What Does an Organisation Actually Learn When Leadership Becomes Harmful? - Learning & Adaptation within The Organisational Capability Framework™

organisational capability

What does an organisation actually learn when leadership becomes harmful?

When harmful leadership becomes visible, attention naturally turns towards the leader.

What happened?
Who was affected?
Was a concern raised?
Was the behaviour investigated?
Who is accountable?
What needs to happen now?
These questions matter.

But there is another question that may matter just as much: What will the organisation learn from what happened?

Not simply what will it document. Not only what action will it take. But what will it understand differently about the conditions that allowed the situation to emerge, continue or become difficult to address? Because an organisation can respond to an individual case without necessarily learning from it.

A complaint can be investigated.
A leader can be coached.
A policy can be reviewed.
Training can be delivered.
A person can even leave the organisation.
And yet the organisational conditions surrounding the problem may remain largely unchanged.

That leads to a more difficult question: If the leader changes but the organisational conditions do not, has the organisation really learned?

The Answer: Learning Must Change Something

Within The Organisational Capability Framework™, I do not see Learning & Adaptation simply as the ability to reflect on what happened.

Reflection matters.
So does investigation.
So does understanding.

But organisational learning becomes meaningful when what has been learned begins to influence how the organisation works.

That may mean changing how information is connected.
How leaders are selected or promoted.
How performance is evaluated.
How concerns involving power are escalated.
How independent challenge is protected.
How governance receives information.

How different professional functions work together.

Or how the organisation determines whether an intervention has actually changed the conditions that created the risk.

This is the distinction I want to explore:

Recognising what happened is not yet organisational learning.
Responding to what happened is not necessarily adaptation.
Learning becomes organisational capability when insight changes the conditions under which future work takes place.

What If Harmful Leadership Is Not Where the Problem Starts?

When we talk about toxic or harmful leadership, we naturally focus on behaviour.

What did the leader do?
How did they communicate?
How did they exercise authority?
How did their behaviour affect others?

Individual behaviour and individual accountability matter. But a leader does not operate in isolation. Leaders work within an organisational environment that selects, promotes, rewards, challenges and holds them to account. That environment also determines which information becomes visible, who can question decisions, how concerns travel through hierarchy and what happens when the person holding power becomes part of the concern.

So perhaps harmful leadership is sometimes the visible problem, rather than the point at which the organisational problem began.

Were warning signals already present?
Had people tried to speak?
Were concerns examined separately?
Was turnover increasing?
Was absence changing?
Was trust declining?
Did colleagues begin behaving differently?
Was performance valued more highly than the conditions under which it was achieved?
And did anyone have both the visibility and authority to connect what was happening?

None of these signals, individually, proves harmful leadership.

Signals are not diagnoses.

But they may create an opportunity for organisational learning if the organisation is capable of connecting and interpreting them.

Learning Begins with What the Organisation Is Willing to Examine

This connects Learning & Adaptation directly to Organisational Signals. Signals tell us where to look. Patterns tell us what may need further investigation. Insight helps us understand what deserves attention. But learning asks something else: What are we prepared to understand differently because of what we have seen?

That question matters because organisational learning is not always comfortable. Sometimes learning confirms that a process worked. Sometimes it shows that an individual made a poor decision. But sometimes it reveals something more difficult. Perhaps responsibilities were unclear. Perhaps the person receiving the concern lacked authority. Perhaps information remained fragmented across functions. Perhaps strong performance made behavioural concerns easier to overlook. Perhaps hierarchy influenced whose interpretation was believed. Perhaps a speak-up mechanism existed, but employees did not believe they could safely use it when power was involved. And perhaps the organisation itself contributed to the conditions it is now trying to correct. That is when learning becomes more than reviewing an incident.

The organisation itself becomes part of what needs to be examined.

Power Changes What Psychological Safety Requires

This became particularly visible to me while exploring a question in The Organisational Capability Series™:

Can psychological safety really exist if people are afraid of power?

Most organisations want employees to speak up. We ask people to challenge decisions, contribute ideas, raise concerns and tell us when something does not feel right. But there is an assumption underneath that expectation: that having the opportunity to speak means feeling able to use it.

Imagine an employee concerned about the behaviour of their manager.

They know the reporting process.
They know whom they could contact.
They may even work in an organisation that actively promotes psychological safety.

Yet they hesitate.

Why?

Because speaking about a problem is not necessarily the same as speaking about someone who has power over you. A manager may influence performance assessments, opportunities, access to information, reputation or future career prospects. Nothing needs to be explicitly threatened for that dependency to exist. The person has not changed.

The risk has.

And that makes the question of psychological safety more precise:

Safe to do what, with whom, and under what conditions?

When Leadership Is the Concern, Something Else Has to Hold

Leadership matters enormously for psychological safety. How leaders respond to challenge, disagreement, mistakes and difficult information influences whether people continue to contribute their voice. But that creates a paradox.

What happens when leadership itself becomes the concern?

The person expected to create psychologically safer conditions may now be part of the reason someone hesitates to speak. An organisation cannot reasonably expect psychological safety to depend entirely on the relationship that may have become unsafe.

Something else has to hold.

That “something else” is where I believe organisational capability becomes critical.

Can information travel another route?
Is sufficient independence available?
Can hierarchy be bypassed when necessary?
Does someone have the authority to act?
Can information held in different parts of the organisation be connected?
Can governance see what operational structures may not?
And can people question power without carrying disproportionate personal risk for doing so?

Learning from harmful leadership therefore cannot only mean teaching leaders to behave differently. It may require examining whether the organisation itself continues to function when good leadership conditions are absent.

What Did the Organisational Response Teach People?

There is another form of learning taking place at the same time.

The organisation may be learning from an incident.

But employees are learning from the organisation too.

They observe what happens when someone speaks.
They see whether concerns are taken seriously.
They notice whether seniority changes the response.
They see whether someone who raises a concern experiences consequences afterwards.
They see whether strong performance appears to excuse behaviour.
They notice whether anything actually changes.

This connects to an insight that emerged during an earlier discussion on Leadership & Accountability:

The organisational response itself becomes a signal.

But from the perspective of Learning & Adaptation, I would take that one step further: The organisational response also becomes a learning event.

People are learning what will probably happen next time.
They are learning whether speaking is worth the risk.
They are learning whether organisational values remain credible when power is involved.
They are learning whether accountability applies equally.
And they are learning whether the organisation can be trusted when circumstances become difficult.

So when organisations review their response, perhaps the question should not only be:

“Did we follow the correct process?”

It should also be:

“What did our response teach people about this organisation?”

Culture Can Protect — But It Can Also Need to Learn

A LinkedIn discussion with Derek Mowbray added another important perspective to this exploration.

Derek described organisational toxicity as strongly connected to culture and leadership. He emphasised leadership that draws on the collective intelligence of the workforce, distributes responsibility and creates conditions in which people can contribute to organisational success.

As our discussion developed, he also pointed towards different organisational layers: board oversight, non-executive responsibility, CEO accountability, peer challenge and an expectation that people throughout an organisation can constructively critique what may be getting in the way of success.

That raises an important possibility.

A strong culture can constrain leadership behaviour.
People can challenge.
Peers can intervene.
Expectations can become larger than any individual leader.

But it also led me to another question:

What happens when the person holding significant power can also influence the culture that is supposed to constrain their behaviour?

And what happens when existing cultural norms have themselves contributed to the problem?

This is where Learning & Adaptation becomes important.

The organisation cannot rely only on culture to correct behaviour.

It must also be capable of examining and adapting the culture itself.

The question becomes:

How do we move from good leadership practice to an organisational capability that survives individual leaders?

When the Protective System May Also Need Examination

Another contributor to the discussion, Ludwig Van den Hove, brought a very different perspective through his personal experiences of what he described as destructive leadership.

His experience should not be treated as evidence of what happens in every organisation.

But it raises a question that organisations should be willing to examine.

What happens when the mechanisms designed to provide protection are themselves affected by the same organisational conditions they are expected to challenge?

An organisation may have HR.
A trust person.
Prevention professionals.
Compliance mechanisms.
Employee representation.
Escalation procedures.
Governance.

Their existence matters.

But Learning & Adaptation requires more than asking whether those mechanisms exist.

It requires asking whether they worked under the conditions in which they were needed.

Were they sufficiently independent?
Did they have authority?
Could information move?
Could power be challenged?
Were people protected from negative consequences?
Could concerns reach a level capable of acting on them?

And if not:

What has the organisation changed because it learned that they could not?

That last question is crucial. Because discovering that a safeguard did not work is information. Changing the conditions that prevented it from working is adaptation.

Removing the Leader Is Not Necessarily Removing the Condition

This may be one of the most difficult distinctions.

Sometimes a leader leaves.
Sometimes they are moved.
Sometimes coaching or development follows.
Sometimes a formal process reaches a conclusion.
These actions may be entirely appropriate.

But they do not automatically mean the organisation has addressed the conditions surrounding what happened.

Consider what may remain:

the same promotion criteria;
the same incentives;
the same reporting relationships;
the same fragmented information;
the same dependency on individual leaders;
the same barriers to escalation;
the same governance blind spots;
the same assumptions about psychological safety;
the same imbalance between performance and behaviour.

If those conditions remain unchanged, another leader may eventually encounter or reproduce the same organisational dynamics.

So perhaps one of the most important questions after harmful leadership becomes visible is:

What would still be possible here if we changed the person but changed nothing around them?

That question moves us from corrective action towards organisational learning.

Adaptation Must Reach the Conditions of Work

This is why I see adaptation as more than introducing another initiative.

An organisation may respond with leadership training.
A new policy.
A revised procedure.
A wellbeing programme.
A communication campaign.
A new speak-up channel.
Each may have value.

But the capability question is different: What organisational condition needed to change?

Perhaps decision rights need to change.
Perhaps escalation needs greater independence.
Perhaps leadership performance needs to include behavioural and psychosocial indicators.
Perhaps HR, HSE, Prevention, Wellbeing and governance information needs to be connected differently.
Perhaps boards need visibility of patterns that currently remain dispersed.
Perhaps leadership development needs to include the exercise of power, not only interpersonal skill.
Perhaps people need safer routes to challenge upwards.
Perhaps the organisation needs to examine whether its own reward structures contradict its stated values.

Adaptation is therefore not simply doing something after a problem. It is changing something because the organisation understands the problem differently.

Different Functions May Be Learning Different Things

This is also why I do not believe psychological safety and psychosocial risk can be managed effectively when they remain fragmented across functions and initiatives. The same harmful leadership situation may appear very differently depending on where you sit.

HR may see an employee relations concern.
HSE or Prevention may see a psychosocial hazard.
Wellbeing may see impact on individuals.
Operations may see absence, performance or turnover.
Leadership development may see a behavioural capability issue.
Governance may see organisational risk.

None of these perspectives is necessarily wrong. But none may be sufficient alone. Learning therefore requires more than collecting expertise. It requires connecting perspectives.

Because if different functions learn different lessons from the same organisational event but those lessons never meet, the organisation itself may not learn at all.

From Organisational Learning to Organisational Adaptation

Within The Organisational Capability Framework™, I therefore see an important progression.

Organisational Signals asks: What is the organisation already telling us?

Leadership & Accountability asks: Who takes responsibility, who has the authority to act, and can accountability still function when circumstances become difficult?

Learning & Adaptation asks: What changes because of what the organisation has learned?

That last step matters. Because knowledge without adaptation can leave the underlying conditions intact. And adaptation without learning can result in activity without understanding. The organisational capability lies in connecting the two.

Learn from what happened.
Understand the conditions around it.
Change what needs to change.
Then look again.

Because adaptation also needs feedback.

Did the change work?
Are people experiencing something different?
Are signals changing?
Can challenge now travel where it could not before?
Has trust begun to recover?
Could the same pattern still develop unnoticed?

Learning & Adaptation is therefore not a single response. It is a continuing organisational capability.

The Question I Want to Bring to the Table

This is also the thinking behind the Toxic Leadership & Trust round-table conversation.

The central question is: When leadership becomes harmful, what should an organisation actually do?

But perhaps answering that question requires us to go further.

What allowed the situation to develop?
What allowed it to continue?
What signals existed?
What role did power play?
What did the organisational response teach people?
What needs to change?
And how would we know that the organisation had actually learned?

These questions cross professional boundaries.

That is why bringing together perspectives from HR, HSE, Prevention, Wellbeing and psychosocial risk matters.

Not because one discipline has the answer.

But because organisational learning may depend on our ability to connect what different parts of the organisation can see.

Different disciplines. Different perspectives. No predetermined answers.

Learning & Adaptation: What Must the Organisation Demonstrate?

Perhaps Learning & Adaptation becomes visible when an organisation can demonstrate that it is capable of:

recognising what happened without reducing everything to one individual;
connecting signals from different parts of the organisation;
examining how power influenced what people could say and do;
questioning whether organisational conditions contributed to the problem;
learning from both the event and the organisational response;
changing systems, structures or practices where necessary;
testing whether those changes actually work;
and using what it learns to strengthen future organisational capability.

This brings me back to the central question:

What does an organisation actually learn when leadership becomes harmful?

Perhaps the answer is not found in what the organisation says it learned.

It is found in what becomes different afterwards.

If the leader changes but the organisational conditions do not, has the organisation really learned?

Written by Annick Rogiers
Founder, Sustainable Wellbeing Solutions
Creator of The Organisational Capability Framework™

Continue The Organisational Capability Journey™

This article forms part of my ongoing development of The Organisational Capability Framework™, and specifically the exploration of Learning & Adaptation: how organisations learn from what they experience and translate that learning into changes in the conditions, systems and practices through which work is organised.

It builds directly on my earlier explorations of Organisational Signals and Leadership & Accountability.

Because recognising what the organisation is telling us is only the beginning.

Taking responsibility for what we see matters.

But organisational capability develops further when the organisation is able to ask:

What have we learned and what must now become different because of it?

The thinking also builds on Executive Insight – The Organisational Capability Journey™ and The Organisational Capability Roadmap™, exploring how organisations move beyond Awareness, Understanding, Implementation and Integration towards capability that can endure, be demonstrated and ultimately be assured.

Research and further reading

The Organisational Capability Series™ — Annick Rogiers. The LinkedIn articles and discussions informing this article explored Leadership & Accountability through trust, employee voice, organisational response, cross-functional connection, leadership behaviour and repair.

Together, these perspectives reinforce the central question behind Learning & Adaptation.

Written by Annick Rogiers
Founder, Sustainable Wellbeing Solutions
Creator of The Organisational Capability Framework™

Continue the Learning Journey

Through the Sustainable Wellbeing Solutions Academy, we help organisations, leaders and professionals translate psychological safety, psychosocial risk management and the principles behind The Organisational Capability Framework™ into everyday organisational practice.

The objective is not simply to know more about what went wrong.

It is to strengthen the capability to recognise, connect, examine, learn, adapt and test what the organisation does next.

Because organisational learning should leave evidence.

What the organisation has truly learned becomes visible in what it is capable of doing differently afterwards.