5 minutes
Leadership influence isn’t just built by your results; it’s shaped by the habits you repeat every day. Many unhealthy leadership habits develop gradually, often driven by a desire to be helpful, responsive, or results-focused. Over time, these patterns limit a leader’s impact and shape a culture of dependency, avoidance, reactivity, and sometimes toxicity. Leaders feel stretched thin and stuck in the weeds, while teams struggle with clarity, ownership, and trust.
A leadership detox is about letting go of habits that limit your influence and impact, while intentionally replacing them with healthier leadership practices that increase your influence, improve results, and create a stronger, more engaged team culture.
Here are five unhealthy leadership habits to detox this year, and what to do instead to elevate both your leadership and your team.
1. Fixing instead of coaching
Many leaders fall into the habit of stepping in to fix problems, manage details, or offer solutions—especially when they care deeply about outcomes. In the moment, this can feel efficient or helpful. Over time, however, it creates dependency, limits ownership, and slows the development of others. Leaders who elevate their impact are intentional about where they spend their time. They slow down enough to ask questions, coach others to think of solutions, and allow team members to build confidence and capability, even when it takes longer. If you want deeper insight into where you may be operating as a fixer, and how to shift toward a more facilitative leadership approach, I created a free assessment that provides impactful strategies for elevating your leadership: Fixer to Facilitator Assessment.
2. Avoiding difficult conversations
When leaders delay addressing issues, offer vague feedback, or hope problems resolve themselves, tension grows, and problems escalate. Avoidance may feel like it protects relationships, but it erodes trust and clarity. Strong leaders address concerns early, directly, and respectfully—creating alignment and preventing unnecessary tension from building beneath the surface. They make the health of their team a strategic priority, addressing misalignment or issues quickly to ensure optimal functioning of the team.
3. Leading in constant reaction mode
Operating from urgency instead of intention keeps leaders in constant reaction mode, leaving little space for strategic thinking or proactive leadership. When there’s no clear plan and energy is spent responding to emails, meetings, distractions, and interruptions, time and effort are wasted, and results suffer. Teams struggle to understand priorities, and leaders feel perpetually behind, pulled in too many directions at once. Strong leaders know that results come from taking charge of their focus and their calendar, being intentional with their energy, and consistently directing attention to the few strategic areas that have the biggest impact. They know that the foundational principles of planning, blocking time, and protecting that time are essential for leadership impact.
4. Ignoring the Impact of Your Energy
Many leaders underestimate how much their personal energy affects their performance and their team. Poor end of day habits like staying up too late, running on little sleep, or being constantly connected to work drain your focus, patience, and energy, and can have a negative impact on decision-making. In addition, the energy you convey to others is contagious. Being rushed, constantly checking your phone, or mentally elsewhere in conversations, send powerful signals to others. When leaders show up depleted or distracted, it creates tension, disengagement, and uncertainty across the team. Leaders who elevate their impact treat energy as a leadership responsibility. They protect their capacity through rest and recovery, and they show up present, focused, and intentional; knowing that their personal energy directly impacts the culture and performance of their team.
5. Back-channeling instead of productively processing challenges
In my experience as a coach and consultant, this is one of the most damaging—and most common—unhealthy leadership habits I see. Leaders avoid difficult conversations, fail to surface concerns in the right forums, and instead process frustration through side conversations or complaints with others. While it may seem harmless in the moment, it significantly undermines a leader’s credibility and influence. Over time, back-channeling normalizes avoidance, creates misalignment, and introduces toxicity into the team. Before long, leaders are making false assumptions, reacting negatively to others, and creating stories in their head about people’s intentions. The team become toxic, and siloes create divides. Strong leaders approach interpersonal and business challenges with maturity by productively processing issues in the moment, not behind the scenes. They pause to clarify the real issue, address it through the appropriate channel, and engage in direct, productive conversations that move the team forward rather than allowing frustrations to fester. They approach even the tensest interactions with curiosity, calm, emotional maturity, and respect. They focus on the good of the team and entire organization, rather than personal gain or ego.
Lasting leadership impact is built through the small, consistent choices you make every day. The behaviors you model as a leader set the tone for how work gets done, how challenges are addressed, and how people show up for one another. When you detox unhealthy habits and replace them with practices that bring clarity, ownership, energy, and productive dialogue, your influence expands, results improve, and your culture becomes healthier and more resilient. Elevating your influence, impact, and results this year starts with intentionally building healthy leadership and team habits.
Laurie Maddalena, MBA, CSP, CPCC, is a professional speaker, leadership consultant and founder of CUES Supplier member Envision Excellence LLC in the Washington, D.C., area. She is the bestselling author of the book, The Elevated Leader. Her mission is to rid the world of bad management practices and help organizations create cultures where people love to come to work. Maddalena facilitates management and executive training programs and team-building sessions and speaks at leadership events. Prior to starting her business, she was a human resources and organizational development executive at a credit union in Maryland. Contact her at 240.605.7940 or laurie@lauriemaddalena.com.
