[dvanwag]

I can deal with bad management/leadership, which I'm sure all of us have experienced at one time or another. The law of averages dictates we will work for someone who sucks at some point in our careers.

Even worse than bad/toxic management to me is No management or leadership. The worse job I ever had involved managers who couldn't make even the simplest of decisions or provide even minute guidance. I worked as a high level project manager who executed on different projects across the organization. I would bring back facts and figures to support the objectives of the organization and usually have three to five recommendations for consideration just to be told "they would get back to me". Weeks would pass with no direction and my team would then be subject to abuse from other stakeholders on why we weren't doing our jobs.

If I tried to take initiative to keep the org moving I'd be hanged by our senior management, so it was a Catch 22 situation. Ultimately I made the decision that the best thing I could do was protect the members of the team by siloing our operations as much as possible while they struggled to do their jobs with as little outside interference as possible.

Bad managers can be mitigated by sometimes playing their game to you and your team's advantage, keeping certain actors at arms length, or "feeding the beast" to simply be left alone. No leadership is the worst because it's the equivalent of not just being on a rudderless ship lost at sea but with everyone on said ship sick and expected to build the rest of the ship after it's already left the dock.

[Update due to grammatical issue]