Toxic bosses, range, and how to learn faster

Teams: Toxic Managers

Like many people, I have been unlucky enough to suffer from a toxic manager. The feeling of anxiety whenever I would see their name on my screen, the dread in my chest that would start a week out from an upcoming one on one. Trying to remain professional as they spent those one on ones criticising you without offering any guidance, or bad mouthing your colleagues behind their backs. Quitting without another job lined up was one of the best decisions I ever made in my career. Below is some advice for those dealing with toxic managers.

What Research Tells Us About the Impact of Toxic Managers

The research is fairly blunt about the damage. Housman and Minor (2015) found that toxic employees and managers degrade organisational performance: people leave, morale drops, and the legal and regulatory bills add up. Toxic leadership often runs on "Dark Triad" behaviours (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) that make the place hostile to work in. A study by Koropets et al. links exposure to toxic management to higher stress, emotional exhaustion, and burnout. Team cohesion suffers too, and so does the work itself.

Practical Advice Dealing with a Toxic Manager

Most of the advice here is about protecting yourself while staying professional. Keep a careful record: dates, times, what was said and done. That record matters if things escalate or you end up filing a formal complaint. Hold a clear line around your time, especially if the manager keeps reaching into your off-hours. Lean on HR or a trusted mentor inside the organisation. Look after yourself, because burnout is the real risk: exercise, people outside work, and counselling if it helps. You can address the behaviour, but your health comes first.

Talent: Competence shifts with context

We are working through the five developmental principles set out in Immordino-Yang et al.'s recent paper. This week starts with their claim that what someone can do moves with the situation, not only with what is stored in their head.

The principle of developmental range makes clear that knowledge is not something stably stored in one's head for later retrieval… Be it an academic skill like solving quadratic equations, or a social skill like calming a distraught toddler, what one can understand and accomplish in any given moment is a dynamic function of the relation between the knower's past experience, which has also shaped their development, and the current context, including its social, cognitive, physical, cultural and affective aspects (Dixon-Román, 2017).

Immordino-Yang et al.

What the quoted principle is claiming

The authors summarise a principle that is common in developmental science: learning is dynamic and context-dependent, not a straight line. What a person knows and can do sits in context, and that context shifts both inside them and in the social space around them. Meaningful knowing is closer to organising a disposition to act than to pulling a stable file out of memory. Knowledge and skills show up as adaptations inside specific situations.

An example outside the office

Children from street vendor families in Kolkata and New Delhi show this pattern clearly. At the stall they handle quick, accurate applied maths, pricing goods and working out change in their heads, yet the same children struggle with formal maths in the classroom. The classroom doesn't draw on the practical knowledge they have built at work. The gap between street maths and textbook maths is mostly about situation, not IQ.

Application in Organisational Learning

For organisational learning, that points to flexible environments rather than one corridor for everyone. Training programmes work better when they offer more than one way in, because the same person shows up differently in different rooms. An employee might solve problems well beside peers and stall on the same task alone at a desk. Design that ignores context will misread what people can do.

Productivity: Learning Productivity

What is Learning Productivity

When people set out to be more productive, they usually start with their work tasks. The part that gets overlooked is learning productivity: cutting the time it takes to learn something and holding on to more of it once you have. Get that right and you pick up skills faster and cope better when the work changes under you.

The Science Behind It

The science of learning productivity rests on neuroplasticity: the brain's ability to adapt and change in response to new experiences. Making and correcting errors during the learning process is essential for neuroplasticity. When we make mistakes, our brain releases neurotransmitters like dopamine, which indicates learning is underway and helps consolidate new information. For example, repeatedly failing and then succeeding in tasks can lead to stronger neural connections, as seen in motor learning studies involving athletes and musicians.

Timing also matters. Our brains have natural rhythms, and aligning study with periods of high mental acuity improves learning efficiency. For most people, that means intense learning in the morning, when the brain is most alert, and less demanding tasks in the afternoon.

Some Practical Tips

A few things that help. Set a clear goal for each study session, one you can actually finish. Break a hard topic into chunks you can hold in your head, and use active recall to make it stick. Sort out your environment so you can concentrate, which usually means cutting distractions and, if it works for you, putting on white noise or instrumental music.

Get some exercise into the week, because it helps cognition and memory. A study by the Department of Exercise Science at the University of Georgia found that even a 20-minute bout can lift information processing and memory. Review on a spaced schedule rather than in one block. Spreading the same material over days, instead of cramming it the night before, gives you better retention, and cognitive science backs that up.

Finally, prioritise sleep and relaxation; the brain consolidates memories during sleep, making rest an essential component of effective learning. Dr. Matthew Walker, a sleep scientist, emphasises that sleep is a critical component of learning and memory consolidation. Inadequate sleep can impair your ability to learn new information by up to 40%.