UpTrajectory Review

Bernard Coleman's piece in Inc. takes a familiar premise — learning from bad bosses — and frames it through his own career, arguing that the managers who made his life miserable were also, in hindsight, his most instructive teachers. The available text is just a tease: a single line promising that each terrible boss left him with a lesson he still uses. The full article almost certainly walks through six specific leadership failures he witnessed firsthand, paired with the counter-principles they instilled. That structure is a staple of business-magazine personal essays, and Coleman's credibility rests on his willingness to name what was actually bad, not just offer sanitized corporate lessons.

For a small-business owner or operator, this framing matters more than it might seem. Most leadership advice is written from the top down — here is what great CEOs do. But small-business owners rarely have the luxury of a leadership coach, an HR department, or a board giving them feedback. They learn by doing, and often by absorbing the worst habits of whoever managed them before they went out on their own. Coleman's premise is a useful corrective: the boss who micromanaged, took credit, or vanished when things got hard is not just a story to commiserate over. That person is a live case study in what not to replicate when you are the one setting the tone for five, ten, or fifty employees.

What is genuinely useful here is the inversion. Most leadership content focuses on positive models — the visionary, the servant leader, the culture-builder. Coleman is arguing, at least in the setup, that negative models can be just as instructive, if not more so, because the pain of experiencing bad management etches the lesson in a way that reading about good management never does. We are inclined to agree with that. Behavioral research consistently shows that people weight losses and negative experiences more heavily than positive ones, and the same holds for management memory. A boss who publicly humiliated you teaches you something about dignity that a dozen inspirational articles cannot.

That said, there is a risk in this genre that the full article may or may not avoid: the temptation to turn every bad boss into a neat, redemptive lesson. Real bad management is often not instructive — it is simply corrosive. A boss who is erratic, vindictive, or incompetent in ways that have no clean opposite principle does not leave you with a tidy takeaway. They leave you with anxiety, imposter syndrome, and a distorted sense of what normal looks like. If Coleman's six lessons are all clean inversions — the bad boss did X, so I learned to do the opposite — the piece may undersell how much damage bad leadership actually does, and how long it takes to unlearn what it normalized.

There is also a second-order effect worth naming. Small-business owners who came up under bad bosses often overcorrect. The employee who was micromanaged becomes the hands-off manager who provides no guidance. The person whose boss took all the credit becomes so generous with attribution that nobody knows who is actually accountable. The lesson learned from a bad boss is only useful if it is calibrated, not just reactive. The best use of a piece like this is not to collect six neat opposites but to interrogate your own instincts: which of your management habits are actually thoughtful choices, and which are just the shadow of someone who managed you badly five or fifteen years ago.

Worth reading the full piece to see whether Coleman's lessons hold up beyond the setup, and worth asking your own team a harder question: what are they learning from you that you would not want them to carry into their next job? If you want to put the premise to work, try writing your own list — not of bad bosses you have had, but of the specific behaviors you swore you would never repeat, and then check whether your current management practices actually reflect the opposite or just a different flavor of the same problem.

Takeaway: List the specific management behaviors you swore you would never repeat, then audit whether your own leadership actually avoids them or just disguises them.