How Do Destructive Leaders Attract Followers?

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and former CEO of Theranos, the blood-testing company, is currently awaiting sentencing after being found guilty in January of bilking the company’s investors.

Holmes offered a multi-day testimony in November 2021, two months after the trial began, but her day in court was the end of a long, tragic saga of narcissism, deception, and destructive leadership.

After raising more than $700 million and at one point hitting a $10 billion valuation, Theranos fell apart amid questions about its core blood testing technology.

Books and documentaries followed as many tried to understand how Holmes was able to keep up the charade for so long, raising money, courting positive press, and attracting a court of high-profile advisors.

While her trial determined that Homes is guilty of defrauding investors for millions of dollars, it did not answer the more perplexing question: how did so many people follow Elizabeth Holmes so blindly?

I have written a great deal about destructive leadership, including narcissistic leadership, Machiavellianism, and corporate psychopathy. The Toxic Triangle shows us that destructive leaders cannot hold power without a conducive environment.

But also, in each case, these leaders are managing others. They have followers, and without followers, the damage done by destructive leaders would be far more limited, if not impossible altogether.

So, what drives people to follow self-absorbed, aggressive, empathy-lacking people in the workplace? How do we end up with an Elizabeth Holmes lavished with funding, praise, and accolades, even as her business fell apart from the inside out?

Susceptible Followers

The toxic triangle posits that destructive leadership is only possible with followers, who fall into two categories: conformers and colluders.

Conformers can encapsulate a variety of personalities, ranging from “lost souls” to “authoritarians” and the “bystanders” who end up injured by the destructive leadership in the end. This group is motivated by fear more than anything else and will often look the other way to maintain a job.

Then there are the colluders, or the acolytes and opportunists. These are followers who look to gain something by imitating their leader’s bad behavior or aiding in the malpractice. Such followers find their own toxic behavior may lead to favorable treatment by a destructive leader, so they feel encouraged to sustain the cycle of toxicity.

Follower personality has been shown to play a role in how followers perceive and experience destructive leaders (Nevicka & De Hoogh, 2018). Followers low on self-esteem demonstrate a greater vulnerability. Possessing a need for more direction and closer management, they are among those ill-equipped to cope with destructive leadership but also among those less capable of finding a path out of the toxic situation, much less taking a stand against it.

Conformers and Colluders

You don’t need to look far at Theranos to find an example of someone whose alleged behavior matches the description of a colluder. Ramesh Balwani, the former president and COO of the company, stands out. While Holmes served as both CEO and the public face of the company, Balwani, an older business executive, is alleged to have known about the issues, and he too faces charges of wire fraud in a trial that began this month.

Nearly 20 years Holmes’ senior, he began working for the company in 2009, six years after Holmes had founded it. In a trove of text messages that were recently revealed, Balwani can be seen affirming Holmes when she refers to herself as “best business person of the year.” While Balwani was a colluder to Holmes’ toxic leadership, he was a toxic leader as well, known for belittling employees.

Leadership Essential Reads

3 Strategies to Reclaim Ownership of Your Work Day

Why High-Potential Women Are Ambivalent About Leadership

One such employee who faced his wrath, Tyler Schultz, ultimately decided he was so tired of the toxic leadership that he left the company and eventually became one of the primary whistleblowers. They aided the reporting that led to Theranos’ downfall.

Balwani had bullied Schultz after raising concerns over fabricated data. Failing to see any change in the company, he ultimately left. Of course, for Schultz’s story to stand out, there had to be a slew of conformers who didn’t quit or who kept silent to preserve their careers.

Theranos wasn’t just Holmes and Balwani. By “winning” partnerships with large corporate organizations, the company was kept in business. Such partnerships are pursued and secured through business development teams, lawyers, and countless others.

Eager to work their way up the corporate ladder at a prestigious startup, these teams likely perceived that colluding with their destructive leader would produce more rewards than speaking out. Others were likely forced to keep quiet lest they lose their jobs and halt their careers.

Conclusion

Theranos was a rocket ship at the time, and no one wanted to be thrown off. Opportunities to work for a rare “unicorn” company don’t come along often. Whether colluding to achieve power or prestige or conforming out of a fear of harsh consequences, susceptible followers at Theranos made it possible for Holmes to hold it together for as long as she did. This pattern of followers serving their own needs for power or safety is a key reason destructive leaders are able to sustain power.

Disrupting this cycle is not easy when followers and their leaders are entrenched in an environment that mutually serves one another’s needs (at least in the short term).

Whistleblowers have become the often-unsung heroes of our time. They are critical disruptors of destructive leadership because they consciously make difficult choices to forego the perceived benefits of colluding or conforming in service of doing what is right. And in many cases, the risks of doing so are daunting.

To pave a pathway for more people to make such choices, boards and organizational decision-makers must take steps to build independent reporting systems that make it safe and desirable to come forward.

But counting on one or a few brave souls to speak up and report destructive behavior is not enough. It is essential to actively and objectively monitor the engagement and well-being of every employee to initiate feedback on their experiences rather than wait for it. And to create cultural expectations that define zero-tolerance for low integrity behaviors.

This is true everywhere, especially when prestige and monetary rewards may entice people at any level into susceptible followership.