Lashing out at staff is bad for business

We can't solve the world's leadership problems in 700 words. But we can at least stop shouting, and hear what colleagues have to say. Photo by Fizkes/Getty Images/Postmedia files

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Isabel Berwick is the FT’s Working It editor and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’

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What baffles me most about workplaces in 2025 (in a competitive field) is the enduring prevalence of shouty, negative and underling-blaming leadership styles. Tricky bosses have always been with us, of course, although I’d imagined they would start to moderate their behaviour once workers could call them out online. Apparently not. TikToker Ben Askins, who has 850,000 followers, is killing it with appalling bad boss stories sourced from his viewers. It makes for jaw-dropping content.

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While these behaviours force staff to act fast and achieve things (of course they do!), in the long term they cause anger, demotivation and mental health problems for those affected. A recent essay in The New York Times, “America is learning the wrong lesson from Elon Musk’s success”, by organizational psychologist Adam Grant, offers explanation and proof — should you need it — of why leaders who operate a culture of fear and criticism don’t get good results. Even if you don’t care about “snowflake” staff, lashing out at people is bad for business.

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It is clear the majority of business leaders take on senior positions for positive, even noble, reasons. What causes some of these smart, standout humans to engage in demeaning behaviour? Analyzing “what lies beneath” gives us a shot at understanding the problem, which is, as any therapist will tell us, the first step towards change.

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In a 2017 paper on “abusive supervision” in workplace culture, authors Bennett Tepper, Lauren Simon and Hee Man Park find three factors that drive bosses’ dark behaviours: “social learning”, which includes an individual’s family history of aggression as well as corporate culture norms; “identity threat”, which might include dealing with difficult staff and the leader’s own insecurity; and “self-regulation impairment”, which I would summarize as ‘anger management issues’.

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Unless you are dealing with an actual narcissist (that’s a whole other story), organizations owe it to their staff, as well as their P&L, to take action on bullying bosses. Who is holding the managers and leaders accountable, in other words? Because there are common underlying causes of poor boss behaviour, it can be tackled. Coaching, ongoing and constructive feedback and honest self-reflection are the kinds of strategies that will help bosses do better. (Or help them leave.)