bad leader: recent publications

Being a good leader of others matters now more than ever.  Great leaders have regular one-on-ones with their staff, they give and seek feedback, they set goals, and communicate progress regularly.  Yet, nearly all of us have worked for a bad leader: someone who doesn’t have time for us, always has a “better” way of doing an assigned task, creates last minute emergency work for the team, and have limited availability to speak with us about project work, or more importantly our career.Adam Grant, a renown organizational psychologist at Wharton Business school reminds us, “bad bosses keep people stuck in the same job; good bosses create opportunities to grow and advance.”  Statistics from 2022 research at DDI, a leadership consulting firm, found that 57% of employees who leave their jobs, leave because they can’t stand their boss.  Forbes recently identified four key behaviors bad bosses demonstrate that encourage employees to leave their job:  they diminish employees by micromanaging them, they don’t solicit employee input, they encourage agreement while discouraging dissent, and they can’t be bothered to remove obstacles.  Further, HR.com reports that forty-seven percent of new supervisors receive no supervisor training before being promoted.

And, according to the Corporate Executive Board, sixty percent of new managers fail within their first 24 months.I remember one bad boss I had.  The signs were there before I started:  interviews kept getting rescheduled, even after I showed up! The offer was weeks in making and wrong when I received it.  My manager loved being in charge, but he didn’t want to do the work that came with it.  He rarely spent time with any of us individually because he was too busy billing client

Adam Grant