6 Qualities and Traits of a Bad Leader (And How to Be Better)

Bad bosses are one of the most pervasive problems for employees and companies alike.

You’ve likely heard about much of the research pointing to this reality: people don’t necessarily leave bad jobs. Rather, they leave bad bosses.

A study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that 84% of U.S. workers say poorly trained managers create a lot of unnecessary work and stress. The study also found that 57% of American workers say managers could benefit from better training in how to manage people.

Gallup has reached similar results in numerous studies of the American workforce. According to a Gallup State of the American Manager report, “Having a bad manager is often a one-two punch: Employees feel miserable while at work, and that misery follows them home, compounding their stress and putting their well-being in peril.” Global employee engagement declined to 21% in 2024, according to Gallup. This trend reflects how poor leadership qualities can have a lasting impact on employee morale and performance.

What Makes a Bad Leader?

One of my favorite quotes on strong leadership comes from international author and speaker Alexander den Heijer: “When I talk to a manager, I get the feeling they are important. When I talk to a leader, I get the feeling I am important.”

This sums up the importance of helping employees feel seen, respected, and supported. Bad leaders do the opposite, displaying bad leadership qualities such as failing to communicate well, ignoring their team’s needs, lacking empathy, and fostering distrust through micromanagement.

6 Traits of a Bad Leader

Drawing from decades of advising leaders across industries, I’ve learned a lot about what disengages and burns out employees. I’ve also seen the lasting impacts of bad leadership. From that experience, here’s my list of the six most common qualities of bad leaders, followed by details on how bad leaders work against their company’s ultimate success.

1. Bad Leaders Don’t Listen
2. Bad Leaders Don’t Value Communication
3. Bad Leaders Don’t Know Their Audience
4. Bad Leaders Set a Bad Tone
5. Bad Leaders Cause Employee Burnout
6. Bad Leaders Micromanage

1. Bad Leaders Don’t Listen

What It Means:

Bad leaders look at listening as a soft skill that’s highly overrated. Or they believe they’re already good at listening and don’t really need to up their game. Bad leaders may even think their job is to “tell,” as opposed to listen. Here are some of the most common mistakes that bad leaders make when they’re not listening to their employees:

• Thinking more about what they’re saying rather than what they’re hearing
• Deciding what they’re going to say next before the person finishes what they’re saying
• Putting a higher priority on what they’re saying than the person they’re talking with
• Not working on listening; not trying to figure out who might be struggling or who might need some time to process a lot of change going on
• Failing to be open to a new perspective that might help you run the business better

An Example:

One of the biggest mistakes leaders often make on the listening front is they don’t take time to do it; they simply don’t prioritize it. I often reflect back on a company president I worked with who made a point to regularly visit company sites and talk to every employee he possibly could. This included management and frontline leaders. He said he always learned something new and important from those visits that he couldn’t have possibly known otherwise.

This leader’s experience proves that actions speak louder than words. Employees need to know you will take time to listen to them and learn from their perspectives.

What to Do Instead:

The better you listen to others, the better they will listen to you. Here are some quick tips on becoming a better listener:

• Stop talking
• Suppress the temptation to think about what you’re going to say next
• Refrain from multitasking; focus closely on the speaker, with eye contact
• Ask questions to ensure you understand
• Paraphrase what you’re hearing
• Listen with an open mind, not with a desire to hear what you want to hear
• Pay attention to what’s not being said (such as body language or sarcastic responses)

2. Bad Leaders Don’t Value Communication

What It Means:

Bad leaders don’t embrace communication as a vital part of their job. They don’t see that when employees don’t get the right message, the responsibility is on them, the leader.

As I often say, “You can’t NOT communicate.” Still, poor leaders figure they can avoid communicating with their teams, especially when there are challenges they’d rather not discuss. Here’s what leaders often don’t realize: You are already communicating whether or not you intend to. Not saying anything is a message in itself, one that often translates to “the leader doesn’t care about us.”

Additionally, not planning for communication and not trusting your communications team sends a message that communication is not a valued part of the organizational culture. Bad leaders disregard the communications function at their own peril.

Too often, when it comes to communication, things are thrown together at the last minute. It’s an afterthought. Or, worse yet, there’s an overconfidence that “We’ve got it.” Yet when leaders wing it, they can’t handle objections and tough situations, and mistakes become a lot harder to clean up.

An Example:

Warren Buffett famously said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Many companies have made some of their biggest mistakes simply by failing to understand that communication is critical, especially at times when major mistakes have occurred.

One famous example of this was the Wells Fargo scandal in 2016. The bank came under public scrutiny after it was discovered that employees in local branches created more than 2 million fake bank accounts without their consent, all in response to leadership demands for higher customer quotas. The bank was later heavily fined by the government, yet leadership was slow to claim accountability for the scandal, which only contributed to the public outcry.

What to Do Instead:

To be a better communicator, leaders need to:

• Plan their communication. Good leaders know the importance of planning and clearly spelling out the path ahead.
• Seek out and provide context. Help employees and teams make sense of what they read and hear.
• Make information relevant so every employee knows how they fit in and how valued they are.
• Be open to new ideas and seek them out. This often means purposely soliciting opinions from the quietest people in the room.
• Use multiple vehicles to solicit opinions – face-to-face meetings, focus groups, manager forums, emails, and employee surveys.

3. Bad Leaders Don’t Know Their Audience

What It Means:

To truly move employees to action, leaders need to know what employees care about and get into their mindset. Leaders often spend too much time setting lofty business goals without viable plans to achieve them. And the most important element behind achieving goals is the team. If they don’t understand where they fit in, nothing gets done.

An Example:

I often reflect on an interesting comparison I once heard. When you see people on the street talking to themselves, they are often labeled “insane.” Yet what is it called when we talk to ourselves inside organizations? “Marketing or communications.” Bad leaders do this kind of thing all the time – speak from their own perspectives rather than seeing every interaction with employees as a chance to meet them where they are.

What to Do Instead:

To better understand where an audience is coming from, strong leaders try to understand where the audience is by asking some of the following key questions:

• What is the employee’s special perspective on the topic? Are they feeling positive or negative about the topic, and why?
• What are they most concerned about?
• What do employees need to understand to be more engaged?
• How can you – as their leader – help them succeed?

4. Bad Leaders Set a Bad Tone

What it Means:

Bad leaders fail to realize the tremendous influence they have on their team’s overall success. I often boil it down to this: The boss makes the weather.

An Example:

I used to work for a leader who was known to be moody. I typically would check with his assistant before meeting with him to determine which way the wind was blowing so I could adapt my style accordingly. All too often, she told me it was cloudy with a chance of showers. On tornado days, she’d suggest rescheduling.

What to Do Instead:

How leaders lead can prevent weather disasters, and, even better, can create an environment where people do great work and feel terrific about it. As the song in the musical Hair celebrates, we can let the sunshine in.

Sometimes, as leaders, we might be rained on, or it might feel like we’re getting poured on without an umbrella (and then hung out to dry!). In that case, it’s our job to dry off, reflect on what happened, and make great weather for our team as only we can.

Here are some tips for leading by example:

• Recognize that as a leader, you make “the weather.”
• Engage others in decision-making; ensure employees know that their opinion matters
• Prioritize self-care; if you’re not taking care of yourself, you can’t effectively lead others because your stress and negativity will inevitably spread

5. Bad Leaders Cause Employee Burnout

What It Means:

Poor leaders don’t recognize when they are putting too much on their teams, creating burnout and disengagement. Leaders overly focused on their own personal goals fail to see the big picture. After all, providing the right support to their teams is actually what moves the mountains.

An Example:

Many recent studies have found alarming rates of employee burnout, including a recent study we conducted with The Harris Poll. We found that the constant pace of change – often facilitated by top leadership – and a variety of new demands contribute to widespread burnout among employees and managers.

More than 75% of employees and 63% of managers feel burned out or ambivalent in their current position, according to the 2024 study. Yet managers aren't recognizing just how overwhelmed their employees feel, with 89% saying their employees are thriving compared to the actual thriving figure of 24% – a more than 3-to-1 discrepancy.

For thriving employees in the survey, the top indicator was a “manager invested in my success.” Other key indicators were leader empathy and approachability.

What to Do Instead:

People want to know their leaders genuinely care about employee well-being and that their manager is invested in them and their growth and development.

Some quick tips on being more empathetic and supportive as a leader:

• Conduct regular check-ins with employees and simply ask how they are doing, personally and at work.
• Survey employees to measure employee stress and burnout levels, as well as the areas in which employees need more support. When problems are identified, prioritize action to turn the situation around.
• Take time to recognize and reward employees for good work and team successes.
• Develop a culture of gratitude that encourages managers and all team leaders to celebrate wins.
• Find out what motivates your employees and keeps them engaged – and focus on it.
• Encourage professional development. High-potential employees are not satisfied with the status quo.
• Pair employees with mentors.
• Help employees build their networks and recommend opportunities within the organization and through professional organizations to build their networks and skill sets.
• Challenge employees with assignments that help them grow.

6. Bad Leaders Micromanage

What it Means:

Micromanaging comes down to a lack of leader trust in employees. Managers who don’t trust that their employees can do a good job often micromanage their teams.

For employees, micromanagement feels claustrophobic, with constant notes and calls from leadership asking them where they are with a project. Or, it can be a leader who never seems satisfied with the product, with heavy edits or re-directions that can be defeating for employees.

There’s a big difference between setting high expectations and micromanagement – and much of this is related to communication. When leaders don’t make clear what the expectations are and then spend lots of time hovering and correcting, that’s micromanagement.

Micromanaged employees often feel they can’t take a step without their employer’s approval. Or they may feel they don’t have the license to be proactive.

An Example:

A corporate executive asks the internal design team to develop a fresh logo. The request comes with vague direction to "make it look more modern," along with a long list of opinions from leaders, most of whom are new and lack design expertise or familiarity with the company’s brand guidelines.

Almost immediately, daily check-in meetings are booked, with the first scheduled just a day after the request is made. The design team rushes to prepare concepts, only to be pulled in different directions by conflicting feedback from various executives.

In meetings, little input is requested from the designers themselves. Instead, new and sometimes contradictory expectations are shared, some pushing the team away from established brand standards.

When the first designs are submitted, they are quickly criticized. The feedback: Be edgier and move faster, again with no meaningful dialogue or collaboration.

Without the space to do what they do best, the design team feels micromanaged and demoralized. Confidence drops, creativity stalls, and the project is ultimately seen as a failure. With trust and clear boundaries, the outcome could have been very different.

What to Do Instead:

The best leaders know that employees can only develop when their bosses know when to get out of their way. This doesn’t mean completely fading into the woodwork. Rather, it’s about having a conversation about big-picture goals and expectations for a project, setting reasonable time for check-ins and tweaks, and then giving employees a level of freedom to get the work done in the best way they know how.

Ultimately, showing employees that you trust them goes a long way toward building a thriving organization of mutual respect – and one that everyone can be proud of.

The Impact of Poor Leadership

Many researchers point to the critical connection between happy employees and engaged leaders. Our recent research with The Harris Poll underscores this. Here are some of the key findings:

• There is widespread burnout among employees and managers, with more than 75% of employees and 63% of managers reporting burnout.

• Employee thriving is driven by very personal drivers, including these top factors:
  • A manager invested in their success (61%)
  • An empathetic manager (57%)
  • Approachable senior leadership (53%)
• Senior leadership plays an important role in building a thriving workforce overall:
  • Senior leaders who set clear direction and deliver authentic communication help employees thrive.
  • Employees look to leadership to demonstrate their investment in employees with actions – a genuine focus on living the company values and demonstrations of an actual commitment to well-being (not just value statements and declarations).

Our research underscores that there are proven tactics for moving many employees from disengaged to thriving, with the keys being stronger manager/employee communication and relationships, and a healthy respect for employee well-being. (To access the full report, click here.)

How The Grossman Group Can Help

We specialize in leadership support and leadership communications. For 25 years, we’ve helped thousands of leaders become better communicators and recognize how they can better support their teams to achieve goals.

Whether it’s leadership skill-building, communication planning, leader and manager assessments, communication support and training, and more, we can help you establish best practices and get you results no matter the challenge.

If you’re looking for a partner to help you elevate leader impact in your organization, let’s connect.

The Bottom Line

Unfortunately, many of us know too well what it looks like to work for a “bad boss.” In the past, we may have even accepted that some leaders simply don’t have great “people skills.”

But the stakes are higher now. To succeed, organizations can’t afford to give bad bosses a pass. Even if they meet financial targets in the short term, bad bosses create significantly bad outcomes in the long-term – including high rates of turnover, disengagement, and unhealthy employees looking for an escape from a toxic culture. The qualities of a bad leader don’t just hurt people; they hurt business.

To truly succeed today, it’s time to shed the bad boss behavior and find new ways to inspire employees, meet their needs, and transform the company culture in the process.

Do bad bosses have an impact on an organization’s bottom line?

—David Grossman

For a quick reference guide on how to stand out as a leader, download our eBook, Top 11 Attributes of Exceptional Leaders and Communicators. Or, share with a leader or colleague you know is looking to elevate their leadership impact.