Don’t be a Good Boss. Avoid Being a Bad One.

The “Don’t Suck Principle” is a counterintuitive secret pathway to good leadership.

Just another day in the backwoods of Leadership Land, somewhere between the Plague Plateau and the Desert of Good Intentions.

For very specific tasks, we’re walking instruction manuals. We’ll draw you a flowchart for changing your contributions to Company McCorporateface, Inc.’s retirement plan, tell you 42 reasons why toilet paper should be oriented over the roll rather than under¹, and whisper the precise coordinates for where we buried the bodies.

But if you ask us about happiness, love, being a good leader, success, and the meaning of life, we morph from “walking instruction manual” into Pythia, Oracle of Delphi. Pythia was known for breathing hallucinogenic fumes, going Looney-Tunes crazy, and speaking gibberish that was later interpreted as enigmatic prophecies. We can’t predict the future, but we’re known for descending into woo-woo nonsense like “the key to winning at life is not losing.”

When a new supervisor asks us for tips on good leadership, our response is to focus on how to avoid being a bad leader first. Our victims usually react with a look of confusion, conclude that we’re crazy, and make an excuse (“I have a 2:30 meeting”) as they backpedal toward the nearest escape route.

“Don’t Suck” sets the bar really low, doesn’t it?

At first glance, you might think that focusing on not being a bad boss will make you merely mediocre. How could advice like “don’t suck” outcompete the arcane knowledge of a Harvard Business School degree? Wouldn’t the go-getters find ways to “get ahead” while you’re merely trying not to fail?

We were equally skeptical when a mentor first advised us to focus on “not sucking” years ago, when one of us first crossed the Interview Mountains into the Boss Forest. In choosing to trust the mentor’s judgment, we were essentially taking a leap of faith. We had to assuage our doubts by telling ourselves:

What’s unintelligible to me isn’t necessarily unintelligent.

Years later, we can attest that the Don’t Suck Principle works unexpectedly well. Here’s why.

In defense of mediocrity

Let’s assume for a moment that focusing on not being a bad boss does, in fact, make you mediocre. Is that such a bad thing? Let’s take a quick visit to the Contrarian Caves to find our answer.

Imagine that you have zero experience playing the piano. When you start playing, you will suck at it. You’ll bang on the keys like an uncoordinated toddler, and everyone within earshot will wish that A) they were deaf, or B) you develop arthritis in both hands – whatever it takes to stop the cacophony. The best you can hope for is to play Chopsticks with your two index fingers in the same way an octogenarian pecks haltingly at a computer keyboard.

If you’re a new leader fresh from your rite of passage in the Interview Mountains, suddenly taking charge of underlings is a lot like being told to play the piano for the first time. The key difference: if you’re really bad at it, the piano will burst into flames. Also, the piano has a mind of its own and might:

1. Suffer silently

2. Quit working

3. Complain about you behind your back

“Boss declared that the beatings shall continue until morale improves.”

Suddenly, starting as a mediocre piano player doesn’t seem quite so bad, does it? Your fingers will not glide across the keys with grace and alacrity, but at least the piano won’t catch on fire. Even if you focus on not being a bad leader and you start at the 50^th percentile, it’s all uphill from here. You can practice at the “leadership piano” until you are a virtuoso capable of playing Rachmaninoff’s third.

Hidden asymmetries

The “piano on fire” metaphor was mostly a reframing exercise. Let’s dig one level deeper and enter the Secret Grottos. Here’s where it gets really counterintuitive.

Focusing on “not sucking” at leadership won’t merely start you out as a mediocre leader; you will probably start out above average. That’s because good leadership is built on the quality of human relationships, and relationships are fragile. Fragile things are asymmetric; doing something wrong will outweigh a lot of things done right. If you forget to put in adequate support for a building, the entire structure will collapse when someone sneezes violently. If you miss the L in “public affairs” and your spell-checker misses it, your email turns into a sexual harassment lawsuit.

Now consider these examples of asymmetry in leadership:

• Trust is fragile; it takes years to build and seconds to demolish.

  • You can utter a single careless remark and rob your subordinates of psychological safety.

  • Take sole credit for an accomplishment, and everyone will become cagey about sharing anything else that you can steal.

  • Throw one person under the bus, and even good-natured bystanders will lust for the day someone does the same to you.

  • Shoot the messenger once, and you create a chilling effect that discourages anyone from revealing problems to you. In effect, you’re encouraging problems to fester in silence.

• People feel the pain of loss more acutely than the pleasure of gain; this is called loss aversion.

  • Cutting pay and benefits hurts a lot more than increasing pay and benefits by the same magnitude.

  • Taking away a subordinate’s autonomy hurts your relationship with that person more than giving them autonomy helps it.

  • Depriving anyone (an employee, a customer, a citizen bound by your regulations, etc.) of a privilege, then dismissing their unhappiness, will turn them into an enemy – no matter how justified your decision may be.

• Punishing someone for failing to meet a performance metric will instantly change the collaborative “Us, the Team” paradigm into an adversarial “You vs. Me” one. The two paradigms are asymmetric because both sides must collaborate to form a team, but only one side needs to become hostile (or defensive in response to perceived hostility) to create an adversarial relationship².

It takes a lot of “good leadership” to overcome a mistrustful or adversarial relationship with subordinates. Creating SMART goals, setting KPIs, and delivering shareholder value will not douse the flames of a burning piano³.

Why the “Don’t Suck Principle” is the secret to good leadership

Cerebrium is a crystallized secret mined from the Secret Grottos, deep beneath the surface of Leadership Land.

You may have heard that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”⁴ If we apply that wisdom to leadership, we get this distillation:

Human relationships are fragile, making setbacks costlier than progress. On average, leaders who focus on avoiding failure will go farther than those who only strive for success.

Naturally, you want to avoid failure and aim for success. But when you take over a team for the first time, you should probably focus on avoiding failure (and incendiary pianos) first. If you can successfully avoid being a bosshole, you’re already above average. Don’t micromanage. Avoid favoritism. Don’t pretend to be infallible. Avoid trivialities⁵.

Applying the Don’t Suck Principle beyond leadership

As we wrote in our About page, it’s very difficult to solve large-scale, unstructured, poorly-defined problems such as:

• What is happiness?

• What is love?

• What makes a good leader?

• What does success look like?

• What is the meaning of life?

Think of the asymmetry here: it’s much simpler to figure out what makes you unhappy, unloved, a bad leader, a miserable failure, or dead. If you can avoid those things by applying the Don’t Suck Principle, you’ll be mediocre at worst. But more likely, you’ll start out above average and continue climbing upward from there.

That raises the question: where else should we apply the Don’t Suck Principle? Our answer is a second piece of Cerebrium for you:

For anything fragile, setbacks are costlier than progress. On average, applying the Don’t Suck Principle will net you superior results compared to only striving for success.

Consider a lifelong marriage, a fortune, and your reputation. Are all fragile – each takes 30 years to build and only 30 minutes to destroy. You must build each one by consistently applying the “Don’t Suck Principle”: not being a bad spouse, not taking wipe-out risks with your money, and not robbing orphans of their meager possessions.

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Let’s summarize what we covered so far:

• Fragile things are asymmetric; a few bad things will overshadow many good things.

• It’s best to apply the Don’t Suck Principle to leadership and other fragile things because there’s more to lose than to gain.

• The Don’t Suck Principle will probably make you above-average from the moment you step into a leadership role, and you can slowly improve thereafter.

  • Even if you’re unlucky or don’t improve, mediocre management is vastly preferable to bad management.

1. There are two types of people in the world: those who orient their toilet paper over the roll, and those who are filthy HEATHENS 🤬

2. We’re not saying that leaders shouldn’t discipline their underlings, or shouldn’t fire them for repeated failures. We’re warning that teamwork is fragile. Furthermore, we often see managers switch from “dangling the carrot” to “wielding the stick” at the first sign of trouble, without attempting to support their subordinates toward improvement. This is a kneejerk reaction that conspires to make teamwork even more fragile.

3. You can keep playing the piano as the inferno rages around you, but it will be very painful. And you’ll constantly be replacing the piano’s components as they burn out or quit.

4. There’s a caveat: if you take this too far, you’ll end up in the territory of “penny wise, dollar foolish.” An unstated goal of Adventures in Leadership Land is gathering the wisdom to find the delicate balance between the two.

5. We have strong opinions about toilet paper orientation, but we’re still nice to the heathens 🙂 Do as we say, not as we do!