Bad Leaders

Good read on the value of learning from bad leaders from Admired Leaders:

Bad leaders, parents, and coaches are not in short supply.

Many up-and-coming leaders suffer under the tutelage of an ineffective or dysfunctional leader, sometimes for years. But surprisingly, many of the best leaders credit these bad role models with helping them to perfect a highly effective approach to leadership.

How can this be?

The answer lies in the creativity and motivation of those who experience poor leadership.

In many cases, leaders who endure an awful leader dedicate themselves to doing the opposite once they gain influence. They invent a leadership style that produces the opposite effect on others from what they experienced.

Consider a leader who spent years under a supervisor who hoarded information and punished bad news. When this leader finally ran their own team, they made transparency their signature.

This leader now shares the numbers early, thanks people for surfacing problems, and treats mistakes as data rather than betrayal. They didn’t learn this from a mentor who modeled it well. They learned it by feeling, day after day, what its absence cost.

Pain is a remarkably good teacher. It shows exactly where the damage happens, and so exactly what the repair must be.

Inventive leaders who experience poor leadership are well positioned to chart a very different course if they choose to. In that sense, bad role models can play a pivotal development role for some leaders.

Good role models, by contrast, can make leadership look effortless, and effortless is hard to copy. When a skilled leader handles a tense moment with grace, the craft behind it is often invisible.

A bad leader leaves every flaw exposed.

The humiliation in the meeting, the credit taken, the promise broken each become a vivid lesson that sticks with a clarity no good example ever could.

For those who go on to become exceptional leaders, suffering under poor leadership can make them unusually attentive to small moments and specific behaviors. By remembering how those moments and behaviors felt, they gain the core ingredients to develop something different and better.

The worst leaders rarely mean to teach anything. But for those paying attention, they may end up teaching exactly what not to do, and that lesson may be the most valuable of all.

If you work under a terrible leader right now, remember this: Every bad leader leaves a blueprint. The best leaders simply build it in reverse.