If We Know What "Bad Management" Looks Like, Why Doesn't It Evolve Out?

The corporate virus.

Every COVID business-related article seems to ultimately be the same. Someone says that managers need to care more, communicate better, be more empathetic, listen to their people, afford flexibility, be a human, etc. Another 92 versions of the same article get written that day on various websites. A few get read. Many get used as sales tools. They get fired out of HubSpot and Salesforce by junior sales bros. We all get it. Empathy is cool. So is communication. So is care. These things make jobs better.

But they don’t scale. And bad management doesn’t seem to evolve out. Why?

If you believe in the idea of “corporate culture,” it would stand to reason that a culture evolves with new leaders and new employees. As the culture evolves, then, wouldn’t bad management styles have to evolve out?

Certain characteristics of a population fade over time, right? So ideally, asshole managers would fade over time as well.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen. Bad management styles persist. They fray social bonds, they cost people money, and they straight up kill people.

None of it seems to matter. It persists.

Managers don’t get better. By some measure, 82 percent of them end up as the wrong hire. That’s an absolutely massive failure rate that would never be tolerated in most areas of a business, but somehow is tolerated when it comes to bad management styles.

So as leadership teams flip and new employees enter at the execution level, the culture changes. But as the culture changes, the bad management styles persist. Why is this?

Understanding bad management styles through a quick video

Here’s an article from MIT featuring this video with London Business School professor Freek Vermeulen talking about bad management styles. The video: