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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Isabel Berwick is the FT’s Working It editor and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’
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.
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 organisational 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.
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? Analysing “what lies beneath” gives us a shot at understanding the problem, which is, as any therapist will tell us, the first step towards change.
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 summarise as ‘anger management issues’.
Unless you are dealing with an actual narcissist (that’s a whole other story), organisations 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.)
We can and should have sympathy for bosses in 2025: running anything is a “Whack-A-Mole” game of challenges, both local (how to roll out generative AI, for example) and global (how to plan supply chains in an age of tariffs). It’s enough to drive anyone to lash out. But there must be a more constructive and profitable way to lead during the uncertain present and even more volatile future.
The key thing for chief executives to do now, according to leadership expert and Sydney Morning Herald columnist Kirstin Ferguson, is to become aware of what they don’t know. One of the perennial problems facing even thoughtful leaders is that they end up in bubbles of limited information, often because staff with useful things to contribute are too scared to present a different point of view. This is especially true when the boss is intimidating.
Ferguson believes that “traditional approaches to leadership — hierarchical decision-making and controlling information flow — are no longer sufficient. Complex issues require complex leadership solutions”. As she outlines in her forthcoming book Blindspotting: How to See What Others Miss, we need leaders who are “open to having their own biases challenged and be willing to accept that their personal views may not reflect those of the people they lead”.
A pertinent side note is that bosses need to watch for people copying their interests and hobbies, which can create a special kind of sycophantic echo chamber. I learnt about this phenomenon from leadership coach Kate Lye. As I reported in the Working It newsletter, one of her CEO clients was delighted to arrive at a new company to find a senior team who were all, like him, keen cyclists. He belatedly realised this was no happy chance: they were playing the new boss to gain favour.
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. Although preferably not while everyone is dressed head to toe in Lycra.
