you, is revocable at any moment, so it’s worth almost nothing.

Fixing it:

• Delegate the outcome and the decision, not just the typing.
• Agree up front on what “good enough” and “come ask me” look like.
• Let the person recover from a small miss rather than rescuing them.

The fog

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The common root is keeping everything in your head. The context feels obvious to you, so you forget it isn’t shared. The team fills the vacuum with anxiety and guesswork.

Vague expectations

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The intention: “They know what they have to do.” You trust them, or you didn’t take the time to spell it out.

The signs: In you: you kick off a topic without saying what the expected result looks like, you discover at delivery that it “wasn’t that”, you catch yourself thinking “I’d have assumed that was obvious”. In the team: you get the same question three times from three angles, people deliver then wait for your verdict, two people understood two different things from the same brief.

The cost: The team works blind and finds out too late. Work gets redone, trust wears thin, and everyone learns it’s better to wait for your clarifications than to move.

Fixing it:

• State the expected result, the constraints, the deadline. All three.
• Ask the person to play back what they understood.
• For anything non-trivial, write it down. A short note beats a perfect verbal brief.

Hoarding information

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The intention: “I didn’t want to drown them in details that don’t concern them.” Or, less admissible: keeping the context makes you a little indispensable.

The signs: In you: you know things the team doesn’t, things that would change its trade-offs, you “summarize” so hard nothing useful is left, you decide alone what concerns it. In the team: people find out after the fact about decisions that affect them, they take options you knew were dead, they feel like they’re playing a game only you know the rules of.

The cost: The team decides badly, for lack of context, and wastes time on paths you knew were dead ends. And it learns that information, here, is a privilege, not a working tool.

Fixing it:

• By default, share the why.
• A short written context note beats a one-on-one share that doesn’t circulate.
• Ask yourself “who else needs this?”, then tell them.

Feedback that’s absent, vague, or only negative

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The intention: “No news is good news.” You say nothing when things go well, and when they don’t you toss out a “hm, not quite” without specifics.

The signs: In you: you keep the feedback for “the right moment” that never comes, your feedback is about the person (“you’re not rigorous enough”) rather than about a fact, you only flag what’s wrong. In the team: people don’t know where they stand, they over-read your silences, they fall from the clouds at the annual review because nothing led them to expect it.

The cost: Nobody can adjust to a blur. Good work isn’t reinforced, weaker work isn’t corrected, and everyone flies on instruments.

Fixing it:

• Give the feedback close to the event, not three months later.
• Describe the behavior and its impact, not the character trait.
• Say what worked, not only what didn’t.

Weathervane goals

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The intention: “The context changed, I’m adapting.” Sometimes that’s true. Often it’s just your own restlessness spilling onto the team.

The signs: In you: the number-one priority changes every week, you launch initiatives you abandon, you change direction without explaining what changed. In the team: people no longer finish anything, they wait for things to “settle” before investing, they greet your announcements with a shrug.

The cost: Nothing lands, because nothing lasts long enough. And the team learns not to take you at your word, which is exactly the opposite of what you wanted.

Fixing it:

• When you change direction, explain what changed.
• Let small adjustments wait for a natural checkpoint.
• Protect the team from your own restlessness. That’s part of the job.

Broken tempo

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The common root is mistaking your urgency for everyone’s. You set the rhythm, you set it wrong, and you call it responsiveness.

Permanent urgency

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The intention: “Everything’s important, I can’t sort.” You want nothing to drop, so you put everything at the same level.

The signs: In you: every request comes in as a “priority”, you never say “it can wait”, you treat the important as urgent by reflex. In the team: people burn out on things that could have waited, they no longer know what to drop when something has to be dropped, the alarm stops meaning anything because it rings all the time.

The cost: When everything is a priority, nothing is. The team makes trade-offs at random, or to please you, and burns itself out on false fires.

Fixing it:

• Rank things explicitly. Number one, number two, and the rest.
• Name what can wait.
• Say out loud “this is important but not urgent” when it is.

Overload with no arbitration

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The intention: “I couldn’t say no.” Someone asked, you accepted, and the team absorbs.

The signs: In you: you say yes to everything that comes down without negotiating, you pass on the load without filtering it, you count on the team’s “goodwill” to plug the gaps. In the team: people work long weeks, last month’s “important” topic is still dragging, you start hearing “we won’t make it anyway”.

The cost: You burn your team slowly so you don’t have to say no. And the day someone leaves exhausted, that’s one more demand for those who stay.

Fixing it:

• Protecting the team’s capacity is your job, not a luxury.
• Send options and trade-offs back up, not silent execution.
• Cut scope before you cut into people’s evenings.

Meeting overload

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The intention: “At least this way everyone’s aligned.” The meeting has become your default tool, and the recurring slots, nobody questions them.

The signs: In you: your first reflex in front of a topic is to “set up a meeting”, you have recurrences you no longer know why you have, you invite wide “just in case”. In the team: people spend their days in meetings and their evenings doing the work, they accept your invites without knowing why they’re there, the real work happens in the cracks.

The cost: You turn the team’s time into time present in a room. The cost shows up in no calendar, but it’s paid in deliverables that slip.

Fixing it:

• A meeting is for deciding, or for a discussion that needs voices. Otherwise it’s not a meeting, it’s an email.
• Kill the recurrences that don’t pass that test.
• For a simple status, async by default.

Off-hours messages

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The intention: “It was in the flow of my thinking, I didn’t want to forget. But really, no rush!” You write at 10pm or on Sunday, with a “no rush” as absolution.

The signs: In you: you send messages in the evening, on the weekend, on leave, you tell yourself people will “see it Monday”, you never schedule-send. In the team: people answer in the evening, on the weekend, on leave, because a message from the manager, “no rush” or not, is stressful. Nobody really disconnects.

The cost: Your availability sets the team’s norm. You think you’re offering flexibility, you’re installing an on-call duty in practice.

Fixing it:

• Schedule the send. The feature exists everywhere.
• Say explicitly that off-hours messages don’t call for off-hours answers. Then hold to it.
• Look at your own example before your instructions. What you do, the team will do.

Constant interruptions

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The intention: “Just a quick question.” For you, it’s thirty seconds. The cost of context-switching, you don’t see it, because it isn’t in your head.

The signs: In you: you swing by people the moment a question crosses your mind, you “ping” at the slightest query, you never batch your asks. In the team: people can’t hold an hour of focus, they answer within the second and pick their work back up three times slower, they put on headphones as a barricade.

The cost: Every “quick question” costs far more than the question. You fragment the team’s days, and the deep work, the kind that needs continuity, stops happening.

Fixing it:

• Batch your asks. One list at one moment beats ten interruptions.
• An availability window, or an async channel for what isn’t urgent.
• Ask “is now a bad time?”, and accept the “yes”.

Unfairness

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The common root is that fairness costs you something: attention, comfort, a bit of the spotlight. And you quietly stop paying it. The team notices long before you do.

Favoritism

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The intention: “I work better with some people, it’s natural.” Affinity, shared background, or simply the people who resemble you. You didn’t decide it.

The signs: In you: the interesting topics always go to the same people, you have lunch with a narrow circle, you grant more leniency to some people’s mistakes than to others’, you know little about half your team. In the team: there are those “who have the boss’s ear” and the others, some go quiet in meetings because everyone already knows who’ll be heard, the opportunities always fall on the same side.

The cost: You waste half your team without seeing it. And you install an informal hierarchy, harder than the org chart because it has no rules.

Fixing it:

• Take inventory: who gets the interesting work, and the time with you?
• Rotate visibility, deliberately.
• Access to you should go through a frame (your 1:1s, your regular check-ins), not through an affinity.

Taking the credit (and shifting the blame)

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The intention: “I presented it, so it’s a bit me.” And the reverse: “they dropped the ball”, never “we dropped the ball”.

The signs: In you: you say “I shipped”, “I landed”, when it’s the team that did it, you leave your name alone on what works, you quickly find someone responsible when it breaks. In the team: people see their contributions vanish into your “I”, they stop flagging problems because they know a culprit will be hunted, they stick to the visible minimum because the rest, anyway, won’t come back to them.

The cost: You buy a little spotlight at the price of a whole team’s engagement. Nobody goes all out for a boss who scoops up the wins and hands out the losses.

Fixing it:

• Name the people who did the work, especially upward.
• The failure is carried in public, the credit is handed out in public.
• If you’re the one presenting, you’re the one crediting.

Public criticism

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The intention: “It had to be known, and serve as an example.” Or simply: it came out on its own, in the meeting, under a flash of irritation.

The signs: In you: you correct someone in front of the others, you drop a joke at their expense in a meeting, your first question in front of a problem is “who did this?”. In the team: people go quiet in meetings for fear of the shot, mistakes get protected instead of surfaced, the mood tightens the moment you speak.

The cost: You get silence, not quality. The team stops correcting its mistakes, it hides them, which is exactly the opposite of what you wanted.

Fixing it:

• Praise in public, correct in private.
• Ask “what happened?”, not “who did this?”.
• If you snapped in a meeting, repair it in the next one.

Comparisons between team members

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The intention: “I wanted to show them what’s possible.” You hold X up as an example to Y, to pull Y up.

The signs: In you: you say “take a leaf out of X’s book”, you compare the pace, the level, the results of different people, you use a colleague as a yardstick. In the team: people size each other up instead of cooperating, the one held up as an example becomes a target, the one it’s served to digs in.

The cost: You turn the team into a ranking, and a ranking is something you defend, not something you share. You harvest rivalry where you wanted emulation.

Fixing it:

• Compare a person to their own trajectory, not to a colleague’s.
• If X is a model on a specific point, say so openly and collectively, as a practice to spread, not as a weapon.

Absence

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This is the mirror image of smothering control. Stepping back is right, vanishing is not. The “fully autonomous” team is sometimes just a team left to fend for itself.

The ghost manager

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The intention: “They’re grown-ups, I trust them.” Or, less glorious: you’re swamped elsewhere, and that team “runs itself”.

The signs: In you: you cancel your 1:1s the moment the calendar tightens, your decisions drag on for weeks, you discover the team’s topics in a leadership meeting. In the team: people make decisions in your place for lack of seeing you, they work around you because waiting for you costs too much, they’re no longer quite sure what you’re for.

The cost: A slow decision is still a decision, and it’s almost always the wrong one. While you’re not there, the team pays for you: in shaky trade-offs, in topics that rot, in energy spent compensating for your absence.

Fixing it:

• 1:1s don’t get cancelled. They’re the last to go, not the first.
• A pending decision is a decision made, only worse. Decide, even provisionally.
• Be clear about what you’re delegating and what you’re neglecting. They’re not the same thing, and the team needs to know which one it is.

No vision, no why

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The intention: “They don’t need the strategic context to do their part.” You hand out tasks, not a story.

The signs: In you: you say “do this” without saying what it’s for, you never connect the day’s work to anything bigger, you’d be hard pressed to explain why this initiative matters. In the team: people work without understanding, they can’t make trade-offs because they don’t know the goal, they slowly check out because you don’t check out of a meaning you never had.

The cost: A team with no why executes, it doesn’t think. It can’t warn you about a wrong direction, because it doesn’t know where you’re going. And the first person to offer it meaning elsewhere will get it.

Fixing it:

• Connect the work to something the person can see.
• Repeat the why more often than feels necessary. What’s worn out for you is new for others.
• If you can’t explain why it matters, that’s the first problem to fix.

Not growing people

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The intention: “She’s really good at this, may as well leave her where she shines.” It’s comfortable, for you: no risk, no rough patch to go through.

The signs: In you: you keep people on what they already know how to do, you give the ambitious topics to those who already master them, you don’t know what the people on your team want to be doing in a year. In the team: people stagnate, the best ones get bored, the ones who want to grow end up doing it elsewhere.

The cost: You optimize today’s comfort at the expense of tomorrow’s competence. And you lose exactly the people you wanted to keep, because they’re also the ones with the most options.

Fixing it:

• Hand out the work that grows people, not just the work that risks nothing.
• Growing people is part of the job. It’s not a favor you grant when you have time.
• Ask each person what they want to be doing in a year, and act on it.

Posture traps

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These aren’t things you do to the team, they’re roles you slip into that hurt it anyway. From the inside, almost all of them look virtuous. That’s what makes them sticky.

The hero firefighter

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The intention: “It was faster if I handled it.” At every incident, you dive in, you solve it, and you mistake that for value.

The signs: In you: you take topics back the moment they heat up, you’re proud to be “the one people can count on”, you work late putting out fires you never taught the team to put out. In the team: people call you at the first hiccup instead of digging, they never get to handle a crisis themselves, they know you’ll take over anyway.

The cost: You build a fragile team you’re the single point of failure of. The day you’re away, on vacation, or simply swamped, everything stops. You call that being indispensable. That’s exactly the problem.

Fixing it:

• Your job is to become less necessary, not more.
• Coach the fix instead of doing it. Slower once, faster a hundred times.
• A team that can’t function without you is a team you’ve made fragile, not a proof of your importance.

The buddy

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The intention: “I didn’t want to put their back up.” The hard conversation, you keep pushing it back, because being liked matters, and a frank piece of feedback bruises.

The signs: In you: you’d planned to give a tough piece of feedback in a 1:1 and you talked about the roadmap, you round off the edges so much nothing’s left, you avoid the touchy subjects. In the team: people learn at the annual review things you’ve known for six months, someone repeats a mistake you never named, the team senses you’re hiding something from it.

The cost: Clarity is a form of respect, and you’re denying it to them. The feedback you don’t dare give is a debt that accrues interest: the longer you wait, the harder the conversation will be, and the more right the person will have to blame you for not helping them sooner.

Fixing it:

• Clarity is kindness. The blur, on the other hand, is a cowardice dressed up as tact.
• The feedback you keep to yourself is a debt. Pay it while it’s small.
• You can be warm and direct. They aren’t opposites.

The perfectionist

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The intention: “I just hold a high bar.” Nothing is ever quite good enough, and the bar rises as people reach it.

The signs: In you: you redo the last 10% because you’d have done it differently, you never say “it’s fine, we’re stopping here”, you always find a detail. In the team: people deliver wondering what you’ll find this time, they wear themselves out aiming at a moving target, they no longer dare call anything finished.

The cost: Your standards become the team’s anxiety. And a job that’s never “done” is a job nobody takes pride in, so a job nobody really looks after.

Fixing it:

• Name “good enough” before the work starts, not after.
• Let people own the last 10%, even if you’d have done it differently.
• A “very good” said in time beats a “perfect” that never arrives.

The yes-man upward

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The intention: “I couldn’t say no to my boss.” Downward, you know how to push back; upward, never. You protect your reputation, the team picks up the bill.

The signs: In you: you accept everything that comes down without negotiating, you present the decisions from above as obvious when you don’t believe them, you never pass up what the team tells you is wrong. In the team: people can see you don’t dare, they don’t count on you to defend them, they learn to get by with no relay.

The cost: Managerial courage works both ways. A manager who only knows how to say no to the people below them isn’t a demanding manager, it’s a manager who’s afraid. And a team that knows you won’t defend it won’t trust you for the rest either.

Fixing it:

• Managerial courage works upward too. Especially upward.
• Send options and trade-offs back to your management, not silent obedience.
• The team you’d dare to defend is the team that trusts you.

Emotional unpredictability

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The intention: “I’m a wholehearted person, it shows, that’s all.” Your moods spill over, and the team reads your face before it speaks.

The signs: In you: your tone for the day depends on your morning, you swing from warm to curt with no warning, people ask “are you in a good mood right now?” before bringing up a topic. In the team: people pick their moment to talk to you, they anticipate your reactions more than the substance, some go quiet on the bad days out of caution.

The cost: The team spends a wild amount of energy reading your weather instead of doing its work. And information stops coming up, because you don’t flag a problem on a day when “it’s not the moment”.

Fixing it:

• Name your state instead of letting it leak: “I’m tense about X, it’s nothing to do with you”.
• Know your triggers. You defuse better what you saw coming.
• Consistency is a feature. People can organize their work around a predictable manager, not around a mood.

The cross-cutting toolkit

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The catalogue is the map. This section is the compass: the handful of practices that catch any of these behaviors before it settles in.

The regular self-diagnostic. At a fixed interval, take a few of the warning-sign questions from this list and answer them honestly. Before or after each round of 1:1s, once a month, whatever: what matters is that it’s regular and written. A slip you catch yourself at every month ends up stopping. A slip you never look at, never.

Upward feedback, made safe. Ask your team what you do that makes its job harder. A skip-level with your boss, a standing question in every 1:1 (“what’s one thing I do that gets in your way?”), an anonymous pulse if the team is large. Careful: asking once and reacting badly poisons the source for a long time. If you ask the question, you have to be able to hear the answer without defending against it.

The team agreement. Write down what the team can expect of you, not just what you expect of it: response times, meeting norms, what gets decided without you. Once it’s written, the drift becomes visible, to you as much as to others.

Knowing your triggers. Know which of these behaviors you reach for under pressure. It’s almost always the same two or three. When you feel one coming, name it, out loud if you can: “right now I’m micromanaging because the deadline is stressing me”. Just saying it is often enough to defuse the move.

The peer buddy. Find another manager who’ll agree to tell you the truth, and make an explicit deal to do it for each other. Not a friend who reassures you: a peer who calls you out. That’s the only person, along with your team, who sees your blind spots from the outside.

The metrics that warn you. None is proof, all of them are smoke: turnover, and especially regretted turnover; the 1:1s you keep cancelling; who speaks in meetings and who’s gone quiet; the trend of your eNPS. When several go red at once, it’s no longer noise.

Conclusion

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We’re all somebody’s blind spot. This list isn’t a verdict, it’s a mirror. If you recognized yourself in it two or three times, that’s normal, and it’s even the sign you read it the way you should.

A good manager isn’t the one who never slips. It’s the one who notices and corrects. That’s exactly what I said about management styles: the question isn’t your personality, it’s your self-awareness and your ability to adjust.

So, which ones did you recognize? Not in your boss: in yourself. Take one, just one, and work on it this month. It’s less ambitious than a grand resolution, and a lot more effective.