The Terrible Manager Who Accidentally Made Me a Better Leader

I have thought carefully about how to write this because I do not want it to be a simple story about a bad person, which is both too easy and not quite accurate.

My manager at the financial services firm in Lucknow when I was 25 was not a bad person in any absolute sense - he was under considerable pressure, was not well-supported himself, and had been promoted beyond his actual management capability in the specific way that happens in organisations that conflate technical expertise with leadership skill.

None of this made him a good manager and he was a genuinely bad one in ways that were patterned and consistent over the two years I worked under him. He communicated direction erratically and then expressed disappointment when the work did not match an expectation he had not shared.

He absorbed credit for team outputs in upward communications with a consistency that started to feel deliberate. He had a tendency, when under pressure himself, to escalate that pressure to his team rather than absorbing it, which meant that the most stressful periods for the organisation were also the most unsafe periods to be working directly with him.

I documented all of this meticulously in a private journal, partly as a coping mechanism and partly because I found that the documentation forced me to be precise about what was actually happening rather than accumulating a general grievance. That precision turned out to be useful in ways I had not anticipated.

By year two I had, without intending to, assembled a very detailed map of what bad management looks like from the receiving end. Not theoretical bad management from a business school case study - specific, daily, this-is-what-it-feels-like bad management experienced by a person who is trying to do their job well and is being made systematically less able to do so.

At 27, when I moved into my first management role, I had that map. I knew what it felt like to not understand what was expected and I built clarity into everything I communicated. I knew what it felt like to have your contribution made invisible and I made visibility a practice.

I knew what it felt like to absorb pressure that was not yours and I made a decision about where my team's stress would stop. I am a better manager because of two years of experiencing its opposite. I would have preferred a different education. I am grateful for what the education produced.