Why are there so many horrible bosses?

Why are there so many terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad bosses? (Yes, a reference to the 1972 children’s classic Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst. (Note: as the daughter of a retired children’s librarian, I was subjected to endless hours of nursery rhymes and sing-a-longs, so these are the kinds of literary references I have trouble avoiding).

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Over the years, I’ve gotten several variations of this question from friends, colleagues, and clients; they include:

• How did my clearly awful boss actually get to their position?
• Why won’t my company do anything about an obviously bad manager?
• Why do so many people get away with being bad bosses…and keep rising?

The boss problem

Anecdotally, most of us will agree it feels like an epidemic – a problem that seems to be widespread, commonplace, and painfully endemic to the modern workplace; it’s the topic of countless lunchtime rants, slack messages, text exchanges, meme accounts, and New Yorker cartoons (see below), not to mention the trigger for an avalanche of stress-related health problems.

Statistically, it’s also true. Among the many studies confirming our boss problem is a 2020 麦肯锡 report called The Boss Factor, which found that:

• 75% of respondents claimed the most stressful aspect of their job was their immediate boss.
• 57% of employees have left a job because of their manager
• An additional 32% of employees were seriously considering leaving because of their manager.

So this is a problem and, as it turns out, an expensive one.

A $960 billion-dollar problem

One 2019 study estimated bad bosses cost US companies between $960 billion and $1.2 trillion a year, and around $7 trillion globally. For some perspective, that’s 9-10% of the world’s GDP.

This figure, collected by Gallup , is based on the well-documented evidence that bad bosses lower employee engagement, suppress individual and team productivity, and raise turnover ?-- all of which are very, very expensive.

So, bad bosses aren’t just a people-nuisance; they’re a performance, productivity, and profit issue – and one that’s closely correlated to the success (or failure) of organizations.

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How did we get here?

Regarding the origin of our bad boss problem, research (and lots of painful experience) point to three main factors:

1 – We’re pretty bad at promotions

One unfortunate fact worth confronting is that we are not great at hiring and promoting decisions. A key study from Gallup’s Chief Scientist explains that companies “miss the mark” on great managerial talent in 82% of their hiring and promotional decisions.

This is because we tend to promote individuals based on the wrong factors; most of the time, we promote individuals for their performance, productivity, and skillset in a current role, and perhaps a demonstrated combination of great work ethic and clear commitment. While this may seem logical, it’s not sound; there is no proven correlation between high productivity, great technical skills, or work effort and great people-manager skills.

In fact, the McKinsey research on bosses suggests that only 30% of individuals with technical skills and personal drive are likely to become high-performing people-leaders, defined as those that foster trust, open dialogue, and transparency across their team.

In short, we’re seeking and rewarding the wrong traits in the people we promote into managerial roles.

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2 – We’re even worse at leadership development

So, if only 30% (or less) of the highly-skilled individuals cited above have the right people-management skills to be a great boss, are we destined to a workplace reality of mediocre managers? Not exactly.

Just because someone doesn’t possess all the right leadership skills right now doesn’t mean they can’t develop them. In fact, psychologists specializing in the topic have found that 70% of great leadership skills are learned, not innate; this means that most of us have the potential to be fantastic leaders.

The problem, instead, is that we’re not doing enough (or sometimes anything) to teach and cultivate the leadership skills managers need to be great bosses.

Consider my story: at the ripe age of 32, a fantastic individual contributor, I was promoted from a position managing one analyst to another where I managed over 500 salespeople across the country. In that transition, I received precisely 0 hours of management or leadership training. (I was, however, handed a Harvard Business Review “management handbook” and told to hire a professional stylist, but that’s a story for another article). It was less than ideal, and I resigned 2 years later.

I’m not alone; studies by 美国哈佛大学 and Volunteer Connect found that 70% of current leaders have expressed interest in developing their leadership skills, and 63% of millennials feel they aren't receiving the training they need to support those leadership skills – a situation that leads not only to low confidence, but declining engagement and higher quit rates.

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3 - Little consequence for bad management

The third factor driving up the incidence (and insidiousness) of bad bosses is a widespread lack of accountability. Across most companies, people managers are not explicitly measured, benchmarked, or rewarded for their performance as a people leader; instead, they are typically bonused and promoted based on team performance metrics like revenue and profit.

This is why, absent a clear infraction or blatant HR violation, a bad boss can get away with being a bad boss for a very long time.

Obvious and quantifiable evidence of bad-bossery, such as higher-than-average attrition rates on a team, more-than-one HR complaint, and clearly unhappy people rarely results in a talking-to, let alone a firing or demotion.

This creates a context in most companies where bad bossery is not only allowed, it’s condoned and accepted as “normal.”

Today, having a great boss feels more like a stroke of luck than a basic workplace benefit.

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Fixing our boss problem

Though the roots of the bad boss problem run deep, they’re surprisingly, delightfully, easy to fix. And fix it, we should; the positive impact of improving leadership development and management practices is well-documented.

Across the many data points proving the link between business success and great bosses, this data from a Gallup study stands out: companies that invest in their managers achieve 147% higher earnings per share than their competitors who don’t.

Predictably, the key solutions to our boss problem (below) can be found in its key causes (above).

1 – Change how (and why) we promote

We need to be much more intentional and careful in who and how we promote into people-management positions. Rather than base promotions on technical skill or performance, we need to have clear criteria that focus on the core components of great people-leadership – traits and practices like transparency, communication, trust, and emotional intelligence.

Alongside this shift, we need to create more advancement opportunities that do not include people management. While most high-performers want to be promoted, not every high-performer wants to be a people-manager. Instead of forcing them into something they won’t enjoy (and most likely won’t succeed in), we need to create more opportunities for advancement of individual contributor roles – in sum, creating spaces and positions for people to perform their absolute best. In fact, promoting such people into a people-management position may actually take away from the valuable skills and contributions they’d make in an individual contributor role, bogging them down with tasks and stressors that they’d really rather avoid.

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2 – Leadership development training

It’s time to bring leadership development training back, but better.

I don’t mean the kind of outdated, tedious management-101 seminars to which some of us have been subjected over the decades; I mean real, robust, engaging leadership learning that is built on the latest (and greatest) research, and specific to the very new and unique demands of the hybrid, diverse, post-2020 workplace.

Over the past 10 years, and the last 5 in particular, there’s been a surge of ground-breaking research by a gloriously diverse set of experts that need to bring to our workplaces. ?This research combines insights from positive psychology, management science, and human development and sheds incredibly important light on what great leadership truly is, and how to cultivate it and achieve it in our people.

This is the kind of human-driven science upon which we should be building our leadership development programs. In fact, it’s the very foundation of the leadership development programs I build for companies and industry groups across a range of sectors.

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3 – Make people management matter

Finally, we need to start holding people managers accountable for how they actually manage people. There are three clear ways to do this.

First, it means defining effective people management, establishing clear ways of measuring it, and making it a key aspect of any leadership role. Second, it means recognizing and rewarding great people leaders and tying leadership performance to compensation and bonuses and annual reviews, putting it on equal footing with other metrics such as sales or cost containment. Third, it means addressing poor or lacking people-management head-on and working with managers to improve.

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It's time for better bosses

At this point, we know that (a) bad bosses are a big and expensive problem and (b) both solution and prevention are firmly within reach. The only thing standing between us and better bosses is a firm recognition that great leadership matters.

It matters to our people, to organizations, and to all the lines of our businesses – the bottom, the top, and everything in-between. ?

So, as we turn the sweltering corner past Labor Day and head into 2025 planning season, ?it’s time to put leadership development on the agenda. As the data (and your people) show, if you want better business, build better bosses.

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Melina Cordero is the Founder & President of P20 Workplace, a firm that delivers digital leadership development and DEI solutions built for the post-2020 workplace. Read the story of how she leapt from commercial real estate executive to DEI innovator, explore her services, and connect with her on?LinkedIn, where she shares the latest data, research, and ideas on the evolving world of work.

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