Daniel sent us this one, and it's basically a probability problem disguised as a workplace complaint. Knowledge workers today change jobs every few years, which means over a career you'll have maybe a dozen different bosses. Your parents might have had three. That math alone means your odds of drawing a bad manager at least once go from "unlucky if it happens" to "unlucky if it doesn't." But Daniel's real question is deeper — when someone keeps hitting the same bad dynamics, micromanagement, responsibility without authority, is that just how the dice landed, or is the system actually producing bad managers at an industrial scale?
The answer is that it's overwhelmingly the system. The data from Gallup, the Chartered Management Institute, ADP — paints a picture where somewhere between fifty and seventy percent of managers are rated as ineffective by the people who report to them. That is not a rounding error. That's a production line.
Fifty to seventy percent. So if I walk into a random office and point at a manager, the smart bet is that their team thinks they're bad at the job.
The smart bet. Median job tenure for knowledge workers has collapsed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median tenure across all workers at about four point one years, but for younger workers in tech and professional services, it's closer to two and a half. Over a forty-year career, that's twelve to sixteen bosses. If seventy percent of managers are ineffective, the probability that you'll never encounter a bad one drops to basically zero.
The old advice was "tough it out, you'll get a better boss eventually." The new advice is "you will definitely have multiple bad bosses, plan accordingly.
And that reframes the entire conversation. It's not "is this person difficult" — it's "the system is calibrated to produce this outcome, so what do you do with that information?
Which is what makes Daniel's question well-timed. He's asking whether the data actually backs up the anecdotal experience, and whether the complaints are consistent across cultures, which would point to something structural.
The thesis, if I can front-load it, is that bad management is not a personality problem. It's a systems problem. And the systems that produce bad managers are so consistent across industries and countries that you can practically draw a wiring diagram of how they fail.
Which is a very Herman way of saying — it's not you, it's the machine.
It is not you. But the more interesting question is what the machine is doing and why almost nobody fixes it even though the fix is known and relatively cheap.
Where do we start? The engagement numbers?
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report — the most recent data from their twenty twenty-five release — finds that only twenty-three percent of employees globally are engaged at work. That means more than three out of four people are essentially checked out. And the single biggest driver of that disengagement, according to Gallup's own analysis, is the manager. They account for at least seventy percent of the variance in team engagement scores.
Seventy percent of the variance. That basically says if you want to know whether a team is engaged or miserable, you don't need to look at the company, the industry, the pay scale — you look at one person.
And Gallup has been running versions of this survey for decades across more than one hundred sixty countries. The pattern holds everywhere. If you put a great manager in charge of a team in a mediocre company, that team will outperform. If you put a bad manager in charge of a team at a great company, that team will underperform. The manager is the bottleneck or the accelerant.
Which makes the next number even more damning. How many of those managers are actually trained to manage?
The Chartered Management Institute in the UK has been tracking what they call "accidental managers." Their most recent data shows that eighty-two percent of new managers are what they classify as accidental managers. These are people who were promoted because they were good at their previous job. The software engineer who writes great code. The salesperson who hits their quota. They get tapped for management, handed a team, and given precisely zero training in how to manage people.
The promotion path is: you're excellent at X, therefore we're going to make you responsible for Y, which you've never done, and we're not going to teach you how.
And Y — managing people — is a completely different skill set from X. It's conflict resolution, performance coaching, resource allocation, strategic communication, emotional regulation. None of which were on the test for getting promoted. The CMI found that these accidental managers spend about sixty percent of their time on people management tasks they were never trained for. They're set up to fail, and then their teams pay the price.
Like taking your best surgeon and making them hospital administrator.
Nobody would do that to a surgeon. But we do it to engineers, analysts, designers, marketers — constantly.
We've got a system where most managers aren't trained, most employees aren't engaged, and the manager is the single biggest factor in whether a team works. That already sounds like a recipe for producing bad bosses at scale. But there's another layer — the authority gap.
The authority gap is where this gets really structural. The Workforce Institute at UKG did a major survey in twenty twenty-four and found that sixty-nine percent of managers report that they are held accountable for outcomes they do not have the authority to control. Budget decisions get made above them. Headcount freezes get imposed on them. Strategic direction gets handed down with no input. But when the team misses targets, the manager is the one who gets the difficult conversation.
Responsibility without power. The classic broken delegation pattern.
It's not a bug. It's a feature of how most organizations are structured. The manager is the shock absorber between the executive layer that makes decisions and the front line that executes them. They absorb pressure from both directions but have control over neither. And that's when you start seeing the behaviors that employees hate — micromanagement being number one.
Because if you can't control the outcomes, you try to control the inputs.
The American Psychological Association did a study in twenty twenty-three looking at why people quit. Fifty-seven percent of employees who left cited their manager as the primary reason. And among those, the top complaint wasn't pay, wasn't workload — it was excessive monitoring and lack of autonomy. But if you're a manager held accountable for results you can't influence, of course you're going to hover over every detail. It's a rational response to an irrational structure.
The micromanager isn't necessarily a control freak by nature. They're a control freak by design.
In many cases, yes. That doesn't make it less miserable for the people reporting to them, but it changes how you think about the solution. You can't fix micromanagement by telling managers to "trust their teams more." You have to fix the accountability structure that makes trust irrational.
Which brings us to the cross-cultural piece of Daniel's question. Are these complaints the same everywhere?
This is one of the most striking findings in the whole literature. The ADP Research Institute's People at Work survey, twenty twenty-three edition, covered eighteen countries across five continents. They asked employees to rank their top complaints about management. The top three were identical in every single country. Poor communication, lack of recognition, and inconsistent feedback. The specific cultural expressions differ, but the structural failures are universal.
A software developer in Bangalore, a nurse in Manchester, and a retail manager in São Paulo are all essentially saying the same thing about their bosses.
Same three things. And none of those three complaints are about technical competence. They're all about interpersonal skills — the things accidental managers were never trained to do. So you have this global workforce managed by people promoted for technical excellence and left to figure out the human part on their own. And they're failing at it in the same ways everywhere.
Which is almost comforting in a bleak way. It's not your boss. It's not your industry. It's not your country. It's a universal pattern.
Once you see it as a universal pattern, the question shifts from "why is my boss like this" to "why is the system designed to produce bosses like this.
Because if seventy percent of managers are ineffective and the complaints are the same everywhere, we're not talking about a people problem. We're talking about a production problem. And production problems have known fixes.
Once you name it as a production problem, the whole conversation changes. You measure the defect rate, you trace it back to the process step that's causing it, and you fix that step. The question is why almost nobody does that with management.
If Ford had a seventy percent defect rate on transmissions, they'd shut down the line. But a seventy percent ineffectiveness rate on the thing that drives all team performance?
That's what I want to trace through the rest of this. The data doesn't just tell us how many managers are ineffective. It tells us exactly how they got that way, what it costs, and what happens when organizations actually decide to fix it.
The arc here is — first, the numbers on how bad the problem is. Then the mechanisms that produce it. Then the knock-on effect. And finally, what the organizations that have actually solved this are doing differently.
When the same three complaints show up in eighteen countries, when eighty-two percent of new managers are untrained, when the manager accounts for seventy percent of engagement variance — you're not looking at a collection of individual failures. You're looking at a system that's working exactly as designed, and the output it's designed to produce is ineffective management.
Which is a darker thesis than "some people are jerks.
But it's also more hopeful. Because if it's a system, you can change the system. If it's just that seventy percent of people who become managers happen to be bad at it, you're stuck. You can't fix human nature. But you can fix a promotion pipeline.
Let's get into the pipeline. Walk me through how someone actually becomes an accidental manager.
It's almost comically consistent across industries. Someone's excellent at an individual contributor role — say a data analyst. They've been there three or four years. The company needs a team lead. The options are: hire externally, which is expensive and risky, or promote internally. So they promote the analyst.
Nobody asks whether the analyst wants to manage people or has any aptitude for it.
And more importantly, nobody trains them. The CMI data shows the average accidental manager receives zero hours of management training before taking the role. They go from writing SQL queries on Friday to doing performance reviews and mediating interpersonal conflicts on Monday, with no preparation whatsoever.
They default to what they know. If they were a great analyst, they manage by analyzing. They review every spreadsheet, they question every number. And suddenly they're a micromanager.
That's exactly the mechanism. They're not micromanaging because they're controlling by nature. They're micromanaging because the only tool they have is the one they were good at in their previous role. They were never taught how to set clear expectations and then step back. They were never taught how to coach instead of inspect. So they inspect, because inspecting is what made them successful.
The team experiences that as "my boss doesn't trust me.
When in reality, the boss doesn't know any other way to feel secure.
Which loops back to the ADP finding about the top three complaints. Poor communication, lack of recognition, inconsistent feedback. Those are all symptoms of someone who was never taught the basic mechanics of managing humans.
Here's what makes this structural rather than personal — the person who gets promoted didn't design the promotion system. They didn't decide that technical excellence would be the sole criterion. They didn't decide that zero training was acceptable. They walked through a door the organization opened for them, and the organization handed them a job they weren't prepared for and said "good luck.
The organization creates the conditions for failure, the manager fails, the team suffers, and then the organization blames the manager for being bad at the job they were never trained to do.
Then the manager leaves or gets pushed out, and the cycle repeats with the next accidental promotion. It's a machine that consumes talent and produces burnout.
Which brings us to the engagement numbers. Twenty-three percent globally. That means more than three-quarters of the workforce is essentially coasting or actively disengaged.
Gallup has been tracking this for decades. The number has never been above about thirty-five percent globally. We have normalized a world where most people don't care about their work. And the single biggest lever — the thing that explains seventy percent of the variance — is the manager.
If you want to fix engagement, you don't start with ping-pong tables or free snacks. You start with how managers are selected and trained.
Which is exactly what the data says, and exactly what almost nobody does. But we'll get to the organizations that have actually done it, because the results are staggering.
Before we go there, I want to sit with the cross-cultural piece. If the complaints were different in different countries, you could argue it's cultural. But that's not what the ADP data shows.
What it shows is that the structural failures are so fundamental that they transcend culture entirely. Poor communication means something slightly different in a high-context culture like Japan versus a low-context culture like the Netherlands, but the underlying complaint — "I don't know what's expected of me, I don't get clear feedback, and nobody acknowledges my work" — is identical. The flavor varies. The dish is the same.
Which is almost the strongest evidence that this is a systems problem. If it were about personality, you'd expect cultural variation. Instead you get the same three things everywhere.
Because the system that produces managers — promote for technical skill, provide no training, hold accountable for outcomes without granting authority — is itself universal. The org chart looks the same in Mumbai and Manchester and Minnesota.
There's another layer in the Gallup data. Teams with highly engaged managers show fifty-nine percent less turnover. But only thirty percent of managers are themselves engaged at work. So you've got this cascade where disengaged managers produce disengaged teams, who then become disengaged managers if they get promoted.
The cascade effect. And it connects directly to something MIT Sloan Management Review documented — employees who endure a toxic manager are three times more likely to exhibit toxic behaviors when they become managers themselves. It's not just that bad management is unpleasant in the moment. You learn management by watching your manager. If your manager micromanages, that's the model you internalize. You may hate it, but when you're thrown into a management role with no training, you reach for the only tools you've ever seen.
The accidental manager pipeline isn't just producing untrained managers. It's producing untrained managers whose only template for management is the bad manager they used to complain about.
And that's how you get a self-perpetuating cycle. The eighty-two percent who get no training don't invent management from scratch. And what they're imitating is the seventy percent of managers who are ineffective. The math on that is almost elegant in its cruelty.
Which makes the "is it me?" question Daniel raised almost poignant. If you've had three bad bosses in a row, the answer isn't that you're bad at picking jobs. The answer is that the base rate is so high that three in a row is statistically unremarkable.
If seventy percent of managers are ineffective, the probability of having three ineffective managers in a row is about thirty-four percent. That's not a rare event. That's rolling a die and getting an even number. Nobody would ask "is it me?" if they flipped a coin and got heads three times in a row. But because we've been trained to think of bad management as an individual failure rather than a systemic one, people internalize it.
The micromanagement finding from the APA study — fifty-seven percent of people who quit cited their manager, and the top complaint was excessive monitoring. That's the majority of voluntary departures driven by one specific behavior.
I want to connect that back to the UKG authority gap finding, because they're the same problem viewed from different angles. The employee experiences micromanagement as "my boss doesn't trust me." The manager experiences the same situation as "I'm responsible for outcomes I can't control, so I have to monitor everything." Both people are miserable, and neither of them created the structure that's making them miserable.
The micromanager and the micromanaged are both trapped in a system that pits them against each other.
The system benefits from that friction in a perverse way. As long as the manager and the employee are frustrated with each other, neither of them is asking why the manager doesn't have budget authority or why the promotion criteria don't include people skills. The conflict stays lateral instead of moving upward.
Which is a pretty effective way to prevent structural change. Keep everyone blaming each other.
It's the organizational equivalent of telling the waiter the food is bad instead of walking into the kitchen. The waiter didn't cook it. But the kitchen is designed to be invisible. And that invisible kitchen has a price tag. Gallup's twenty twenty-five report puts the cost of low engagement at eight point eight trillion dollars in lost productivity annually.
Which is one of those numbers that's so large it stops meaning anything. Give me a comparison.
It's roughly nine percent of global GDP — more than the entire GDP of Japan and Germany combined. And if managers drive seventy percent of engagement variance, then we're talking about roughly six trillion dollars in losses directly attributable to management failure.
The "bad manager tax" is six trillion dollars a year. That's not "people feel sad at work." That's output that simply doesn't exist because the person responsible for unlocking it was never trained to do so.
That number is almost certainly an underestimate. It doesn't include turnover costs, which typically run between fifty and two hundred percent of an employee's annual salary. It doesn't include the healthcare costs associated with stress-related illness. It doesn't include the innovation that never happens because disengaged employees don't generate new ideas.
The real number is probably north of ten trillion. And the fix, as we'll get to, costs a fraction of that.
A tiny fraction. But before we get to the fix, I want to trace the knock-on effect that makes this problem self-replicating. The MIT Sloan study found that employees who worked under a toxic manager were three times more likely to exhibit toxic behaviors themselves when they became managers. The mechanism is straightforward — if your entire experience of management is being micromanaged, receiving inconsistent feedback, and never being recognized for your work, that becomes your template. When you get promoted with no training, you don't suddenly invent healthy management practices from first principles. You reach for what you know.
Which is the only model you've ever seen up close.
You may hate that model. But under pressure, in a role you're unprepared for, you default to it. The MIT researchers called this the abuse cascade. It's the organizational equivalent of the finding that children who experience harsh parenting are more likely to become harsh parents themselves. The behavior replicates even when the person experiencing it knows it's harmful.
Because knowing something is bad and knowing what to do instead are completely different things.
The system provides no "what to do instead." No training, no coaching, no alternative model. So the cascade continues. One generation of accidental managers produces the next, each one slightly more convinced that micromanagement is just how management works.
Which means the seventy percent ineffectiveness rate isn't a static number. It's a self-sustaining equilibrium.
It normalizes the whole thing. When most managers are ineffective, being ineffective doesn't stand out. It's just the water everyone swims in. You don't question whether your manager could be better because you've never experienced a good one. Or if you have, you assume that was the exception.
Which brings us to the third knock-on effect — quiet quitting. Because if the system is producing this outcome at scale, people are going to adapt their behavior accordingly.
This is where I want to push back on the moral framing that usually surrounds quiet quitting. When you look at the structural conditions, quiet quitting is a completely rational response to a broken incentive system.
Walk me through the logic.
The UKG data showed that sixty-nine percent of managers lack authority over the resources they're held accountable for. That means your manager can't reward your extra effort even if they want to. They don't control the budget for raises. They don't control promotions. So you're in a situation where working harder doesn't reliably produce better outcomes for you. The link between effort and reward is broken.
You calibrate downward. If effort doesn't correlate with outcomes, you supply exactly the effort required to keep the job and nothing more.
That's not laziness. That's game theory. If extra effort yields zero marginal return, continuing to supply extra effort isn't virtuous — it's irrational. The rational move is to optimize for your own wellbeing. And that's exactly what people are doing.
It's the organizational equivalent of putting a rat in a maze where the cheese is randomly distributed regardless of which path it takes, and then calling the rat unmotivated when it stops running.
Which is a clinical analogy I didn't expect from you, but I'll allow it.
I'm a retired pediatrician. I contain multitudes. But the point stands — quiet quitting isn't a moral failing. It's a predictable output of a system where the people who manage you can't reward you, can't develop you, and can't advocate for you because they have no institutional power.
The cascade goes: untrained managers produce disengaged teams, disengaged team members become untrained managers, and the rational response to the whole mess is to emotionally check out. It's a machine that runs on human burnout.
The machine keeps running because the people who could fix it — the executive layer — are insulated from the costs. They don't see the daily friction. They see quarterly numbers. And by the time the numbers show the damage, the people who caused it have usually moved on.
Which is the perfect segue to the part that makes me genuinely angry. The fix is known. It's been tested. And almost nobody does it.
Gallup's twenty twenty-five report found that organizations that invest in manager development see an eight-to-one return on investment within eighteen months. Eight to one. That's the kind of return that would make a venture capitalist weep with joy.
Yet only twenty-one percent of organizations have a formal manager development program.
Twenty-one percent. So nearly eighty percent of companies are leaving an eight-to-one return on the table. And it's not because the training is expensive relative to the cost of the problem. We just established that bad management costs the global economy trillions. Manager development programs, done right, cost a few thousand dollars per manager. The math is not complicated.
What explains the gap? If the ROI is that clear, why isn't every company doing it?
I think there are a few things going on. One is that the costs of bad management are diffuse and delayed, while the costs of training are immediate and visible on someone's budget line. You can see the training expense. You can't see the six trillion dollars you didn't lose.
The people who control the budget are typically several layers removed from the daily damage. A CFO sees a line item for manager development and thinks "cost." They don't see the team in marketing where three people quit in six months because the team lead was never taught how to give feedback.
The other thing is that most organizations don't measure management effectiveness at all. They measure output, revenue, deadlines. But they don't ask "is this person good at managing humans?" in any systematic way. So the problem is invisible to the people with the authority to fund the fix.
Which means the first actionable takeaway here is actually for the people living inside this system right now. Because you can't wait for your company to suddenly discover the eight-to-one ROI. You need a framework for evaluating whether the situation you're in is fixable or whether you need to leave.
So here's a framework. I'm calling it the manager audit. The core question is: does your manager give you clear authority that matches your responsibility?
Not "is my manager nice" or "do I like my manager." Those are personality questions. You're asking about structure.
Nice managers can still be ineffective. The question is whether the authority gap exists in your specific situation. Do you have control over the resources, decisions, and methods needed to deliver what you're being held accountable for? If the answer is no, that's a structural problem, not a personal one.
The second part of the audit — how do you know if it's fixable?
You track it over two review cycles. That's typically six to twelve months. If you've raised the authority gap — explicitly, in writing, with specific examples — and nothing has changed after two cycles, the structural failure is not going to fix itself. It's not that your manager is stubborn. It's that the system that created the gap is above their pay grade.
The decision point is: two review cycles of documented gap, no movement, start planning your exit.
Before burnout sets in. Because that's the real cost of staying too long in a structurally broken situation. You don't just lose time. You internalize the dysfunction. You become three times more likely to replicate it when you become a manager.
Which means leaving isn't just self-preservation. It's also protecting your future team from inheriting the cascade.
And I want to be clear — this isn't "quit at the first sign of difficulty." The manager audit is designed to filter out personality friction and focus on the structural issue that the data says actually matters. Your manager might be annoying. They might have a weird laugh. That's not the audit. The audit is: do I have the authority to do the job I'm being held accountable for?
That's the individual contributor side. What about the accidental managers themselves? The ones who are listening to this and realizing "wait, I'm the eighty-two percent.
This is the group I actually have the most sympathy for, because they didn't ask for this. They were good at something, they got promoted, and now they're drowning. And the single highest-leverage thing they can do — costs nothing, requires no budget approval, can be done tomorrow — is to change one question in every one-on-one meeting.
What's the question?
"What decision do I make that you could make better?
Because it's not "what am I doing wrong" or "how can I improve." It's a specific invitation to delegate.
It directly addresses the number one complaint from the ADP data — lack of autonomy. When you ask that question, you're telling your direct report "I believe you're capable of making this decision, and I want to hand it to you." Then you actually hand it over. Not "you can decide but I'll review it." Not "you make the recommendation and I'll approve." You delegate the decision.
That's terrifying for an accidental manager who's been micromanaging because they don't know any other way to feel secure.
But here's what the data from companies that have implemented this shows — within about six weeks, the manager discovers that their team is making decisions that are at least as good as the ones they were making, and often better because the team has context the manager doesn't. The manager gets hours of their week back. The team feels trusted. Engagement goes up. And it costs nothing.
The accidental manager doesn't need an MBA or a six-month leadership course to start turning things around. They need to ask one question and then actually follow through on the answer.
One question, consistently, in every one-on-one, until you've delegated everything that can be delegated. And the follow-through is the hard part. You have to actually let go. But the alternative is staying in the seventy percent, producing the cascade, and burning out your team and yourself.
Which brings us to the organizational level. What actually works at scale?
Two things that the companies with the highest manager effectiveness scores do differently. First, they stop promoting based on technical competence and start promoting based on demonstrated coaching ability. Before you become a manager, you have to show that you can develop other people. Not that you can hit your own numbers. Not that you're the best individual contributor. That you can make other people better.
Which is a completely different skill set, and one that most promotion processes don't evaluate at all.
Not at all. The second thing — and this is the one that I think would eliminate the accidental manager pipeline overnight if it were widely adopted — is a ninety-day management apprenticeship. Before the promotion is permanent, the new manager spends three months leading the team while being evaluated exclusively by their direct reports. Not by their boss. By the people they're managing.
The team gets a vote on whether this person should be their manager.
The team gets the vote. And if the feedback at ninety days says this person isn't ready, they go back to their individual contributor role with no stigma, no pay cut, no career penalty. They just weren't ready yet, and the organization provides coaching and a path to try again.
That solves the problem of the promotion being irreversible. Once someone becomes a manager, it's almost impossible to say "this isn't working, let's undo it" without them quitting. The apprenticeship makes it a trial period with a real feedback loop.
The companies that do this — Buffer and Patagonia are the most cited examples — report manager effectiveness scores about forty percent higher than industry averages. Buffer in particular found that after implementing direct-report-only manager evaluations, they identified that forty percent of their managers were rated below average. They invested in coaching for those managers, and within a year, turnover dropped by twenty-five percent.
Forty percent below average, identified by the people who actually experience the management, fixed with coaching, quarter reduction in turnover. That's not a pilot program. That's a proof of concept.
It cost them a fraction of what the turnover was costing them. The math is not subtle. It's just that most organizations don't want to give direct reports that kind of evaluative power, because it inverts the hierarchy.
Which is exactly the point. The system protects itself. The people who benefit from the current promotion criteria — the ones who got promoted for technical skill and learned to manage through imitation — are the ones who would have to vote to change the criteria. And that's not going to happen unless someone above them forces it.
Which brings us to the meta-takeaway. Bad management is not a personality problem. It's not that seventy percent of people who become managers are bad people or don't care. The data is clear that most managers want to be good at their jobs. They're set up to fail by organizations that don't train them, don't empower them, and don't evaluate them on the metrics that actually predict team performance.
The question isn't "why are there so many bad managers." It's "why are there so many organizations that refuse to implement the known fix.
That's a question about power, not about management. The fix requires giving up control — control over promotion criteria, control over evaluation, control over the narrative about who's good at their job and why. Most organizations would rather lose six trillion dollars in aggregate productivity than give up that control.
Which is a bleak note to land on, but also a clarifying one. If you're sitting there wondering "is it me," the answer is no. The system is producing exactly what it's designed to produce. The question is what you do with that information.
I think there's a deeper question hiding inside that one. If seventy percent of managers are ineffective, and the fix is known, cheap, and demonstrated — what does it say about organizations that choose not to fix it?
It says the problem isn't ignorance. It's function.
That's where my mind keeps going. Bad management, at scale, serves purposes that nobody names out loud. It suppresses dissent. A workforce that's micromanaged and disengaged doesn't organize. Doesn't push back on strategic decisions. Doesn't ask uncomfortable questions in all-hands meetings.
It also maintains the power structure. If managers were evaluated by their direct reports, a lot of people who are currently secure in their authority would suddenly be accountable to the people below them. That's not a training problem. That's a threat to the hierarchy itself.
There's a subtler function. Bad management churns the workforce. People leave bad managers, not bad companies, but the company keeps the people who are willing to tolerate it. You end up with a self-selected workforce of people who don't push back, don't demand autonomy, don't expect to be developed. That's not a bug if you're optimizing for compliance.
The six trillion dollar question is whether organizations are accidentally producing bad managers or deliberately benefiting from the side effects.
I think it's both. Nobody sits in a boardroom and says "let's make sure our managers are ineffective." But the people who could fix it look at the cost of fixing it — not the money, the power — and decide, consciously or not, that the current arrangement works for them.
Which makes the future implication interesting. Because AI tools are increasingly handling the technical tasks that used to justify accidental manager promotions. The data analyst who got promoted because they were great at SQL — half that job is automated now. The designer who became a creative director because their Figma skills were unmatched — the tools are eating into that too.
That forces the management role to become purely about what AI can't do. The soft skills that the accidental manager pipeline never taught anyone.
The organizations that adapt first — the ones that start selecting for coaching ability now, that implement direct-report evaluations now — they're not just fixing a management problem. They're building the only kind of management structure that will be viable in five years.
They'll have a retention advantage that compounds. When word gets around that your company actually develops people instead of consuming them, the best talent flows toward you. The companies still running the accidental manager pipeline will be left with whoever's willing to tolerate it.
Which loops back to Daniel's original question in a way I didn't expect. He asked "is it me?" — and the data says no, emphatically. But the more important question, the one the data points to but can't answer, is: what are you going to do about a system that's designed to produce the very behavior you're experiencing?
Because once you know the base rate — once you know that seventy percent of managers are ineffective, that eighty-two percent were never trained, that the cascade replicates across generations of accidental promotions — you can't un-know it. You can't go back to assuming it's just bad luck or a personal failure. You're looking at a machine. And machines can be refused.
Refused, or rebuilt. The Buffer example shows it's possible. Twenty-five percent turnover reduction in a year. Forty percent of managers identified as below average and coached up instead of fired. The tools exist. The ROI exists. The question is whether the people with the authority to rebuild the machine will ever feel enough pressure to do it.
That pressure, if it comes, will come from the people who are living inside the machine right now and deciding they're done blaming themselves.
That's a good place to land.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The naked mole rat can survive up to eighteen minutes without oxygen by switching its metabolism to run on fructose, a feat unmatched by any other mammal — which means a naked mole rat could hold its breath longer than it took to compose Frédéric Chopin's Minute Waltz, a piece that actually takes about ninety seconds to play.
...right.
One of these days I'm going to ask how he finds these.
You've been saying
