A Bad Leader: A Book About the Leader You Might Be

By: Marc Baily

Your team doesn't have a motivation problem. They have a you problem.

You've read the leadership books. You've nodded along to podcasts about emotional intelligence and servant leadership. And then you walked into Monday morning and did the same things you've always done - micromanaged and called it support, avoided conflict and called it diplomacy, stolen credit and called it teamwork, burned people out and called it dedication.

Everyone sees it. Except you.

A Bad Leader is not a leadership book. It's a self-confrontation book. Through thirteen unflinching chapters, each exposing a specific leadership failure that most leaders will recognize in everyone except themselves.

Marc Baily dismantles the comfortable stories you've been telling yourself about why people leave, why teams underperform, and why the culture you built doesn't feel the way you think it does.

Inside these pages, you'll confront:

The 20% gap between how you rate yourself and how your team actually rates you, and why that gap is where people quit

The five mechanisms of burnout culture you're running right now, including why your sixty-hour weeks produce less output than someone else's forty.

The real reason your "open door policy" hasn't produced a single piece of honest feedback in years

Why your "radical candor" is just cruelty with a vocabulary, and what actual honesty requires

The accountability dodge you've perfected so thoroughly that you've edited your own memory to believe you saw every failure coming.

The echo chamber you've mistaken for consensus, and why the silence in your meetings isn't agreement, it's fear

This is not a book of frameworks, acronyms, or four-quadrant matrices. There are no assessments to take and no scores to celebrate. This is a book that looks you in the eye and asks the question your team wishes they could: What would they say about you if you couldn't hear them?

Drawn from years of coaching at companies of every size, and from the author's own unflinching confession of every leadership failure in these pages, A Bad Leader is the book that finally tells you what your direct reports, your exit interviews, and your Sunday-night dread have been trying to tell you for years.

The reckoning isn't coming. It's here. The only question is whether you'll meet it, or keep walking past the mirror.

If this description made you uncomfortable, the book is for you.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1778168736
• ISBN13: 9781778168734
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: BailyCom
• Length: 347 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.8" x 5.3"