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What Makes Bad Managers Bad: The Small Failures That Destroy Leadership and What To Do Instead
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 3 2026
Pages: 184
Weight: 0.56
Height: 0.39 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Most bad managers don't wake up one morning and decide to become bad managers.
It happens slowly.
A little more ego. A little less listening. Results begin to matter more than people. Accountability becomes blame. Experience turns into arrogance. Pressure gets passed down. Good employees stop speaking up. Eventually, people quit long before they actually leave.
In What Makes Bad Managers Bad, Angelo DiTullio draws on more than three decades of real-world leadership experience to examine how capable people become ineffective leaders-and how easily the strengths that helped someone succeed can eventually begin working against them.
This is not a book written from a classroom.
DiTullio has led businesses, managed large teams, developed leaders, inherited problems he did not create, worked for exceptional leaders, worked for difficult ones, and made plenty of leadership mistakes himself. Some of the hardest lessons in this book came from looking in the mirror.
Through practical stories and hard-earned lessons, What Makes Bad Managers Bad explores what happens when leaders:
- Stop listening to the people closest to the work
- Confuse authority with leadership
- React emotionally instead of responding thoughtfully
- Allow ego and insecurity to influence decisions
- Avoid difficult conversations
- Lower expectations and then blame people for meeting them
- Create cultures where employees quit but continue showing up
- Remove ownership while still demanding accountability
- Put results ahead of the people responsible for producing them
- Forget that leadership is ultimately about taking care of the team
This is not a book about identifying all the bad managers around you.
It is about recognizing the behaviors before they become part of you.
Because some of the most dangerous leadership failures begin as small ones.
And sometimes the difference between becoming the leader people want to follow and the leader people cannot wait to leave is recognizing the problem while there is still time to fix it.
The question isn't whether you've made leadership mistakes.
The question is what you do after you recognize them.
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