A leadership problem that does not fix itself
As I interviewed George, I heard all the right things:
– He wanted the team to succeed.
– He believed the right people were in place.
– He could articulate the strategy clearly.
But his voice and body language told a different story. Every time he said the right thing, there was a slight edge in his tone when certain names came up. A pause before responding that was half a beat too long. A way of quoting other people’s ideas that landed as a dismissal of those ideas. A slight raising of the eyebrow when he described a peer’s impact.
Underneath all of it was contempt. Unadulterated contempt.
I had to name it. And naming it out loud, with George sitting across from me, opened something that months of careful conversation had not.
What followed was not unusual. What was unusual is that we finally went there.
Why contempt is different from conflict
In leadership teams, contempt does not usually arrive as open hostility. It is more refined than that. It shows up in the micro-moments: a slight eye roll while a colleague is still speaking, sarcasm reframed as humor, an overly polished agreement that carries no real commitment behind it, a pattern of interrupting some voices but not others.
The tone carries the message before the words do. And the message is always the same: I am above you.
Psychologist John Gottman spent decades studying what causes relationships to fail. His research identified four destructive communication patterns he called the Four Horsemen: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Of these, contempt is the most damaging and the most predictive of breakdown. Not because it is the loudest, but because of what it communicates underneath the surface: that one person has stopped viewing the other as a legitimate peer.¹
That dynamic is not confined to intimate relationships. It shows up in leadership teams, in off-sites, in the twenty minutes before a board presentation when two people who cannot stand each other have to present a unified front. And once contempt enters a team system, trust fractures.
What contempt does to a team’s ability to function
Google’s Project Aristotle, a multi-year research effort studying more than 180 internal teams, found that psychological safety — the shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks — was the factor most predictive of team performance. Not because of who was on the team or how long they had been there, but because of whether every member believed it was safe to raise a concern or take an unpopular position without being diminished for it.²
Contempt destroys that condition directly. When one team member consistently signals superiority, the rest of the team recalibrates what is safe to say. That recalibration happens quietly, long before it shows up in outcomes. People self-censor. They submit input in writing rather than raise it in meetings. They give less context in cross-functional updates because they have learned that context can be used against them. The team continues delivering. But it delivers with increasing friction and decreasing candor.
And the leader who allowed this continues receiving information filtered through fear.
We might ask ourselves: how often do we think we know what is happening on our teams, when what we are actually seeing is what people have decided is safe to show us?
What it costs us when we look away
There is a rationalization most of us have made at some point. He is difficult, but he is brilliant. This is just how he is.
What that rationalization actually does is allow performance to function as the ceiling for accountability. A Harvard Business School study analyzing more than 50,000 workers found that a single toxic team member costs an organization roughly $12,500 in turnover costs alone, and that peers working alongside such an individual are 54 percent more likely to leave.
Separate research by Will Felps at Rotterdam School of Management showed that one disruptive or bad-faith member in a group can reduce overall team performance by 30 to 40 percent.³ What the data tells us is not surprising, really. When we accept contempt as the price of having a high performer, we are trading the potential of the entire team for the output of one person. And too often, we do not realize how high that price has been until we are managing its consequences every single day.
Here is what that looks like in practice. A VP I worked with noticed that the two people responsible for coordinating her product and go-to-market functions had stopped having direct conversations. Every handoff was being rerouted through her. Her calendar filled with what should have been bilateral problem-solving sessions that had become trilateral ones because neither side trusted the other to engage fairly. She was not leading strategy anymore, instead, she was absorbing the relational fallout of contempt she had let go unnamed for too long.
Some of what she faced called for a direct coaching conversation. Some required setting a clear boundary with consequences. And eventually, it required a decision about whether this person could remain on the team. Delaying that decision did not neutralize the damage, rather it confirmed to everyone watching that the behavior was permitted.
Naming it without escalating it
One of the reasons contempt persists is that many of us do not know how to name it without triggering a defensive response that shifts the focus from the behavior to the individual’s feelings about being called out. Precision matters here. We are not labeling the person. We are naming the observable behavior and its observable effect on the room.
“I am noticing a pattern in how certain perspectives get responded to. I want to slow us down and understand what is happening.”
“When I hear that tone — the one that closes people down rather than opens them up — it tends to shut the conversation rather than advance it. That is not the environment we are building.”
“Help me understand what is behind that reaction.”
The goal in that moment is not correction. It is awareness. Once the behavior has been named, accountability becomes possible in a way it was not before.
If we are the one feeling contempt
This is the harder reflection, and the one that requires us to be most honest with ourselves.
Contempt rarely begins as contempt. It often starts as legitimate frustration: a peer who repeatedly misses commitments, a colleague who takes credit for shared work, a pattern that feels like double standards that no one else is naming, a leader who hides behind process instead of taking a courageous stand. Left unaddressed through direct conversation, that frustration calcifies and at some point it stops being about the behavior and starts being about the person.
Marshall Goldsmith, in his work on leadership growth, observed that what got us here will not get us there.⁴ That is as true of our emotional habits as it is of our professional ones. If we recognize ourselves in this dynamic, the question worth sitting with is not whether the original frustration was valid. It may well have been. The question is whether contempt is an effective way to address it, and what it is costing us in how we show up as leaders.
What happened with George
The story I started with did not end cleanly.
George was eventually let go. And the team leader, in retrospect, recognized it had taken too long. The rationalization, he is too valuable, the team needs him, this is difficult but manageable, had run through one too many planning cycles and the cost to the team’s trust had been accumulating quietly the entire time.
What she described in the weeks after George left made me smile: “It was like the clouds had cleared.”Conversations that had been rerouted through her started happening directly between the people who needed to have them. A voice that had gone quiet in meetings started speaking again. A peer leader who had been visibly cautious started bringing harder questions to the table. The team began to laugh together!
The team was not performing differently because of a structural change. It was performing differently because the relational conditions had shifted. And here is what that required from her: she named what had changed. She created space for the candor that had gone underground to re-enter the room. For the people who had been most suppressed, she looked for early wins that could be publicly recognized. The team did not automatically reset when George left. She had to help it rebuild.
That is what this work keeps teaching us. The absence of contempt is not enough. We have to actively create the conditions that replace it.
In practice, that means going back. When contempt has been present in a team, people learn to make themselves smaller. They route ideas around certain people. They stop volunteering what they actually think. And when the source of that dynamic leaves, the learned behavior does not automatically leave with it. Someone has to name what changed. A leader who simply exhales and moves on is leaving the recovery to chance.
So what can we actually do? We can reopen the conversations that got closed prematurely. We can go back to the ideas that were dismissed without a fair hearing and ask the person who raised them to try again. We can check in individually with the people who went quiet and tell them directly that we noticed, and that we want to hear what we missed. These are not grand gestures. They are small, deliberate acts of restoration that signal to the team that the rules of engagement have genuinely shifted.
And we can name the difference going forward between challenge and contempt, because they are not the same thing. Productive challenge questions the idea. Contempt questions the person. Teams that learn to hold that distinction tend to get better at both: more willing to push back on the work, more careful about how they push back on each other.
None of this is quick. Trust that has been eroded over months or years does not come back in a single conversation. But it does come back, if we are deliberate about it.
So the real question is not whether we can recognize contempt when it shows up. Most of us can, eventually. The question is whether we are willing to do the slower, less visible work of building something infinitely better in its place.
Notes
¹ Gottman, J. M. (1994). Why Marriages Succeed or Fail… And How You Can Make Yours Last. Simon & Schuster.
² Google re:Work. (2016). Guide: Understand team effectiveness. rework.withgoogle.com.
³ Housman, M., & Minor, D. (2015). Toxic Workers. Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 16-057. / Felps, W., Mitchell, T. R., & Byington, E. (2006).
⁴ Goldsmith, M. (2007). What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Hyperion.