Why There Are So Many Bad Managers

Most bad managers aren’t bad people — they are talented employees promoted into a craft they were never taught

Jul 09, 2026

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By the time they have reached the middle of their careers, most people have had a bad manager.

However, most of those “bad managers” are not actually bad people looking to make their employees’ lives difficult.

So what makes them bad managers?

They’re often intelligent, hardworking, and genuinely trying to do a good job.

Many were top performers before they became managers.

They were the engineer everyone relied on, the marketer who consistently delivered results, or the product manager who could navigate complexity better than anyone else on the team.

Then, one day, they got promoted.

And that’s where the problem begins.

The reason so many managers struggle is not that they lack intelligence or effort.

It’s that management is a craft that must be honed over many years, but we treat it like a promotion that occurs overnight.

In this article, you will learn why so many smart, hardworking people become bad managers, why the most common corporate “solution” barely moves the needle, and what senior leaders, managers, and ICs can do to stop poor management from spreading through an organization.

We Promote People Into Jobs They Were Never Trained To Do

An engineer is trained to be an engineer.

A lawyer is trained to be a lawyer.

A marketer is trained to be a marketer.

Then someone becomes a manager…

Suddenly they are responsible for hiring, coaching, motivation, influence, managing up / down / and across, difficult conversations, performance management, organizational design, and team culture.

The skills that made them successful in their previous role are no longer the skills that determine their success going forward.

Yet in many organizations, there is little or no formal preparation for this transition.

We simply hand someone a team and hope they figure it out.

This does not happen with any other type of role.

We would never hand someone a software engineering role and expect them to know how to code without training. We would never put someone in a finance role and assume they would figure accounting out through trial and error.

But we do exactly that with management.

Leadership Is A Craft

Part of the problem is that good management isn’t something that can be taught quickly, in one seminar or leadership training.

Leadership is a craft.

There are certainly pieces of it that can be learned “academically” — frameworks, research studies, and principles that can help.

But the actual practice of leadership is learned through repetition, coaching, observation, reflection, and feedback.

You learn how to have a difficult conversation by having difficult conversations.
You learn how to motivate people by trying, failing, adjusting, and trying again.
You learn how to influence without authority by watching people who are good at it and then practicing the skill yourself.

These are not skills most people magically acquire because they were good at their previous job and got promoted.

So, the result is that many people become bad managers when they get that promotion.

Companies Know This

The frustrating part is that most companies already understand this problem.

They know management quality matters, and that it influences retention, engagement, performance, and culture.

Yet many organizations still invest surprisingly little in developing managers.

The reason is usually the irrational fear that if they invest in training, people might leave and take that training with them to another company.

Or that if they help people grow, they will ask for promotions or raises.

Those fears do sometimes come true, they are also dramatically overemphasized.

Research shows that employees are much more likely to stay with a company long term if they feel like they are growing.

And, while companies are busy worrying about the possibility that trained employees might leave, they often ignore the very real consequences of not training them.

The Catch-22

One statistic captures the problem perfectly:

Roughly 70% of people who leave a job do so because of some form of conflict or dissatisfaction with their manager.

Many organizations are basically creating this scenario for themselves.

They avoid investing in management development because they worry employees will leave, leading to untrained managers, leading to poor employee experiences.

Then the employees leave.

In theory, the thing they were trying to prevent becomes the thing they create.

It’s a remarkably common form of organizational self-sabotage.

Even Leadership Development Programs Miss The Point

Some companies do invest in leadership development…

But almost all make a different (but the same) mistake: