Clues to identify a destructive leader

So the eventual outcome was no one would pick up their requests from the queue, and this made them even more angry and difficult. I flat out refused to do them, directly to my managers, since they wouldn't consider voiding the inevitable bad reviews. Just dumb all around.

These kinds of customers will eventually screw you on billing, too.

You blow this off but in being able to handle this kind of client you will be given more and more of these difficult to manage clients. Until you can't take anymore and you break.

Worse yet, when you are breaking you don't realize you should have quit long ago.

In my experience, taking this approach is a short term thing only.

After doing consulting for the last couple of years, I’m slowly realizing how lucky I was to have stumbled into a small company with a CEO with this approach, right after uni.

He ended up writing a rudimentary, inefficient cms in java, filled with strange lispisms, but goddammit it worked as an amazing stopgap until I was available to make something more useable.

That’s true leadership to me.

Judging from my lavish lifestyle (not), you can see how that worked out for me.

Ya that should have been a red-flag. That stuff lasted at most a month until it ended and it went back to 'the beatings will continue until morale improves'

It was super common to work 60 hour weeks, but every hour of overtime you wanted to get paid for... you had to give detailed explanation to justify why you worked so that they could bill overtime/emergency rates to the client.

At my first year performance review I got scathing terrible review because our time/attendance system said I was late >40 times to work. I immediately asked which days I was late for... so my boss looks it up. Every single one of those lates was me logging in on a weekend after 9am because something was down and generally speaking the on-call person called me for help. So not necessarily that I worked 40 weekends, but saturday at 10am login and then next day at sunday at 11am would be 2 lates.

Did my performance review change for the better after realizing that not only was I being awesome and working afterhours and weekends to help my coworkers and the literal only complaint against me was having been late? Nope. Not even a little.

* The first red flag was all the empty, but fully equipped desks. Several floors almost vacant.

* The second red flag was leadership being away 80% of the time "on training", "seminars" and whatever else BS, instead of facilitating work.

* The third red flag was being tasked by a remote PM, to install extra equipment. I later learned it was because VMs were overbooked.

* The fourth red flag was my boss got fired, without hearing any reason.

On and on it went. Since this was tempwork, I just felt pain for those with steady work in such conditions and did what I could. Without support though, there was nothing I could do but leave in the end, with leadership wanting me to stay (I was probably the only one resembling some sanity in that place).

With experience and hard work, such places can be turned around. But not in times when top leadership and owners destroy a place. You'll be seen as an idiot and insane, in a world where leadership has turned everyone against eachother behind their backs.

a month later, I resigned. They were a bully who perceived any geniuine question as a challenge. Good people, coming out of meetings trying not to cry. I was coming out of meetings feeling like I was being beaten up.

My last day is next Thursday. People keep telling me how envious they are of me. I'm feeling guilt for leaving them in the lurch.

Should those board members do nothing, you now know to avoid their companies in the future :)

You only really need to analyze a startup team that is growing for the sake of growing. That’s really where the autocratic team leads will be a detriment to your mental health because they know why their team is growing, and don’t care for it. That’s where if such a person isn’t cool, you’ll get the decaying morale as a direct side effect of their entitlement, superiority and requisite insecurity.

I’m going to say something ageist, even though I hate ageism. I don’t think most people are emotionally mature enough until their 30s. I think developers could be lagging in emotionally maturity by 5 years, in which case I don’t think your average developer is emotionally mature until 35. Team leads and managers need to be extremely emotionally mature, none of that ego and insecurity is useful. You need to be able to shoot someone down, and come right back and build that person back up. It takes a lot of maturity to do this and not devolve into picking favorites or hiring new people, or turning authoritarian and despotic.

One time, long back in my career, my then-boss jumped down my throat in a meeting for no valid reason. I clearly remember thinking to myself, "Is this it? Is this the day I tell this asshole to fuck off, and walk out the front door?" I decided not to, but I was in full-on job search mode the moment that meeting ended. It didn't take more than a couple of weeks before I gave notice. The next job was for less money, but it was basically my dream job at the time. It was the best move I ever made.

There's no moral or lesson to this story. I just thought I'd share it.

Made that mistake once... I learned that no job is perfect, and if you have a good thing going, stick with it.

Now, hindsight is always 20-20. If I had that experience, I'd probably ask my boss about it, in private, if possible. (Good leadership should always be able to handle challenging questions from subordinates.) (But, there are times where leadership should be challenged publicly.)

Perhaps the statement needed some context? I've had to make statements like, "no, I will not do you work for you," and, "now I've never done this before, and hopefully don't need to do it again, but I'm pulling rank here."

So I would have tried to get context from you boss... And maybe realize that good people make mistakes too.

Edit: The point to leave is when there is a pattern of bad behavior.

Many of our greatest leaders exhibit a lot of those traits (though not the existentially negative one's i.e. they are only motivated by their own power etc.).

'Looking down on others as incompetent' is not a negative sign if said individuals are incompetent.

'Interrupting/speaking over others' is in most cases just a sign of possibly poor communication, and frankly in many cases warranted. Just because you are 'speaking' does not give you the right to monopolize someone else's time with your thoughts. Some people, myself in included have difficulty 'getting to the point' and I'm used to leaders interrupting me, it's fine.

'Pontification' 'Telling Stories' - often is at the root of positive charismatic leadership. Plebes want to believe that their jobs have a higher purpose, a 'mission', they generally want the koolaid so long as it's not too out of hand.

'Chaotic Climate' - again, some systems work better when they are in more or less permanent chaos or in an ambiguous state. Not 'panic' obviously, but in entrepreneurism chaos is often the defining quality of the situation, those that can't live with that may want to work elsewhere.

"Appears unsympathetic to others’ concerns" - sorry - again, one person has absolutely no material right to require that some other person is sympathetic to their concerns. Of course a sympathetic leader makes us 'feel better', but most mature, senior workers who have emotional maturity could care less if their bosses are 'empathetic'. If management isn't listening because they are 'wrong' or 'missing something' then that's altogether a different stories.

Politically astute leaders take this one to the bank - appear to be 'empathetic' when really it's just an infantile, placating emotional display that has nothing materially to do with anything. They do this because a lot of emotionally immature people respond to it.

"Disdain for human frailty or weakness of any kind" - this one I think is adding to the list of 'made up' 'unscientific tropes' amended to the list by someone because they think leaders ought not to be this way. I think it's misunderstood. I think most, even 'tough guy' leaders are fine with weakness, it's a matter of how it's displayed. You can cry, but not on Television for god's sakes; it's not the 'crying' that's weak, it's the evocation of sympathy or empathy from others, a form of emotional grovelling that's the issue.

"Moralistic whistleblowing" - like shaming, cancel culture? So yes, it's possibly a sign of something, but possibly not.

I think this is a great article - and all of these things 'can be signs' of bad leadership but are often not. Every point probably needs a counter point, I think a lot of the behaviours of leaders are misunderstood.

I've been very fortunate to have a lot of great and demanding leaders and see many of the supposed 'negative points' in them, so I'm wary of promoting such a list without a whole load of caveats and contextualisations.

"Some people are dominant destructive bosses because of genetics, m'kay?"

The whole argument falls apart when you realize the author, and nobody really, understands the relationship between your behavior and your genetics enough to conclude anything at all.

This is just how business works. It's how market (and many non-market) economies work. It's how much of human society is structured.

Also, sometimes people need external motivation. "You are a jerk and you need to stop being a jerk" is not enough sometimes. This happens in many contexts, not just the workplace.

Businesses require success and profit to continue to exist. There’s no point in pretending that what the business does isn’t ultimately motivated by profit. I know there’s a trend to pretend that companies are doing things for selfless reasons or purely to do good things for their employees, but that’s usually obscuring a hidden profit motive (increase recruiting, motivate employees to work harder, create goodwill among customers). It’s better when the companies are simply honest about their intentions.

"forward the goals of the corporation" can mean a lot of things. As any parent knows, it's dangerous to let kids have everything the want. Same with pets. If you let your dog eat all your chocolate chip cookies, I hope you have an animal emergency room nearby. Same with a corporation.

In one or two cases, I deliberately took a risk, and disobeyed orders/policies, because I knew that they would be eating chocolate chip cookies. That's a big risk, because there's usually quite a bit more behind policies and orders than an individual can see, and what I did could have been destructive. I am happy to report that these were not destructive, but it isn't a practice that I can recommend.

But "forward the goals of the corporation" can also be in direct conflict with the goals of the employee, which, if they are healthy, may start with things like "my kids, my spouse, etc." Balance needs to be had, and it's a mistake to look to a corporation to provide that balance.

Usually, the best source of balance is the direct-report manager. They need to be "in tune" with their employees, and be able to negotiate the competing priorities.

In any case, a manager that puts their own, personal goals ahead of those of the corporation, and of their employees is (IMNSHO) negligent in their duties. I was a manager for 25 years. I think I did a decent job of it, and I kept senior-level employees for decades (not an exaggeration -when they finally wound up my team, after 27 years, the employee with the least tenure had ten years).

My experience, is that whenever I have discussed my philosophies and methodology, I'm attacked for either being a "wimp" (other managers), or being "two-faced" (other employees). None of these attacks have come from people that have actually worked with/for me.

When I became a manager, I assumed a different role. I had to make the commitment to put aside my personal aspirations, in favor of those of the corporation, then my employees. My own goals came behind those.

But that was just my experience. YMMV.

Statements like that aren't 100% true.

That being said, if everybody's leaving for money, that's a sign that you might want to look elsewhere too. You could even call up the people who you tried to get raises for when you're ready to hire.

I should have walked away from a co-founder in a similar situation.

Short answer: Your co-founder is probably a good person. Plenty of people are good people. The qualities of running a successful startup are hard to come by, and the sooner you realize your co-founder can't do it, the sooner you should walk away.

Long answer: I worked with a guy who I really hit it off with; who was a good person. But after a year I realized he was mostly letting his imagination run away, and didn't have the leadership qualities needed to design or run a startup. I should have walked away much earlier when he fundamentally misunderstood certain rules about asking the CTO to build an idea, and I should have walked away when he couldn't articulate a one-page business plan after we locked ourselves away for a week.

When I called it quits, we remained friends and he even helped me meet his wife. But, I think things would have been smoother if I walked away when I suspected problems, instead of assuming things would work out.

You have three layers of leadership... elected officials, appointed officials who serve at the pleasure of the appointment authority, and civil servants.

Each category has unusual incentive structures and act out in various ways.

BUT, personality DOES play a large role in determining the effectiveness of someone as a leader.

More to the point, personality and the discernment of its characteristics and consequences is an intrinsically subjective thing. You will not find clearly actionable data nor systematic rules for figuring this stuff out.

That subjectivity doesn't stop people from trying to quantify this stuff, like for example, those insipid HR-driven DISC personality surveys and workshops. Some folks dive into minutia about Myers-Briggs classification. There's grains of truth in all these approaches, but it never works the way it was intended. HR departments and individuals aren't psychometric professionals, and even if they were, what they could actually use this for in a workplace isn't at all clear even in the best case scenario.

IMHO, the way you identify a destructive leadership pattern is by having experienced it before (as well as its opposite), by being mindful of your interactions with others and with organizational politics, and being self-critical of your own reactions to it. None of that is easy, It can't be learned in advance. It takes experience, trial and error.