How Good Leaders Become Toxic Leaders
Most of the toxic leaders I have worked with did not start out toxic.
They started out ambitious. Driven. Effective. They hit targets. They shipped products. They grew revenue. They earned promotions. And somewhere in the process of doing all of that well, they crossed a line most leaders cannot see themselves crossing until they are already on the other side of it.
They started leading for the hit. Not for the humans.
That is the pattern I want to name today. Because it is one of the most under-diagnosed sources of dysfunction inside modern organisations. And it is a billion dollar blind spot sitting at the top of far more leadership teams than anyone in leadership development wants to acknowledge.
What the neuroscience tells us
We know a great deal about what happens inside the human brain when we hit a target.
Wolfram Schultz’s research on dopamine neurons, running now for more than three decades, has shown that dopamine is released in specific patterns when we anticipate and achieve a reward. Not only when the reward arrives. When the prediction of the reward is confirmed. That is why the moment we hit the number, close the deal, or ship the product produces such an intense sense of satisfaction.
Kent Berridge’s research on wanting versus liking has added another critical layer. The dopamine system is more responsible for the pursuit of reward than the enjoyment of it. In other words, the chemistry that drives us to chase the next win is not the same chemistry that makes us satisfied once we get it.
Read that again. The system that hooks us on chasing is a different system from the one that lets us feel content when we arrive.
That is a neurobiological fact. And it has consequences for how leaders lead.
Why hitting targets is addictive
B.F. Skinner’s research on variable ratio reinforcement, done nearly a century ago, is still the most robust finding in behavioural psychology. The reinforcement schedule that produces the most persistent behaviour is one where the reward arrives unpredictably. That is why gambling is compulsive. It is also why business metrics become compulsive for the leaders chasing them.
You never know exactly when the next win is coming. Sometimes the quarter closes ahead of target. Sometimes the deal lands unexpectedly. Sometimes the campaign takes off. The reward is unpredictable. The pursuit becomes compulsive. And the neurobiology does what it was designed to do. It hooks the leader on the chase.
For a while, this looks like leadership. The person at the top is driven. Committed. Relentless. They deliver results. They keep the organisation moving forward.
Underneath the visible behaviour, something else is happening. The leader is being trained. By the neurobiology. To need the hit more than they need almost anything else.
Leadership culture calls that high performance.
Behavioural psychology calls it the predictable outcome of any variable-ratio reinforcement schedule operating on any human nervous system long enough to establish a compulsive pattern.
The gap between those two descriptions is where good leaders quietly cross into toxic ones.
What happens when the high wears off
The neurobiology that hooks the leader on chasing is the same neurobiology that eventually stops rewarding the same-sized wins.
Hedonic adaptation, first documented by Brickman and Campbell in the 1970s, is one of the most robust findings in wellbeing research. Human beings adapt to their circumstances. The win that thrilled the leader last year barely registers this year. The target that felt bold three quarters ago feels routine now.
The response, if the leader has not built any other source of meaning into their life, is to chase bigger wins. Bolder targets. Faster growth. Riskier bets. Because the previous hit no longer produces the previous feeling.
This is where toxic leadership behaviours start to emerge. The leader has not become a worse person. The neurobiology has done what neurobiology does when it runs unchecked for long enough. And the leader has not built the interior conditions to hold what is happening.
The specific behaviours that show up.
Increasing impatience with anyone who slows down the pursuit of the next hit.
Emotional volatility. Snapping at the team when the quarterly numbers wobble. Withdrawing when they slip.
Micromanagement of the wrong things. The leader needs the win to arrive faster than the team can deliver it. Control feels like the fastest route to the outcome, even when it is the slowest.
Blaming the team when the hit does not come. Because the leader cannot yet look at the possibility that the problem is the chase itself.
Treating the humans in the organisation as instruments of the next win rather than the whole point of the work.
Every one of these behaviours is a symptom of the same underlying pattern. A leader whose nervous system has been trained to require a reward that used to arrive and no longer does.
And that pattern is a billion dollar blind spot inside more organisations than most executive coaches can safely name.
The team experiences this before the leader does
The team knows.
They can feel the shift. The meetings that used to be about the work now feel like performance reviews. The check-ins that used to be human now feel transactional. The praise that used to land now feels calculated. The leader who used to see them now seems to look through them, searching for the next indicator that the number will come.
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety tells us what happens in a team that has learned the leader is chasing an outcome rather than caring for the people producing it. Truth-telling stops. Risk-taking stops. Real engagement stops. The team performs the appearance of the work while quietly disengaging from the substance of it.
Gallup has been telling us for a decade that seventy percent of engagement variance is explained by the direct manager. The manager chasing the next hit is precisely the manager losing engagement fastest. And they cannot see it. Because the numbers still look fine, right up until the moment they do not.
Human behaviour drives business outcomes. Always. And the behaviour of the leader is the specific behaviour that shapes the culture, whether the leader can see it or not.
What positive psychology offers as the way through
Positive psychology gives us the distinction that changes everything here.
Researchers like Carol Ryff and Richard Ryan have spent decades mapping the difference between hedonic wellbeing and eudaimonic wellbeing. Hedonic wellbeing is pleasure. The rush of the win. The chemistry of the hit. Eudaimonic wellbeing is meaning. The sense that what you are doing is worth doing regardless of the immediate reward.
The two are not opposed. Both are part of a full human life. The problem is what happens when a leader tries to run their entire operating system on hedonic wellbeing alone.
The chemistry cannot sustain it. The neurobiology of pleasure was designed to be a signal inside a life, not the fuel for one. And the leader who has built a career on hitting targets, without also building meaning underneath, is running on a system that will inevitably break down.
I know this pattern. I have watched myself edge toward it in earlier chapters of my work. I have watched leaders I care about run it for years before they could see it. It is not a personality defect. It is a nervous system doing what nervous systems do when they have been trained by decades of variable reinforcement.
Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework locates this precisely. Accomplishment matters. So does positive emotion. So do engagement, relationships, and meaning. A leader who has optimised for accomplishment while starving the other four is not building sustained wellbeing. They are building a nervous system that will eventually stop being able to feel the wins at all.
And when it stops, the toxicity begins. Because the leader is chasing something the nervous system can no longer deliver.
Where Respect Equality lives in this conversation
I have written before about the Respect Equality Model. Respect is not a value you hang on the wall. It is a behaviour under pressure.
Here is where that concept lands in this article.
You cannot respect the humans in your organisation if you have started to see them as sources of the next hit. That is instrumentalisation dressed up as high standards.
The moment a leader begins to relate to their team primarily as a means of getting the next win, the humans on that team become interchangeable. Replaceable. Optimisable. All the language of the human resources industry becomes literally true. The people are resources. The leader is extracting from them.
The team feels the shift, even if they cannot name it. And the culture underneath that leader slowly rearranges itself to serve the leader’s neurochemistry rather than the organisation’s mission.
That is one of the most expensive things a leader can allow to happen. And they usually cannot see it, because from the inside it feels like commitment. Ambition. High standards.
From the outside, it looks like a leader who no longer sees the humans they lead.
Three practices for the leader sitting with this
If any of this is landing uncomfortably close, three practices to consider.
Notice what you feel when a team member brings you something that is not a metric. Test yourself in real time. When someone raises a concern, shares an idea that will not immediately produce revenue, or asks for time to think. Is your first response openness, or impatience? The impatience is the tell. This is a neurochemistry pattern before it is a values one. And impatience is the earliest signal that the chase has begun to run you rather than the other way around.
Build meaning into your operating system that does not depend on the next hit. Relationships that outlast quarterly targets. Practices that produce eudaimonic wellbeing rather than only hedonic wellbeing. Time that is not measured against outcomes. The leader who has meaning outside the chase is the only leader who can hold the chase without being consumed by it.
Ask your team what they have stopped bringing you. Because they have stopped bringing you something. And they know exactly what it is. The answer will tell you where the pattern has already taken hold. And it will give you the specific ground on which to start rebuilding.
The leadership this moment is asking for
We are past the era when leaders could be measured on the numbers alone.
The workforce doing the work now can feel the difference between a leader who cares about the mission and a leader who cares about the hit. They can feel it in the meeting cadence. In the emotional weather of the room. In who gets celebrated and who gets ignored.
And they know, with a clarity that senior leadership rarely credits them for, when the person at the top has stopped leading and started chasing.
The most trusted leaders of the next decade are going to be the ones who did the interior work required to hold the pursuit of results without being consumed by it. Who built meaning underneath their accomplishment. Who could feel the wins without needing them. Who could return to the humans they lead as full humans, not as instruments of the next chart line.
That is the leadership this moment is calling for. And I believe the leaders reading this are capable of it. Because most of you are already sensing that the chase is starting to cost more than it is delivering.
The question I want to leave you with is one you can answer honestly, quietly, right now.
What are you chasing that used to feel like leadership and has started to feel like something else?
That is the beginning of the work. Because until you can name the pattern, you cannot begin to interrupt it. And the humans in your organisation cannot wait indefinitely for you to figure it out.
Build the leadership that does not need the next hit to feel worth showing up for. That is what real leadership has always been. And your team has been waiting for you to remember it.
Hacia Atherton is the author of The Billion Dollar Blind$pot, a three-time Amazon bestseller in Strategic Management and Behavioural Psychology. She works with leaders and organisations to build the behavioural clarity that drives both psychological safety and commercial performance.
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You do not get the culture you want. You get the culture your behavior creates.