Learning good lessons, especially from bad leaders, is always relevant to your life and career. It can be both a preventive resource to keep you from becoming a bad leader and a palliative resource to assist you in overcoming the difficulties that bad leaders cause.

The message of GOOD SUCCESS is enormously relevant. Recent research indicates that a large majority of people who leave their jobs do so because of poor supervisory leadership. People don’t leave jobs, companies, and organizations; they leave their supervisors!

Good supervisory leaders make the difference between engaged and disengaged employees who are likely to exit rather than persist. According to author Bridgett Hyacinth:

A Gallup poll of more than 1 million employed U.S. workers concluded that the No. 1 reason people quit their jobs is a bad boss or immediate supervisor. 75% of workers who voluntarily left their jobs did so because of their bosses and not the position itself. In spite of how good a job may be, people will quit if the reporting relationship is not healthy. “People leave managers not companies… in the end, turnover is mostly a manager issue.”

Job satisfaction, career trajectory, and general peace of mind are greatly affected by the quality or lack of quality of one’s workplace leadership. Who doesn’t want the positive influence of a competent, attentive workplace leader to improve one’s life? Who doesn’t want to avoid the emotional and career baggage as well as the negative influences of bad leadership?

You can learn a great deal from observing and avoiding the bad behaviors of bad leaders. Your life and career will be altered dramatically when you learn the “best” from a bad leader’s “worst.”

Observing good and bad leadership behaviors can happen at both the executive level and supervisory level. It’s important to address the effects of bad leaders who are higher or highest on the organizational chart and pay scale as well as supervisory leaders who hold positions just above non-management personnel.

GOOD LESSONS received pushback when it demonstrated that some leaders are infinitely bad, no matter how bad is defined. Yet, I reaffirm that some leaders are bad, not necessarily because someone believes they are, but because they have proven themselves to be ineffective, inconsiderate, substandard, and disregarding of factors that would otherwise enable them to be good.

The word “mediocre” is a good descriptor for ineffective leaders. Placed together, two Latin words define mediocre as “halfway to the peak.” Regarding how well they perform and how well they lead their teams and organizations, bad leaders only make it halfway to the peak.

GOOD SUCCESS again makes a distinction between judging or condemning others. This continues to make sense to those required to conduct employee evaluations and performance appraisals. This section, with its comments and recommendations, remains the same as in GOOD LESSONS.

GOOD SUCCESS reflects a greater awareness of the width of the emotional separation between leaders and those led. Despite substantial efforts to promote inclusion and diversity as a means of creating unity and goal attainment, a divide remains in the workplace and in society. This results in intransigence, the exclusion of good people with good ideas, and bad leaders hiding behind their blind spots.

I’ve noticed a broadening divide in two substantial ways. First, there is an unwillingness to seek to understand another person’s point of view on societal and workplace-related issues. Second, although full agreement may never be reached, understanding should be attempted. Good leaders seek to achieve understanding first and then agreement. Bad leaders settle for achieving less-than-optimal levels of both understanding and agreement. They often insist on others agreeing with them and their ideas first.

Moreover, bad leaders continue to be unable to close gaps to create commonality of purpose and outcomes among coworkers. I’m not apocalyptic about this, but unfortunately, there is little unity in the community. Finding agreement on important matters seems an impossibility. It is in this environment that the failures and inadequacies of bad leaders are unexposed or ignored.

When separation and disunity are the norm, how leaders and followers describe one another changes. Leaders pejoratively describe would-be followers as worker bees, laborers, grunts, deplorables, and disposables. Followers describe leaders as being disingenuous, aloof, self-serving, and intractable. This is our current and undesirable reality—not everywhere all the time, but most of the time nearly everywhere.

Learning good lessons will help close the divides. They can be gleaned from even the worst of leaders and workplaces. Short of a profound emotional and spiritual awakening, it falls to good people who have learned good lessons to bridge the gap to community, workplace harmony, and goal attainment.

If good lessons and ultimately good success are not extracted, underestimating how powerful and long-lasting the negative impact of a bad leader can be dangerous. In fact, good lessons can be learned even as bad leadership behaviors are noticed. Game-changing lessons are more likely to be learned with distance and time between the observation of ineffectiveness (with the unsettledness caused by it) and learning good lessons from it.

Additionally, the complexity, demands of the workplace, and pace of life will not slacken. That’s the not-so-great, uncomfortable news, but it’s an acknowledgment of what we already know. One is not alone in wondering how to cope. People in the U.S. and in other developed countries feel the same way.

Yours in Learning Good Lessons,

Woody