Why Leaders Who Make Millions Create Employees Who Quit
The Great Resignation is a leadership referendum, and bad bosses are losing.
CEOs are making $50-70 million while laying off thousands of workers.
They demand loyalty but won’t sacrifice a dime. Then they act shocked when their best people walk out the door.
The Great Resignation isn’t about compensation. It’s about hypocrisy.
And if you’re a leader who doesn’t understand that, you’re already losing the talent war.
I sat down with Mita Mallick, USA Today bestselling author of The Devil Emails at Midnight: What Good Leaders Can Learn from Bad Bosses, to cut through the corporate BS and expose why employees are fleeing…
…and what leaders can do about it before it’s too late.
Connect with Mita Mallick
Bad Bosses Aren’t Born—They’re Manufactured
Most people think bad bosses are just assholes who were born that way. Mita destroys that myth immediately.
Bad bosses are made, not born. And they’re manufactured by three specific moments that most leaders don’t even recognize until it’s too late.
First, environmental stress. Tariffs. Economic uncertainty. Government shutdowns. Market volatility.
When the external environment gets chaotic, leaders who haven’t built the right coping mechanisms default to their worst behaviors. They become controlling, reactive, and abusive because they’re trying to control something—anything—in a world that feels out of control.
This connects directly to Presence in the PEAK framework. When leaders lose their anchor in the present moment, they spiral.
They catastrophize about the future or obsess over past failures. Trust, clarity, and power only exist in the now. Leaders who can’t stay present under stress become the stress for everyone around them.
Second, leadership emulation. Mita calls this “poo poo trickles down,” which is the most accurate description of toxic culture I’ve ever heard.
If you’re a first-time leader and your boss is terrible, you don’t know any better. You copy what you see because it’s the only model you have. The system perpetuates itself, creating generation after generation of bad bosses who think abuse is just “how business works.”
This is where Awareness becomes critical. Leaders who see clearly—who have brutal self-awareness about their own triggers and situational awareness about the impact they’re having—can break the cycle.
But most leaders are operating on autopilot, unconsciously replicating the dysfunction they inherited.
Third, personal earthquakes. Divorce. Death. Illness. Miscarriage. Trauma. Leaders think they can compartmentalize grief, put it in a drawer, and show up to work like nothing happened. Mita lost her father suddenly in 2017 and learned the hard way that grief is relentless. It will find you when you least expect it, and if you’re not dealing with it, it will leak into every interaction you have.
This is the moment when Kalibration matters most. You will drift. You will stumble. The edge comes from recalibrating fast and returning to center. Leaders who refuse to acknowledge their personal struggles don’t just hurt themselves—they weaponize their pain and inflict it on everyone around them.
The Difference Between Healthy and Toxic Vulnerability
One of the most important distinctions Mita makes is between healthy vulnerability and toxic vulnerability. And most leaders have no idea which one they’re practicing.
Healthy vulnerability is admitting you don’t have all the answers. It’s saying, “This tariff situation is stressing me out too. I don’t know exactly how this plays out, but here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know, and here’s what we can control. Let’s figure this out together.”
That builds trust. That creates psychological safety. That makes people want to follow you into uncertainty because they know you’re not pretending to be invincible.
Toxic vulnerability is trauma dumping. It’s using your personal problems as a get-out-of-jail-free card for abusive behavior. It’s the boss who tells you about every detail of his failing marriage, then uses that as justification to scream at you when you miss a deadline.
Mita’s advice if you’re dealing with a boss like this? Redirect them to professional resources. “I appreciate you sharing this, but I’m not equipped to help. I’d encourage you to talk to our EAP or Modern Health.” Then pivot back to work. You’re not their therapist, and enabling that behavior only makes it worse.
This is about boundaries. It’s about recognizing when someone is using vulnerability as manipulation instead of connection.
Leaders with Awareness can spot the difference. Leaders without it become the problem.
The CEO Compensation Hypocrisy That’s Destroying Companies
This is where the conversation got real. Mita brought up a CEO making $2.5 million a year—and that’s on the low end. We’re talking about Fortune 50 CEOs pulling down $50-70 million while laying off thousands of employees.
And then they wonder why nobody’s “loyal” anymore.
You can’t demand sacrifice from your people while refusing to sacrifice anything yourself. You can’t ask employees to tighten their belts while you’re buying your third vacation home. You can’t preach “we’re all in this together” while hoarding wealth and cutting jobs to protect your bonus.
Employees aren’t stupid. They see the hypocrisy. And they’re done with it.
Mita asked the question that every board should be asking: What if you just took a reasonable salary for one year? What if instead of making $50 million, you made $100,000 and used the rest to keep people employed?
The silence from the C-suite is deafening.
This isn’t about being soft. This is about being smart. When your best people leave because they don’t trust you, you lose institutional knowledge, productivity, and competitive advantage. The cost of turnover dwarfs whatever you “saved” by cutting headcount while protecting executive comp.
Leaders who understand Energy know that you can’t extract performance from people you’ve betrayed. ADHD isn’t chaos—it’s raw horsepower. But that horsepower only flows when there’s trust. When employees see leaders enriching themselves at their expense, that energy redirects into updating resumes and taking recruiter calls.
Why I Hired Single Moms While Everyone Else Fired Them
I want to share something that still fires me up. One of the best business decisions I ever made was hiring working mothers—especially single moms—that other companies had thrown away.
Why did other companies fire them? Because they couldn’t punch a time card from 8:30 to 4:30. Because their kid got sick at 11 a.m. and they had to leave. Because life doesn’t operate on a rigid corporate schedule, and these women needed flexibility to manage their responsibilities.
So I gave them autonomy. I said, “I don’t care when you punch in or punch out. I’m going to W-2 you so you have stability.
Here’s what I need you to produce by the end of the month. How you get there is up to you. Some days you’ll work six hours, some days you’ll work nine. I trust you to get it done.”
The talent I acquired was insane. Some of the most capable, driven, loyal people I’ve ever worked with. They crushed goals because they weren’t stressed about whether they could pick up their kid from school.
They had the mental bandwidth to actually perform because I removed the artificial constraint of time-based management.
This is what Kalibration looks like in practice. These women were constantly recalibrating—balancing work, kids, life—and instead of punishing them for it, I built a system that supported it. The result? A competitive advantage that other companies were too rigid and stupid to see.
Flexibility isn’t charity. It’s strategy. And leaders who don’t understand that are bleeding talent to competitors who do.
The Great Resignation Is a Leadership Referendum
Let’s be clear about what’s actually happening. The Great Resignation isn’t about people wanting more money or better benefits. It’s about people refusing to tolerate bad leadership anymore.
Employees will put up with a lot.
They’ll work long hours.
They’ll deal with difficult projects.
They’ll navigate ambiguity and stress.
But they won’t tolerate leaders who treat them like disposable resources while enriching themselves. They won’t stay in environments where vulnerability is weaponized and flexibility is denied.
The data backs this up.
People don’t leave companies—they leave managers.
And right now, they’re leaving in record numbers because the leadership crisis has reached a breaking point.
Mita talks about how storytelling and data work together to drive change. Data shows you the problem. Storytelling makes people care enough to fix it. But if leaders ignore both the data and the stories, they lose the right to be surprised when their best people walk out the door.
This is the ultimate test of Awareness. Can you see your triggers? Can you see your team? Can you see the terrain? Leaders who see clearly, win. Leaders who are blind to their own dysfunction lose—slowly at first, then all at once.
What Good Leadership Actually Looks Like
Mita’s book is called The Devil Emails at Midnight, and the title comes from her own bad boss moment. After her father died, she was drowning in grief and still trying to perform at work. She sent emails at midnight because she couldn’t sleep and needed to feel productive. She thought she could compartmentalize the pain and just push through.
She couldn’t. And she became the bad boss in that moment—demanding, reactive, unable to see how her unprocessed grief was affecting her team.
The lesson? Good leadership starts with taking care of yourself. You can’t lead others if you’re running on empty. You can’t create a healthy culture if you’re ignoring your own mental health. You can’t demand presence from your team if you’re not present yourself.
This is the foundation of the PEAK framework:
Presence - Anchor yourself in the now. Stop catastrophizing about the future or obsessing over the past. Trust, clarity, and power only exist in the present moment.
Energy - Your ADHD isn’t chaos—it’s raw horsepower. But you have to direct it into execution and impact, not anxiety and distraction. Self-care isn’t selfish. It’s the fuel that makes everything else possible.
Awareness - Brutal self-awareness plus situational awareness. See your triggers. See your team. See your terrain. Leaders who see clearly, win.
Kalibration - You will drift. You will stumble. The edge comes from recalibrating fast and returning to center. Kalibration isn’t balance—it’s the discipline of constant reset.
Good leadership isn’t about being perfect.
It’s about being human, being honest, and being willing to do the work. It’s about recognizing when you’re drifting into bad boss territory and recalibrating before you do permanent damage.
The Bottom Line
The $2.5M CEO problem is real, and it’s destroying companies from the inside out. Leaders who hoard wealth, demand sacrifice, and refuse to show basic humanity are driving the Great Resignation.
They’re losing their best people, and they have no one to blame but themselves.
If you’re a leader, ask yourself:
Am I creating an environment where people want to stay, or am I giving them reasons to leave?
Am I showing healthy vulnerability, or am I weaponizing my problems?
Am I offering flexibility as a competitive advantage, or am I clinging to outdated management practices that drive talent away?
The answers to those questions will determine whether you build a team that crushes goals or a revolving door that bleeds talent.
This is the way.
Hanley
Work with me
I’ve built teams, scaled companies, and learned the hard way what separates high-performing leaders who retain top talent and drive revenue, from those who don’t.
Today, I help leaders like you do the same.
If you need a speaker for your next event who brings real-world experience and zero BS, or if you’re looking for coaching that transforms how you lead, let’s talk.