Leadership Blind Spots That Could Be Costing You Trust and Talent with Matt Bertman

November 11, 2025·41 min·3 clips

Matt Bertman reveals that 60% of employees would fire their boss if given the chance.

Leadership starts with an awkward measurement. Matt talks through research that asked employees whether they would virtually fire their manager if they could, and the answer points to a trust problem that polished workplace language can hide. He does not treat it as a quirk of one industry. The same leadership trouble showed up across automotive, home building, real estate, insurance, and technology, which makes the problem feel less like sector noise and more like basic management practice. The host presses on timing. Because the book moved from pre-COVID into post-COVID work life, the conversation asks whether workplaces became kinder and gentler, or whether managers were still losing the room. The answer is not especially comforting. Instead of getting better, the employee-manager relationship seems to have worsened as remote work, hybrid expectations, and return-to-office pressure piled up. Flexibility gets treated as a real tradeoff, not a slogan. Employees value remote and hybrid work, but Matt also argues that losing face-to-face connection can hurt the relationship between managers and employees. The pendulum idea gives the exchange some balance. The host frames the workplace as something likely to swing toward the center, with hybrid as the practical landing place, rather than a clean win for office life or remote life. What keeps coming back is the relationship itself. Managers are not painted as cartoon villains. They sound more like people carrying a constant leadership problem, one that gets messy fast when trust is thin. The sharpest point comes near the end: credible leadership may depend on treating people as intellectual equals while still recognizing differences in experience. That is the test. Leadership is not just knowing more than the people below you. It is earning trust from people who can tell when respect is missing.

As heard by us

A direct look at why manager-employee relationships still shape how modern work feels.

The episode keeps its footing by staying close to a plain workplace problem: why management friction keeps showing up in different business settings.

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Why you'd press play

When your team is quietly rethinking the manager relationship, this one lands for you.

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