What Being Managed Badly Taught Me About Leading

Bad managers are not just something to survive. They are precise information about what not to do. What twenty years on both sides taught me about leading people.

Over twenty years I have worked under a wide range of leadership, and I learned as much from the environments that did not work as from the ones that did.

I have been micromanaged, second guessed, and watched rather than trusted. I know the effect that it has, because I lived it. It made me withdraw. My judgement narrowed to the size of the permission I was given.

I have also worked for people who trusted me before I had entirely earned it. Who gave direction without taking over, and brought me into decisions rather than managing around me. The difference was not that they were easier on me. Several pushed me harder than anyone. But it came with the assumption that I was capable, and that changed how much I was willing to attempt.

When I moved into leadership myself, I was not following a model. I was mostly trying not to reproduce what I had already been on the receiving end of.

Which is the part I think gets missed.

Being led badly is information

We tend to file difficult managers under things to get past. Something to survive, then leave behind.

But the experience of being led badly is precise information. It tells you, with more clarity than any leadership book, exactly what not to do to another person, and exactly how it feels when someone does it to you.

I did not build my approach by studying the people I admired. I built it from both directions at once. What I wanted to pass on, and what I refused to repeat.

So I am genuinely grateful to both kinds of leader I have worked for. One showed me what to aim for. The other made certain I would never mistake control for leadership.

If you have worked for someone who made the job harder than it needed to be, that experience is not wasted. It is probably shaping how you lead right now, whether or not you have noticed.

Where the method came from

There is a second source for how I work with people, and it comes from somewhere less expected.

I was never a Montessori or Steiner student myself. But for as long as I can remember, mainstream education never quite sat right with me. Rigid structures. One pace for every student. Systems built around the average learner rather than the actual person in the room.

For years I kept coming back to the same half serious thought: education could really use a good UX designer.

That instinct is what led me to Steiner and Montessori. Not through my own schooling, but through looking for evidence that someone had already designed something better.

What I found there was not a philosophy. It was a method. And one principle in particular has stayed with me.

You do not help unless you are asked. And before you step in, you ask first, so the learner gets the chance to challenge themselves.

As a parent, that is genuinely difficult. Every instinct tells you to intervene. It only becomes possible once you have internalised why you are holding back.

The same principle at work

I caught myself doing exactly this at work a while ago.

A team was facing a process they had not handled before, and I was halfway to explaining it when I stopped and asked instead: do you want me to walk you through this, or would you rather attempt it first and come back to me if you get stuck?

They wanted to attempt it.

It took longer than if I had simply told them. That is the honest cost.

But only the first time. The second time, they did not need me at all.

That is the part I think gets missed when people talk about efficiency in leadership. Stepping in is faster today and more expensive every day after. Holding back costs you once.

It is less like managing and more like investing. You accept a slower return now because you are building capability that compounds.

This is not an argument for absence

Holding back is not the same as being uninvolved.

Sometimes you need to step in and correct, and doing that well is its own skill. There are moments that call for direct intervention: real risk, a course correction, something that genuinely needs teaching rather than discovering slowly.

The question I have learned to ask myself first is a simple one.

Am I stepping in because they need me right now, or because it is uncomfortable to watch?

Most of the time, when I am honest, it is the second one. The urge to help is often about relieving my own discomfort rather than serving theirs. Recognising that does not make the urge go away, but it does make it possible to pause long enough to check.

What it adds up to

Two sources, arriving at the same place.

From having been managed badly and well: people rise when they are trusted and quietly shrink when they are controlled.

From an approach to education I never experienced but went looking for: the most useful thing you can often do is observe, remove obstacles, ask before intervening, and let the struggle happen, because the struggle is where the learning lives.

Neither of those is a technique you can apply on a Tuesday and see results on a Wednesday. They are dispositions. They show up in small decisions repeated over years.

Every experience is a lesson, including the ones you would not choose again.

Reuben Chircop is a product management consultant, OKR specialist and leadership coach based in Prague.