I’ve had a few toxic leaders.

I’ve also, on bad days, been one.

I want to write about this, because I think we have the conversation wrong.

My son has tantrums

My five-year-old has tantrums. Some are short. Some are loud. Some are at home and some, mortifyingly, are in public. He says mean things to me sometimes. He pushes his little sister. He flings himself on the floor.

I don’t say he’s toxic.

I say he’s still learning to regulate. I say he’s having a hard time. I say it’s my job, and his dad’s, to help him develop the skill of moving through a hard feeling without breaking the room.

He’s a person who needs help and an adult who’s still teaching. He’s not a label.

I think about that every time I read another article about toxic leaders.

What I’ve actually noticed about “toxic” leaders

In my long career across restaurants and tech, I’ve worked with a handful of leaders I’d have called toxic at the time. A couple of them earned the label.

Most of them, though, when I look back, weren’t toxic in some fixed-character way.

They were running an old survival skill in a current context where it didn’t belong.

One bulldozed every meeting because he’d come up in a kitchen where the first person to speak got cut down. Speaking first, loudly, was how you didn’t get destroyed. He kept doing it twenty years later in a corporate office where it scared everyone and helped nothing.

One controlled every detail because she’d been raised by a parent who punished anything she couldn’t account for. Control was how she stayed safe. By the time she got to manage a team, control was how she made everyone around her smaller.

These are not justifications. Both of them caused real harm. People left. Some of them, frankly, should have been moved out of leadership roles a long time before they were.

But when I tell those stories, the framing is usually “she was just a bad person” or “he was a narcissist.”

I think the truer story is closer to: that was a person running a skill they built in a different context, on top of a wound nobody helped them tend, with no incentive to do the work because the system kept rewarding the behavior anyway.

That’s a longer sentence than “she was toxic.”

It’s also the only one that opens the door to anything actually changing.

Hurt people hurt people

Trauma passes. Not just from parents to kids, though that’s the version we talk about most. It passes laterally too. From leaders to direct reports. From founders to companies. From a boss to your nervous system. You leave the job and the wiring stays.

Hurt people hurt people.

I don’t say that to excuse it. I say it because I think it’s the only frame that makes anything possible.

If a person is born toxic, you only have one move: get away from them. Protect yourself. Cut the loss.

If a person is running an unhealed pattern, you have a different range of moves. You can still leave. You can still protect yourself. You can still set the boundary. And you can also hold the door open in case the person ever does their work.

I want to live in the second story.

What I know about being a better human

Here is what I know about me, after a lot of years of doing my own work:

When I’m rested, when I’m in my own skin, when I’m eating in a way that supports my body, when I’m meditating most days, when I’m journaling, when I’m filling my own cup, I am a much better human to the people in my life.

When I’m running on empty, I am sharper than I want to be. I can be short. I can be the kind of mom who says something I regret. I can be the kind of partner who lands a comment that lingers.

The difference between those two versions of me is not personality. It’s whether I’m doing the work.

I think most “toxic leaders” are people running on empty in a way they have not yet noticed. People who never had the room to learn the language for what they were carrying. People who got promoted before they got healed.

Can they be rehabbed?

I think they can.

If they want to.

If they can develop the self-awareness to see what they’re doing and name it without falling apart.

If they have the right support around them. A coach. A therapist. A partner who calls them on it. A friend who tells the truth.

If the system around them stops rewarding the behavior.

If they’re willing to look at the cost they’ve caused other people and let that land.

That’s a lot of ifs.

It’s not always going to happen. Some people won’t do the work, ever. Some people are not safe to be around, period. Some people need to be moved out of leadership roles before any conversation about rehab is even appropriate.

But it’s a different conversation than “this person is toxic, run.”

That difference matters to me because the work I do, with senior managers and directors who look fine on LinkedIn and are quietly questioning everything, often starts here. Most of them are not the toxic leader. They’ve worked for one. They’ve also wondered, in their quietest moments, if they’ve started to become one.

And the question that opens the door is the same one we ask about everyone else: what survival skill am I still running, and is it still serving me, or am I hurting the people around me because I was hurt first?

That’s not a small question.

It’s also not a question you can ask from a place of being exhausted, depleted, and running on empty yourself.

So the work starts where it always starts. With the cup. Whether yours is empty or full. Whether you’ve made room to tend it. Whether you’re going to be the kind of leader who keeps passing it down, or the kind who decided to do the work and break the chain.

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Sharilyn Chavez is a leadership coach (CPC, ELI-MP, ACC, Trauma-Informed Certified)