How to Spot a Toxic Leader—Before Hiring Them

Gemma, founder and CEO of a growing marketing firm, thought Richard was perfect for her new VP of marketing analytics role. In his interviews, Richard was charismatic, articulate, and confident. His résumé showcased impressive technical accomplishments and a compelling vision for building a new operational function.

But within months of his arrival, his team’s culture began to show signs of fracture: Team members raised multiple complaints regarding his leadership approach, and one was seeking a different team assignment. From what Gemma could piece together, Richard dismissed team members’ input unless it was aligned with his thoughts, took credit for others’ work, and reacted defensively to any feedback he received. By the time Gemma let him go, the damage was done: Promising employees had left, partnerships had soured, and her credibility with the rest of her leadership team was shaken.

Gemma and Richard are composites drawn from our several decades of advising organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to smaller nonprofits on designing interview processes that assess leadership and interpersonal competencies. We’ve seen time and time again that people with certain extreme and poorly managed personality traits—such as prioritizing self-interest over team success, undermining colleagues through blame-shifting or credit-taking, and reacting defensively to feedback or dissent—often come across brilliantly in standard interviews because of those very traits. For example, one study found that narcissists are consistently rated as more attractive, likeable, and even “charming” in brief encounters—precisely the setting of a job interview. This presents talent leaders and hiring managers with a very real problem of how to detect toxicity during the recruiting process before the new hire can do real damage.

A recent meta-analysis demonstrates how the damage caused by toxic leaders translates into lasting negative impact on employee attitudes, such as job satisfaction and work commitment, as well as on job performance, creativity, and other critical workplace behaviors. More broadly, research published in MIT Sloan Management Review found that toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting employee turnover, making it the single strongest predictor of attrition during the Great Resignation.

In most cases, the solution doesn’t need to be complex. You don’t need elaborate assessments or personality tests that require clinical expertise, and you don’t need to diagnose personality disorders or play armchair psychologist. (Although for high-risk roles that involve many direct reports or control over significant organizational assets or risk, you will typically benefit from expert consultation.)

Instead, we’ve seen the most success when hiring managers use the interview to assess whether candidates have demonstrated the ability to productively manage their interpersonal challenges in previous professional settings, just as they would assess any other critical competency. We suggest six steps for doing this.

Prepare for the Interview

Articulate what you’re looking for and plan how you’ll assess it in advance so you won’t be distracted and swayed by a candidate’s charisma in the moment.

Step 1: Identify the interpersonal requirements of the role.

Before interviewing candidates, talk to their future peers and others who will work most closely with them. Determine teamwork requirements, partnership needs, and cultural expectations.

To see how this works in practice, consider how Gemma might approach hiring Richard’s replacement to avoid repeating the same mistake. First she might speak with those who had worked most closely with him—his fellow department heads, former direct reports, and a key client liaison, for example. Those conversations might reveal that Richard dismissed client questions about their campaigns’ ROI as “statistically naive,” or that he changed the criteria for evaluating potential customers halfway through a campaign without consulting anyone, forcing the team to redo weeks of reporting.

This could give Gemma the insight that the leader in this role would need to be able to translate complex analytics for non-technical clients and to collaborate on solutions rather than imposing them—insights that she could make central to her interviews.

Step 2: Draft interview questions.

Toxic candidates, from our experience, often easily answer questions about successes and strengths but struggle with those about about failures, dependencies, and how others experienced working with them. These questions challenge candidates to acknowledge mistakes and share credit—the antithesis of their natural motivation to self-aggrandize and create a heroic image of their impact.

To expose these tendencies, design questions that expose how candidates handled interpersonal challenges in past roles, especially the ones you’ve identified as most important, and whether they are able to exhibit humility. Focus on situations where things went wrong, where they needed help, or where they developed others. Avoid hypothetical scenarios—you want to know how they really acted. Plan to ask the same questions of all candidates for fairness and to make comparisons easier.

Effective questions include:

• Describe a project that you were part of that failed. What was your specific contribution to that failure?

• Tell me about someone who disagreed with your approach. How did that play out?

• Walk me through how you developed an associate in your last role.

• Describe a time a team member disagreed with you, and they turned out to be right. How did you handle the situation?

Step 3: Define your ideal responses.

To avoid being swayed by a candidate’s charisma, write down what an ideal response would sound like for each key question in advance of the interview. Be specific about what genuine accountability, collaboration, and development of others look like in practice.

For example, for the question about failure, an ideal response might be: “Takes specific ownership, names what they learned, and describes how they communicated with affected stakeholders.”

Also anticipate what more concerning responses might sound like. Red flags for the failure question might include focusing primarily on external factors for problems, showing minimal personal accountability, and providing no mention of relationship repair or learning. It can also be a red flag if the person tells the story of when someone else failed, and the candidate saved the day. More broadly, struggling to name specific contributions by others even when specifically prompted to do so or remaining vague about developing subordinates are flags that the candidate may engage in toxic patterns.

In the Interview

This is where toxic patterns become visible, especially if you ask how others were involved in the work they describe.

Step 4: Master the follow-up.

When candidates describe their accomplishments or challenges, dig into the interpersonal context. Ask:

• Who helped you succeed?

• If you had to name a co-star in this story, who would it be and why?

• How did your team members feel during this process?

For example, when a candidate describes turning around a struggling project, ask who else was involved. If they mention “the team” generically, press further: “Pick one person who was essential to that turnaround. What specifically did they contribute?” Candidates who struggle to provide substantive answers—or who can’t name anyone without prompting—may often show this same pattern of taking solo credit throughout the interview and beyond.

Candidate Assessment

Finally, as you analyze your findings from the interviews, keep interpersonal capabilities front and center.

Step 5: Separate technical and interpersonal assessment.

The more impressed you are by a candidate’s technical brilliance, the more likely you are to overlook interpersonal red flags.

The solution is deliberate separation. Assign the technical evaluation to team members with deep expertise in the role’s technical demands. In our experience, often those closer to the work are better positioned to do this than managers; they are also often motivated to find strong colleagues.

The hiring manager, meanwhile, should spend their interview time focused mostly on interpersonal and leadership capabilities. This doesn’t mean that team members won’t spot interpersonal issues as well; that’s just not the focus of their questions.

Score each domain independently before combining them. When a finalist scores exceptionally high on technical skills but shows multiple interpersonal red flags, don’t let the technical score override your concerns. For leadership roles especially, weight interpersonal capabilities at least equal to technical expertise.

In Gemma’s case, she could assign a few of Richard’s direct reports to the interview team to get a sense of the candidates’ technical background, while she and one of the other department leaders could focus on the interpersonal behaviors she had identified from her earlier conversations. Even if the direct reports assigned high technical scores to a candidate, Gemma and the department lead would have the time to determine whether the candidate could patiently translate analytical concepts into lay language, and whether they were adept at looping others into determining solutions to problems.

Step 6: Validate with multiple sources.

A single interview can catch someone on a bad day or on a good one. Patterns that appear across multiple interviewers and reference conversations are far more reliable signals. Have others on the hiring committee conduct a similar interview to test your perceptions. Also, when checking references, consider asking questions targeted to interpersonal concerns:

• How did peers and subordinates relate to this candidate?

• Were there partnership challenges across department boundaries?

• Would you rehire them?

You may not get a response to all of these questions, depending on the company’s policy, but in our experience, often you do.

. . .

Let’s imagine that Gemma took all of these steps. That could mean that her new hire—who readily named strong collaborators and delighted in finding ways to help clients and colleagues understand complex analytics—might be thriving and the team’s culture could finally be rebuilding. And Gemma might discover an unexpected benefit: The process itself might have aligned her leadership team around what they valued in leaders and how they wanted their culture to evolve. It might have given them a shared framework for future hiring decisions.

The next time you face a critical leadership hire, resist the temptation to simply fall for the impressive accomplishments and heroic actions described by your candidates, and ask about the wake they leave behind.

Copyright 2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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