THE ISSUE

When that house of cards a former boss had created to make me feel safe, valued and understood, finally came down I could suddenly see him for what he was. And his game plan, which didn’t foresee a very comforting role for me.

I fell deep and I knew who I had to blame. It was easy. It was obvious.

But was it really? Did I see the whole picture?

And don’t we love that myth of the toxic individual? The narcissist who slipped through the cracks. The manipulator who fooled everyone. It’s a comforting story, because it keeps the system innocent. But here is the uncomfortable truth: often organizations do not accidentally promote toxic leaders. They do it systematically, repeatedly, and often with full structural support. The individual is not the anomaly. The system is the engine.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

When researchers pooled the studies on narcissism and leadership, two things came out of it. Narcissism was clearly related to whether a person emerges as a leader. It was unrelated to whether they were any good at the job (Grijalva et al., 2015). The quality that carries somebody into the role is not the quality that makes them effective once they are in it, and the route runs largely through extraversion, which is to say through warmth, energy, and the ability to fill a room.

There is a second result in that same analysis, and it matters more here. When the effectiveness ratings are separated by who is doing the rating, the pattern splits. Ratings from supervisors, peers and subordinates show no relationship with narcissism at all. Self-ratings show a positive one. The people who work with this person daily do not think he is unusually effective. He does.

How the ascent actually happens is more specific than the usual account, and the specificity is the interesting part. A meta-analysis of influence tactics at work separated the things people do to manage how they are seen from above. Self-promotion, meaning talking up your own accomplishments, turned out to be worth almost nothing: its corrected correlation with performance assessments was .01 across eleven studies. Ingratiation, meaning making the other person feel good, correlated .35 with performance assessments across twenty-seven studies and more than three thousand people (Higgins, Judge & Ferris, 2003).

The tactic that does pay is not the one aimed at the evidence about you, but the one aimed at how the assessor feels. And a recent review of the personality literature reports that low honesty-humility, together with the related dark traits, predicts most impression management behavior at work (Steep & Bourdage, 2025).

No single study runs that whole chain, and joining these findings is my reading rather than a result anyone has tested. But the pieces fit together without strain. The traits that predict heavy use of these tactics are the traits that predict rising. The tactic that works is the one that operates on the assessor rather than on the record. And the thing it moves is the performance assessment, which is precisely the document a promotion decision reaches for.

A study of matched leaders and followers shows the other half of the arrangement. Followers of leaders high in narcissistic rivalry reported less supervisor support, poorer relationship quality, lower performance-based self-esteem, and lower engagement. Those associations appeared only when the followers rated the leader. When the leaders rated their own rivalry, they did not appear at all (Fehn & Schütz, 2020).

So the signal that travels upward is the leader’s own account and their performance in the room where the decision is made. The signal that would contradict it exists only among the people below them, and almost no promotion process is built to go and collect it. Nobody has to be careless for this to happen.

Equally important is the toxic triangle framework: the convergence of destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. A case analysis of a public university found that an environment lacking fundamental checks and balances, combined with instability and perceived threats, created precisely the conditions that brought a toxic leader to power — and kept them there (Pelletier, Kottke & Sirotnik, 2019). Toxic leadership rarely thrives in a vacuum. It requires an organizational context that rewards short-term results over relational health, tolerates power asymmetries, and lacks meaningful accountability mechanisms. Remove any one side of the triangle, and the dynamic weakens. But most organizations never examine the triangle at all. They only ever look at the individual at the top.

Research on promotion decisions further reveals a structural bias: performance metrics in most organizations are output-focused and short-term oriented. A leader who drives results through fear, extraction, and psychological pressure may score exceptionally well on quarterly KPIs, while the human cost remains invisible in the data. Organizations, in other words, are often measuring exactly the wrong things.

IN PRACTICE

Consider a pattern that appears across industries with striking regularity. A senior manager is known internally for creating a climate of fear. Employees avoid escalating concerns because past attempts led to retaliation: subtle, deniable, but effective. HR receives occasional signals: above-average turnover in that team, a spike in sick leave, vague complaints that never quite crystallize into formal grievances.

And yet, the manager’s performance review is strong. The numbers are good. They are articulate in leadership meetings and skilled at managing upward. Two years later, they are promoted.

This is not a failure of individual judgment. It is a systemic failure: an incentive structure that rewards visible output and ignores invisible damage, a complaint architecture that protects the organization more than the employee, and a promotion process that never asks the structural question: what has this person’s leadership cost the people around them?

THE STRUCTURAL QUESTION

The question organizations should be asking is not “how did this person get through?” but “what in our system created this outcome?”

Three structural gaps tend to appear repeatedly:

1. Incentive misalignment. When leaders are evaluated primarily on financial outcomes or project delivery, the relational and psychological dimensions of leadership become externalities: real costs absorbed by employees, invisible to the system.

2. Accountability asymmetry. Formal complaint processes are rarely designed with power differentials in mind. Reporting a direct superior carries enormous personal risk: career risk, social risk, and often psychological risk. Systems that do not actively compensate for this asymmetry will systematically underreport toxic behavior.

3. Governance blindness. Boards and senior leadership often lack the tools, incentives, or mandate to scrutinize leadership culture below the executive level. Toxicity can persist for years within a single department while remaining entirely invisible at the governance level.

Each of these gaps is a design choice, or more precisely: a design omission. And design omissions can be corrected.

ONE TAKEAWAY

The next time you hear someone say “we didn’t see it coming” about a toxic leader, ask one question: What would your organization have had to measure, report, and reward differently in order to have seen it?

If the answer requires fundamental changes to your incentive structure, complaint architecture, governance framework or nepotism culture, then you didn’t miss a person. You have a system that was never designed to see them.

That is the work.

Markus

Correction, 16 August 2026. An earlier version of this issue attributed to Fehn and Schütz (2020) a finding about upward impression management being misread as leadership potential. That study examined outcomes for followers and collected no data on promotion decisions. This section has been rebuilt on sources that do address the question, and Fehn and Schütz are now cited for what they actually found. The error was mine.

This essay first appeared on 10 June 2026 in my LinkedIn newsletter Toxic by Design.

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Sources

Babiak, P. & Hare, R. D. (2006). Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. HarperCollins.

Fehn, T. & Schütz, A. (2020). What You Get is What You See: Other-Rated but not Self-Rated Leaders’ Narcissistic Rivalry Affects Followers Negatively. Journal of Business Ethics. DOI: 10.1007/s10551-020-04604-3

Pelletier, K. L., Kottke, J. & Sirotnik, B. (2019). The toxic triangle in academia: A case analysis of the emergence and manifestation of toxicity in a public university. Leadership. DOI: 10.1177/1742715018773828