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Key Takeaways Enduring bad bosses is exhausting, but there are invaluable lessons to be learned from them, which can teach you what kind of leader you don’t want to be.
If your boss — or even you yourself — exhibits any of the following traits, there are ways to turn things around and become a better leader.
In my new book, The Devil Emails at Midnight: What Good Leaders Can Learn From Bad Bosses, I share hilarious and heartbreaking stories of bad bosses I have endured and survived. It’s easy to paint a bad boss as a Disney villain or Marvel character. It’s much harder to sit and reflect on what we have learned from these experiences. And how these bad bosses can actually make us better leaders.
As I practice gratitude this holiday season, I am reflecting on how I am grateful for those bad bosses. Here are five lessons my bad bosses taught me.
Related: The 6 Most Familiar ‘Bad Boss’ Types and What to Do About Them
1. Stop normalizing emailing at midnight
My former boss, who I nicknamed “The Devil,” was the boss who never had any time for me during the day. But did have time to consistently send me emails between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. I started responding to her emails in the early morning hours.
Years later, the question I continue to ponder is, Why didn’t she have time for me? As a leader, if you can’t make time for your teams during the day to coach, guide and teach them, you have to ask yourself, Why are you leading in the first place?
And I’m not ashamed to say that on most evenings I’m asleep at midnight. It doesn’t mean there aren’t periods of my life when I’m working incredibly hard and constantly burning the midnight oil, but that isn’t sustainable. I have to be able to lead myself and my team through intense drive periods, and then take the time to rest and recover.
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