Bad Leaders Don’t Choose to Break People, They Just Never Choose Not To
Updated: Aug 21
Written by Nick Reich, CEO of Abundant Empowerment
Nick Reich is a leadership strategist, speaker, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Abundant Empowerment, where he works with leaders and organizations to build high-performing, people-first cultures. A former championship basketball coach, he is the creator of the People-First Playbook and author of Every Player Is Bigger Than the Program.
Every leader who ever shaped you, for good or for hard, probably never sat down and decided to have that effect on you. Most were just repeating whatever leadership looked like the first time they saw it. Here is why that pattern keeps winning and what it actually takes to break it.
I understand the life-changing impact, for good or bad, that leaders can have on the people they lead. Almost none of them chose that impact on purpose. Most simply led the way leadership was modeled for them, on autopilot, and never stopped to decide otherwise.
This applies not just to managers, but to parents, coaches, teachers, and anyone who stood over you at a formative moment and either built you up or wore you down, most of the time without meaning to do either.
That impact does not clock out. It lasts a lifetime, and it ripples out to everyone that person goes on to touch. Most leadership content treats this as a workplace problem: fix the manager, fix the org chart, fix engagement.
Then I started asking a question in front of rooms full of leaders, and the answer changed how I think about this work entirely.
Why do bad leaders outnumber good ones?
I ask a simple question: How many great, phenomenal, gold standard leaders have you directly experienced in your life or career?
One? Most hands go up. Two? I lose about half the room. Three? A handful remain. Four or more? Almost nobody.
Then I ask the other question: How many toxic or terrible leaders have you directly experienced?
Five? Nearly every hand goes up. Six? Still most of the room. Seven? Fewer, but still a surprising number.
Room after room, the ratio holds. Bad leaders outpace good ones by roughly three to one. That should stop us cold. We know what good leadership looks like. Ask any group to describe their best leader, and you will hear the same words every time: they led with kindness and respect, they had vision, they hired smart people, and they got out of the way. We know the formula. We just do not follow it.
Why knowing isn’t doing
Here is the answer I have landed on after years of asking that question. When people reach a leadership position, whether through a promotion, in a classroom, or within a family, they mimic what they have seen most often, not what they admired.
If you spent your career watching command and control leadership, that is the muscle memory you carry into your own leadership, even if you promised yourself you would do it differently.
I coached a state championship basketball team at a school with no gym and no budget. I have also been the guy yelling at kids from the sideline, certain that volume was the same thing as leadership. It took me years to understand that leadership is not about getting louder. It is about getting closer.
Knowing what good leadership looks like was never the problem. The problem is that most of us are running someone else’s playbook, inherited from whoever led us first, and nobody ever handed us a new one.
The playbook, not the poster
This is why “people are our greatest asset” stays a poster on the wall instead of becoming how an organisation actually operates. It is a value with no system underneath it.
I built the People First Playbook because a belief without a system is just a nice thing to say in an all-hands meeting. The Playbook has six plays: Purpose, Direction, Connection, Excellence, Enablement, and Legacy. Each one is something a leader can practise, coach, and measure. It is not a poster. It is an operating system.
Take Connection, the play I probably talk about most. Within it sits a practice I call Know Your Personnel, or KYP. It is not complicated. It involves a leader taking the time to actually learn who is on their team: who thrives with structure, who needs room to create, and who is carrying something heavy outside of work that is showing up inside it.
A 2023 Gallup report found that only three in ten employees strongly agree that their manager genuinely cares about them as a person. Employees who do feel cared for are three times more likely to be engaged and five times more likely to stay. That is not a soft metric. It is the business case for doing the thing that was always right to do anyway.
One leader at a time
The people who lead us can build us or break us. That is true whether we are talking about a parent, a coach, a teacher, or a manager, and it is true whether that leader ever reads a single leadership book in their life.
I have decided to spend my career working with one leader at a time so their people feel the difference. Not because it scales quickly, but because it is the only way I know that actually works.
If you already recognise the ratio in your own life – three toxic leaders for every great one – you already know what is at stake in becoming the leader who breaks that pattern instead of repeating it.
If you want to talk about what that looks like within your organisation, book fifteen minutes with me here or find more information on my website.
Read more from Nick Reich
Nick Reich, CEO of Abundant Empowerment
Nick Reich is dedicated to expanding what's possible for humanity by developing leaders who live fully, lead consciously, and create the conditions for others to do the same. Nick is a future of leadership strategist, keynote speaker, and CEO of Abundant Empowerment. Drawing on more than two decades of experience across a wide variety of sectors, he helps leaders and organizations move from high-pressure to high-trust, translating complex change into practical, human-centered leadership. Nick is the architect of the People-First Playbook and the author of Every Player Is Bigger Than the Program.
