Your Boss Sucks, But Not for the Reason You Think

If you have worked in corporate America, survived startup life, or honestly just had a job at any point in the last decade, you have probably said it. Or heard it. Or texted it to a friend at 11pm from your bed. “My boss is toxic. They SUCK.”

Having a terrible boss has become so embedded in how we talk about work, that it barely registers anymore. Toxic boss. Toxic culture. Toxic environment. And honestly, it makes sense that we reached for that language, because the experience it is trying to describe is real. The micromanaging. The credit-stealing. The public humiliation dressed up as feedback. The emotional volatility that keeps you guessing what version of them you will get on any given Monday. The specific kind of dread that builds on Sunday nights because you know who you have to face in the morning.

That experience is real. I have worked for some pretty terrible people, so I am not coming at this from a place of theory. Despite all of that, what I want to challenge is the explanation we have been given for it.

Now, before you stop and say “wait, what?” — hear me out. Somewhere along the way, we started diagnosing ALL of our bosses with personality disorders. I hear this terminology so much that it has made me genuinely question: how is it possible? How do all of us have, or have had, so many terrible bosses? We call them narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths. TikTok has delivered a full DSM-adjacent vocabulary and we use it liberally, often correctly identifying real harm but misidentifying the source. Here is the thing though: experts generally believe that about 1 percent of the general population meets the criteria for psychopathy, and the largest study ever conducted on personality disorders in the United States found that 6.2 percent of the general population1 meets the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. Even if you stack every one of these diagnoses on top of each other, the math does not explain what we are all experiencing at work.

I get it. When someone makes your life difficult, the most satisfying explanation is that something is wrong with them specifically and fundamentally. It feels clarifying. BUT is it true? What is actually going on here?

Here is what the data actually tells us…Only 44% of managers aka bosses, have received formal management training.

Sit with that for a second.

More than half of the people currently managing other human beings have never been taught how to do it. Not formally…not even badly! They were handed direct reports the same way you might hand someone a fire extinguisher and then leave the building: “Good luck, it is yours now, figure it out.”

And it gets worse! In 2023, managers received an average of 50 days of on-the-job training, down from about 68 days in 2018, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data2. That is a drop of nearly 20 days in 5 years. At the smaller companies where many of us spend our careers, the numbers are almost comedic in how bleak they are. Most companies simply don’t offer management training…AT ALL. Companies with fewer than 100 employees gave only 12 minutes of manager training every 6 months. Organizations with 100 to 500 employees provided just six minutes.

6 minutes….Per 6 months…to learn how to manage human beings!

There is a concept in organizational psychology called the Peter Principle. It was introduced in 1969 by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and it states something devastatingly simple: employees keep getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, because promotions are often based on performance in a current role rather than the skills required for a higher position.3

In plain language: we take the best salesperson and make them a sales manager. We take the best designer and make them a creative director. We take the best analyst and make them a team lead. And then we act surprised when it does not work. The result is a loss of a skilled worker and the creation of an ineffective manager.

A 2019 study proved this out at scale, examining performance data for more than 50,000 sales professionals across more than 200 companies. The researchers found that sales performance was negatively correlated with managerial success. The better you were at selling, the worse you tended to be at leading a team of sellers. The skills are simply not the same, and treating them as transferable is a decision organizations make consciously, because it is easier and cheaper than building a real pipeline for leadership. 4

Harvard Business Review calls what results from this pattern the "accidental manager." Results-oriented, high-performing employees find themselves suddenly promoted into management roles, more for their technical strengths than for their people management skills, and are then let loose on their teams without receiving the proper skills and training. The result, as HBR puts it, is a new manager experiencing anxiety and imposter syndrome, causing a disconnect between them and the people they now have power over.5 OY VEY.

What Happens When You Leave People Untrained

Gallup’s data shows that 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager’s influence. Which means the single most powerful variable in whether you feel valued, challenged, seen, or completely demoralized at work is not the company. It is not the mission statement. It is not the free snacks or the “unlimited PTO” that you are never allowed to actually use….It is the person sitting across from you in your one-on-ones.6

About 4 in 5 people with effective managers say they feel valued in the workplace, roughly double the rate of those without effective managers. So basically, the presence or absence of a trained, competent manager cuts your sense of being valued in half.7

To add another layer to this, untrained managers are often incredibly controlling and micromanage. Why? Well, control feels like competence when you do not actually have the tools. They often take credit, because visibility is the only metric they understand. They also often avoid hard conversations, because no one taught them how to have them. Ultimately, they manage by fear, because fear is what got results from them, and it’s the only playbook they know.

Large companies saw their average training expenditures decline from $13.3 million in 2024 to $11.7 million in 2025. This happened during a period when those same companies were posting earnings calls about investing in their people. 8

The decision to cut management training is almost never announced. It happens in budget meetings, quietly, as a line item that seems less urgent than whatever crisis is happening that quarter. Training is consistently treated as overhead rather than infrastructure, which means it is always the first thing to go when pressure mounts.

The proportion of workers that received employer-sponsored training dropped 42% between 1996 and 2008. That was before the 2008 financial crisis hit and gave companies a new round of justification for cutting whatever felt optional. The habits formed in that era of austerity never fully reversed and a generation of managers came up inside organizations that had decided, formally or informally, that training was a “nice-to-have” for when things were going well.9

TLDR: They were wrong.

What You Can Actually Do With This

So what do you do with all this? Well, understanding the systemic origin of something does not mean you have to tolerate it. It means you can stop internalizing it in ways that make you doubt yourself, and you can start making clearer decisions.

The most important reframe is this: your terrible boss’s behavior is most likely not a reflection of your performance, your value, or your instincts about what a functional workplace should feel like. You were not wrong to expect better. The bar you were measuring against was reasonable. What failed you was the system that put an untrained, underprepared person in a position of power over your livelihood and then called it leadership.

That system is worth being angry at. Your “toxic” boss is a product of it. They are also still responsible for what they do inside it, and you are not obligated to absorb the consequences of choices that were never yours to make.

Statistically, your boss is probably not a narcissist, and I say that as someone who has worked for some truly crazy (narcissist-adjacent) people. They are probably just someone who was very good at something once, got promoted for it, received no meaningful preparation for what leading people actually requires, and rather than reckon with that, decided everyone else should deal with it instead. Until organizations start treating management training as infrastructure instead of a line item that disappears the moment Q3 looks rough, the accidental manager will keep getting promoted, and we will all keep reaching for personality disorder diagnosis language to describe something that was, at its root, a policy decision.

I share all of this because systems only change once we genuinely call them out and understand how they actually work. If you are reading this and you have any proximity to someone at your company who could push for real investment in management training, send it to them. The power to change this is more in our hands than we realize. It deserves more than a diagnosis. It deserves accountability!

BRING BACK SOURCES! SEE ALL SOURCES BELOW :)