A simple leadership lesson: Be the good boss who remembers what it was like to have a bad boss

Most of us know what it feels like to work for someone who made the job harder than it needed to be. You remember the lack of clarity, the delayed feedback, the surprise deadlines that disrupted your plans, and the sense that decisions were being made without any understanding of what it actually took to do the work. Those frustrations stay with you. They shape how you think, how you work, and what you value. They show up on walks with coworkers, in late-night texts, in whispered debriefs after tough meetings where people say, “If I were in charge, I’d never do that.” That’s where many leadership philosophies begin, long before anyone gets the title to match.

But the interesting thing about becoming a boss is how those philosophies start to drift. You step into leadership with good intentions, only to discover how quickly pressure rearranges your behavior. Suddenly there are more meetings than hours in the day. More decisions than energy to make them. More urgency than clarity. And without realizing it, you start slipping into patterns that once drove you crazy. You push a one-on-one because you’re exhausted. You rush through feedback because it’s late. You send a vague note instead of taking time to explain what’s off. When stress rises or time collapses, the easiest habits to access are often the worst ones. Reacting takes less effort than noticing and choosing.

How small lapses shape an entire team

I’ve caught myself doing it too. The moments I regret most aren’t tied to big decisions, they’re tied to the small lapses—the hurried feedback, the delayed reply, the meeting I didn’t show up prepared for. Those things don’t feel significant in the moment, but they land with weight on the people waiting for you. When these moments repeat, they start to erode trust.

When guidance is unclear, the work becomes fragmented. When deadlines move without explanation, stress spikes. When decisions lag, people sit waiting, frozen in their current state. Eventually the team spends more time working around the leader than they should, instead of focusing on the work they were hired to do.

Most teams won’t say, “Your lack of clarity is making our jobs harder.” Instead, they adapt. They explore more options because they didn’t get the detail they needed. They hold extra meetings to fill gaps. They stay late because feedback came too close to the deadline. Over time, those adaptations turn into resentment—not loud, but steady. The pattern becomes clear. Leadership’s habits, not the work itself, are creating unnecessary difficulty.

That’s the part many new managers underestimate. They assume leadership is conceptual. Strategy, vision, direction. But to a team, it’s operational. Every interaction either stabilizes their work or complicates it. Most of what makes someone a good boss shows up in small, ordinary moments that rarely get celebrated. Consistency, clarity, preparedness, and responsiveness don’t make for flashy leadership lessons, but they determine whether people feel grounded or adrift.

Remembering what it felt like to be led poorly

This is why staying close to your own experience matters so much. You don’t need a complex management framework to start. You need to stay connected to the version of yourself who wasn’t in charge yet—the person who needed clarity late in the day, who needed timelines that made sense, who needed a boss who understood how the work actually got done, not just the outcome expected at the end. Those earlier experiences weren’t just frustrations, they were teaching moments. They revealed what it feels like when leadership is inconsistent or vague. They showed you how much emotional energy goes into guessing what someone wants. They demonstrated how destabilizing it is to operate without information, and how amazing it feels when someone gives you feedback that genuinely helps you improve.

These memories can serve as a compass if you let them. They push you toward behaviors that support and away from behaviors that frustrate. They remind you to pause before pushing your stress onto the team. They make you more thoughtful about how your choices ripple outward.

When you lead from that remembered place, you’re more likely to become clearer, steadier, and more intentional. You take time to articulate what isn’t working because you know how it feels to operate without that clarity. You show up prepared because you remember what it felt like when someone didn’t. You make decisions with care because you understand the downstream effects on people’s workloads and evenings. Leadership becomes less about authority and more about responsibility.

The weight and nuance of your influence

Leadership grants power—not the loud, performative kind people imagine, but the quieter power to shape the experience of everyone around you. Your actions create the conditions in which other people work, think, and develop. That power deserves care. Just because you have the authority to make a decision doesn’t mean you should make it without thinking about its impact. Just because you can push for more doesn’t mean it’s the right moment to do so.

Good leadership, however, has very little to do with power itself. In fact, the more someone treats leadership as power, the worse the experience becomes for everyone else. Leadership is nuanced. It’s relational. It requires you to pay attention to people, not just projects. Every person on your team needs something slightly different. Some need more context. Some need reassurance. Some need space to run. Some need you to check in before a problem becomes unmanageable. Being a good leader requires more work than the tasks assigned to you. It asks you to notice the nuance in each person’s needs and show up with enough consistency that people know what version of you they’re going to get. Consistency is not about being emotionally uniform—it’s about being reliable. When people know what to expect from you, they feel more grounded in their own work. Predictability isn’t rigid. It’s stabilizing.

With that stability comes a different kind of accountability. Teams don’t work harder for leaders who demand it. They work harder for leaders who respect them. Respect creates a natural sense of obligation. When people feel supported and valued, they don’t want to disappoint you. They want to meet the expectations you set and rise to the level you believe they can reach. Accountability becomes a shared commitment instead of a pressure tactic. It’s the difference between doing the work because they have to and doing it because they know you’re in it with them.

Support is the real work of leadership

At its core, the job of a boss is to support the people doing the work. Not in a soft or sentimental way, but in the practical sense of creating the conditions where people can do their best work. Support can look like guidance when someone is stuck, or protection when outside forces threaten to derail the project. It can look like making decisions promptly, giving feedback that is specific enough to be useful, or advocating for realistic timelines so your team isn’t forced into avoidable stress. It can also look like recognizing when someone’s personal life is stretching them thin and adjusting expectations so they can stay afloat.

Good leadership isn’t about controlling the work. It’s about shaping the environment in which the work happens. That requires behavioral consistency. Everyone on your team should know how you operate, what matters to you, and how you’re likely to respond. Predictability strengthens psychological safety and gives people space to think instead of brace.

When leaders show respect for the team’s time, attention, and expertise, accountability is far easier to build. People naturally rise to meet expectations when they feel supported rather than monitored. They want to deliver work that reflects well on a leader who respects them. They want to grow in environments where they feel trusted.

Staying aware when it matters most

The moments that test your leadership often arrive when your plate is full, your patience is thin, and your attention is split in too many directions. These are the moments when it’s easiest to slip into behaviors you don’t admire. And they’re also the moments your team will remember most—not because they expect perfection, but because they want to see whether you stay aware of your impact even when it’s hard.

Being a good boss isn’t about perfection. You will have off days. You will miss something important. You will send a rushed message that lands wrong. But if you stay conscious of your impact—if you stay connected to what it felt like to be on the other side—you’ll course-correct. You’ll apologize when needed. You’ll shift your approach. You’ll remember that the people who report to you are shaped every day by the quality of your presence, your attention, and your effort.

Leading like you remember how it felt

Many people risk becoming the bosses they once resented when they stop remembering what it felt like to be on the receiving end of bad leadership. They forget the emotional weight of uncertainty, the frustration of unclear expectations, and the drain of working for someone whose habits made everything more difficult. Breaking that pattern doesn’t require a reinvention of who you are. It requires awareness of the role you play in the day-to-day reality of other people’s jobs and intention in how you choose to show up.

When you stay connected to your own past frustrations, you make different choices. You think twice before moving a deadline without a conversation. You notice when your silence is creating more work than your guidance would. You recognize that just because you can do something—because of your title or authority—doesn’t mean you should. Leadership becomes less about managing tasks and more about designing a better experience of work for the people around you.

Be the boss who doesn’t make the job harder.
Be the boss who shows up.
Be the boss you needed before you became one.