8 Ways You Might Be a Toxic Manager Without Realizing It—and Slow Ways to Change

Most people who become toxic managers probably do not think of themselves that way. They may believe they are being attentive, maintaining standards, protecting the organization, or helping employees succeed. Toxicity does not always arrive as shouting, intimidation, favoritism, or obvious abuse. Sometimes it develops through ordinary management practices repeated often enough that they begin to shape how people experience their work.

A manager checks on a project one more time. Rewrites a sentence that was perfectly acceptable. Gives another assignment to the person who always gets things done. Responds defensively when someone questions a decision. Sends an email at night and says there is no expectation of an immediate response, even though everyone knows the message itself can create an expectation.

None of these actions, taken alone, necessarily makes someone a toxic manager.

The problem is what happens when small actions become patterns.

This is where I find Ruha Benjamin's Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want useful for thinking about management. Benjamin is writing about racial and social justice, not workplace leadership, and it would be a mistake to reduce her argument to a set of management tips. But one of the powerful ideas in her work is that systems are sustained not only through large policies and institutions, but also through ordinary habits, relationships, decisions, and expectations. Small actions can reproduce harmful conditions, but small actions can also interrupt them.

That changes the question. Instead of asking, “Am I a toxic manager?”, which most of us will probably answer no, we might ask something more useful: What am I repeatedly doing that makes this workplace harder for someone else?

It also changes how we think about improvement. Leadership development is often presented as a major undertaking: attend a program, adopt a new philosophy, launch an initiative, reorganize a department, or introduce a new framework. Those things can matter. But management is also practiced in hundreds of ordinary moments. Becoming less toxic may begin much more slowly.

Change one behavior.

See what happens.

Then change another.

1. You Make Everything Urgent

Managers have unusual power over other people's attention. A request that feels casual to the person sending it may immediately reorder someone else's day. “Can you take a quick look at this?” or “Could you get this to me today?” may seem harmless when considered individually. But when those requests happen repeatedly, employees learn that their own priorities are provisional.

Over time, people begin organizing their work around interruption. They may stop concentrating deeply on longer projects because experience has taught them that something else could suddenly become more important. The manager may think they are being responsive and fast-moving. The employee may experience the workplace as one in which everything can become urgent at any moment.

Not everything is urgent simply because the manager noticed it.

The slower practice is simple: before sending the message, ask when you actually need the work. If Friday is fine, say Friday. If next week is fine, do not manufacture a deadline for tomorrow. If there is no real deadline, say that too. One more reasonable deadline will not transform a workplace, but repeated over time it communicates that other people's time belongs to them as well.

2. You Say You Trust People—and Then Check Everything

You delegate a project and tell someone they are responsible for it. Then you ask for an update. Then another update. Then you ask to see the draft. Then you make several changes. Then you ask to be copied on the final email.

From the manager's perspective, this can feel like support. You are interested. You are available. You want to make sure the project succeeds. But from the employee's perspective, the message may be very different: you do not actually trust me to do this without you.

Trust is not established by saying, “I trust you.”

Trust becomes visible when the manager is absent.

A slower practice is to choose one responsibility and genuinely give it away. Agree on what the outcome should look like, establish when you will reconnect, and clarify when the employee should bring you back into the conversation. Then do not check before then.

That may feel uncomfortable. Managers who are accustomed to knowing everything that is happening can experience silence as loss of control. But tolerating that discomfort is part of the work. You are not only asking the employee to become more autonomous. You are asking yourself to become less necessary.

3. You Always Have the Answer

Managers often become managers because they are good at solving problems. They have experience, know the institution, understand the politics, and can sometimes see the solution before someone else has even finished explaining the problem.

That competence can become a problem of its own.

An employee comes to you with an issue. You know what they should do, so you tell them. The problem is solved quickly, but something else may have happened. The employee has learned that when a problem becomes difficult enough, the answer ultimately comes from you.

Do that often enough and employees stop developing judgment because the manager is always available to supply it. Then, ironically, the same manager may become frustrated that nobody takes initiative.

A slower practice is to wait before answering. Ask, “What do you think we should do?” or “What options are you considering?” Let the employee reason through the problem before you step in.

You can still provide guidance.

You just do not have to be the first person to think.

4. You Correct Things That Aren't Wrong

You rewrite the sentence. Rearrange the presentation. Change the subject line. Modify the agenda. Adjust the formatting. Move a paragraph.

None of those changes may be especially significant.

That is exactly why they can become significant.

When small corrections happen repeatedly, employees learn that there is an invisible standard they are expected to discover. The standard is not simply whether the work is accurate, useful, or professional. The standard becomes whether the work resembles what the manager would have produced.

Over time, people can stop asking, “What do I think works best?” and start asking, “What will my boss want?”

That is a subtle form of control.

Before changing someone else's work, try separating three things: wrong, important, and different. Correct what is wrong. Discuss what is important. Try leaving different alone.

Your employee's sentence may not be your sentence. Their presentation may not be organized exactly as you would organize it. Their method may not be your method.

Different is not the same as wrong.

Sometimes, leaving the sentence untouched is an act of leadership.

5. Your Best Employees Get Rewarded With More Work

Someone is dependable, so you ask them to join another committee. Someone is efficient, so you give them another project. Someone responds quickly, so you contact them whenever something unexpectedly needs to be done. Someone always says yes, so you keep asking.

No single request feels unfair. Each one may seem entirely logical. You need something done, and this person has demonstrated that they will do it well.

This is how inequitable workloads can grow without anyone deliberately creating them.

The strongest employee gradually becomes responsible for more and more because the manager knows they can handle it. Meanwhile, other employees receive fewer opportunities to develop the experience that would make them the obvious choice the next time something important needs to be done.

The dependable employee is punished with dependability.

Before assigning another task to the person who always delivers, ask who you have not asked. Look at the distribution of work across the group, not merely at who can complete the next assignment fastest.

Developing someone else may initially be less efficient. They may need help. Their first attempt may take longer.

Efficiency today can create dependency tomorrow.

6. You Listen Mostly for an Opportunity to Explain Yourself

An employee raises a concern. You explain why the decision was made. They describe a workload problem. You explain the pressures facing the department. They tell you something is not working. You explain what you intended.

Nothing you say may be inaccurate. Managers often have context that employees do not. They may be operating under constraints that are invisible to everyone else.

But explanation can become a way of avoiding listening.

Managers already have more opportunities to explain their perspective because they have more positional power. Employees may have relatively few opportunities to tell the manager something uncomfortable. If every concern is met immediately with context, justification, or defense, people eventually learn that raising a concern simply means sitting through another explanation.

A slower practice is to resist explaining for a few minutes. Ask, “Tell me more.” Ask, “What am I missing?” Ask, “How is this affecting you?”

Then listen long enough for the answer to become uncomfortable.

Listening does not mean agreeing. It means accepting that sometimes understanding should come before being understood.

7. You Say People Can Disagree With You—but They Learn Not To

Many managers sincerely believe that they welcome disagreement. They tell employees that their door is always open, that they want people to challenge ideas, and that nobody should be afraid to tell them when something is wrong.

The real test is not what happens when the manager invites disagreement.

It is what happens after someone actually disagrees.

Does the manager become defensive? Do they explain why the employee misunderstood? Do they continue arguing until the other person eventually gives up?

Does the disagreement somehow reappear later, perhaps during a performance conversation or when another opportunity becomes available?

People learn very quickly which kinds of honesty are safe.

A slower practice is to resist winning the conversation. Say, “I hadn't thought about it that way.” Say, “Let me think about that.” Then actually think about it.

You do not have to agree.

But people need to know that disagreement does not carry a penalty.

Psychological safety is not created when the manager announces that people can speak freely. It is created when people speak freely and discover that nothing bad happened afterward.

8. You Think Culture Is Something You Will Fix Later

Managers are busy. There is always a deadline approaching, a vacancy to fill, a budget issue, a reorganization, a new initiative, an accreditation requirement, or some unexpected crisis.

So managers recognize cultural problems and postpone them.

We need to communicate better.

We need to distribute work more fairly.

We need better boundaries.

We need to give people more autonomy.

We need fewer meetings.

We'll work on that after this project.

After this semester.

After the reorganization.

After things calm down.

Things rarely calm down.

Meanwhile, the existing culture continues being practiced every day.

This is where Benjamin's attention to everyday action becomes especially helpful. Her argument does not suggest that structural problems disappear if individuals simply behave better. Larger systems, institutional rules, policies, histories, and inequalities matter enormously. But those structures are also lived through daily practices. People participate in reproducing them, resisting them, modifying them, or imagining alternatives.

The same distinction matters in organizations. A healthy workplace cannot be created simply by having a kind manager. Staffing, compensation, workload, hierarchy, policy, and institutional expectations all matter. Individual niceness cannot repair structural inequity.

But managers also should not use “the system” as an excuse for the behaviors they can change.

Do one thing differently today.

Cancel the unnecessary meeting.

Extend the deadline.

Do not send the late-night email.

Give someone authority to make the decision without you.

Ask the quieter person in the room what they think.

Leave the sentence alone.

Then do something else differently tomorrow.

Toxicity Accumulates. So Can Something Better.

What makes many toxic management behaviors difficult to recognize is their ordinariness. Few managers consciously decide to create a culture of mistrust. Instead, they ask for one unnecessary update. Then another. One employee receives another assignment because they are reliable. One disagreement receives a defensive response. One late-night message becomes normal. One decision that could have belonged to an employee gets pulled back to the manager.

Eventually, those individual moments form a pattern.

The pattern becomes an expectation.

The expectation becomes culture.

This is why Benjamin's idea of small practices matters here. In Viral Justice, she asks us to take seriously the possibility that change can grow through everyday actions and what she calls “beautiful experiments”: small efforts that help make another way of living possible. The scale of her argument is much larger than management, but the underlying insight is useful. We do not always have to wait for a dramatic intervention before we begin behaving differently.

Managers can conduct their own small experiments.

Give away one decision and see what happens. Ask one more question before offering the answer. Interrupt one less time. Listen two minutes longer. Let someone approach a problem differently. Give an opportunity to someone who usually does not receive it.

Trust someone a little sooner.

None of these actions replaces the need for structural change. Nor does a collection of good habits automatically create a good organization. But culture is partly produced through repetition. If people repeatedly experience autonomy, fairness, listening, trust, and room to disagree, those experiences begin to shape expectations, too.

That is a more demanding way to think about management than simply deciding whether we are good bosses or toxic bosses.

The better question is what our everyday behavior is teaching other people.

Do they learn that everything is urgent?

Does the boss have to approve everything?

Is that disagreement risky?

Does that good work earn more work?

That being trusted still means being monitored?

Or do they gradually learn something else?

That they have room to think.

That disagreement is possible.

That boundaries are legitimate.

That difference does not mean wrong.

That responsibility can come with real authority.

That trust is something the organization practices rather than something the manager merely talks about.

We often imagine becoming a better manager as a major undertaking: a leadership course, a new philosophy, a retreat, a book, a strategic initiative.

Maybe those things help.

But organizational culture is being created whether we launch an initiative or not. It is being created in the next email, the next meeting, the next deadline, the next assignment, and the next moment when someone disagrees with us.

If toxic management can grow through small actions repeated over time, becoming less toxic may begin the same way.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

One ordinary decision at a time.