A senior leadership hire is one of the highest-stakes decisions a board or founder will make. Get it right, and you gain someone who lifts an entire function. Get it wrong, and the damage rarely stays contained to one seat — it shows up in attrition, in stalled succession pipelines, and in a culture that takes years to repair. Our insight below gives some practical tips on how to avoid hiring toxic leaders in the first place.
Harvard Business Review’s recent piece, “How to Spot a Toxic Leader—Before Hiring Them“ by Douglas H. Reynolds and Steven G. Rogelberg, makes the case that most of the warning signs are visible during the hiring process itself — if you know where to look. We’d add one thing from our own work across Africa, the Middle East, and India: the signs are visible, but only if your search process is built to surface them. A standard interview loop usually isn’t.
Why This Risk Is Higher at the Top
The higher the seat, the harder toxic behaviour is to detect — and the more expensive it is to miss. A toxic leader rarely presents as obviously difficult. More often, they interview beautifully: articulate, composed, quick with a compelling turnaround story. The behaviour that damages a team — micromanagement, credit-hoarding, selective information-sharing, blame-shifting under pressure — tends to surface only once they have direct reports who can’t easily push back.
By the time a board notices, the cost isn’t just the leader’s exit package. It’s the senior people who quietly left during their tenure, the decisions made on incomplete information because no one felt safe raising concerns, and the time it takes a new leader to rebuild trust in the team they inherit.
Signals Worth Building Into Your Process
A handful of areas tend to be far more revealing than a standard competency interview:
How they narrate past teams. Listen for the ratio of “I” to “we” when a candidate describes past wins — and, more tellingly, how they describe past failures. A leader who can name what they got wrong, without immediately pivoting to someone else’s fault, is a different proposition from one who can’t.
How they treat people who can’t help their candidacy. A candidate’s manner with your receptionist, your executive assistant, or a junior panelist often tells you more than an hour with the hiring committee does. Consistency of behaviour across power differences is one of the more reliable predictors available.
What their reference checks actually surface. Standard references, provided by the candidate, are selected to flatter. The more useful signal comes from structured, behaviourally-anchored reference conversations — and, where appropriate, back-channel references with people who worked for the candidate, not just alongside or above them.
Whether their team has produced other leaders. Ask directly: who on your former team has gone on to a bigger role, elsewhere or internally? Leaders who build capability in others usually have a ready answer. Leaders who don’t, often deflect the question.
What This Looks Like in Practice
We’ve seen this play out in a pattern common enough to be worth describing, even without naming names. In one succession mandate for a family-owned group in East Africa, an internal candidate for a divisional MD role looked, on paper and in panel interviews, like the obvious choice — strong commercial results, confident in the room, well-regarded by the ownership family. It was only through structured reference conversations with former direct reports rather than the peer and superior references the candidate had offered, that a consistent pattern emerged: information was tightly controlled, dissenting views were quietly discouraged, and two capable managers had left the division within the prior eighteen months without a clear account of why. None of that was visible in the interview room. All of it would have mattered enormously to a family business thinking about the next decade, not just the next quarter.
That is the gap a structured search process is designed to close — not to catch dishonesty, but to make behaviour visible that a standard hiring loop simply isn’t built to surface.
Building This Into a Search Mandate
For roles where the cost of a mis-hire is highest — CEO, MD, and other leadership succession appointments — we build toxic-leadership screening directly into the search methodology rather than treating it as a final-stage check:
- Structured, behaviourally-anchored interviews designed to surface how candidates handle failure, conflict, and dissent
- Reference conversations that go beyond the candidate-supplied list, including former direct reports where possible
- Attention to consistency of behaviour across levels of seniority throughout the process, not just in the final panel round
- Assessment findings framed for the board or founder in terms of organisational risk, not just capability
The Takeaway
A polished interview is not the same as a sound leadership hire. The candidates worth worrying about are rarely the ones who are obviously difficult — they’re the ones who are difficult to see clearly without the right process. If you’re navigating a senior leadership appointment and want a second set of eyes on exactly this kind of risk, get in touch with our team — this is where a structured search process earns its cost, well before the offer letter goes out.
