Avoid Bad Bosses

Welcome to Star Compass!

What’s inside this week:

🧑‍🚀 This Week’s Mission: Why do so many people quit their boss?

🌌 This Week in Space: Three things to share this week.

🚀 Ask a Rocket Scientist: How has the commercialization of the spaceflight industry impacted the way that nations think about national security?

🔭 Next Step: Strategies for responding to a bad boss.

BambooHR, in their article The Boss Effect, identified that 90% of employees who quit their job for a new position said their boss had an impact on the decision. 58% said their boss’s management style was the main reason for leaving. 88% cited at least one negative boss behavior as a reason for quitting. People quit bad bosses, and it is the #1 turnover driver.

Bad management takes on many forms. The top reasons that make people quit, according to BambooHR, are:

Based on these quitting statistics, bad managers are abundant, and they make an impact. Almost everyone can relate to the dread of coming to work when a manager makes even a good job feel like a dead end. The movies Office Space and Horrible Bosses are funny for a reason.

The reason someone is a bad manager is that they were likely promoted into it for the wrong reasons.  The two top reasons people become managers, according to Gallup, are due to tenure in the field or at the organization and success in a previous non-managerial role. Effective people leadership is a set of talents that someone who succeeded in a previous role may not have.

I have seen this occur often in engineering. Someone who is successful in their technical role or has a certain tenure in the industry is expected to be a good leader.

As we touched on in last week’s issue, the ability to dive deep into the details of a problem is valuable, but too often it translates mistakenly into micromanagement, a top reason for leaving. Micromanagement is taking over tasks, stripping autonomy, and constantly breathing down their team’s necks. Diving deep is understanding the system, asking detailed questions, and empowering your team with clarity.

Leadership is a talent just like any other job skill. You can develop great leaders or hire them, but both take a rigorous focus on the leadership skill set rather than technical excellence.

It is why degrees like the University of Colorado Engineering Management program exist to train the next generation of engineering leaders. There is a reason we have three classes on leadership: Leading Oneself, Leading Others, and Leading Technical Organizations, along with courses in communications to complement courses in finances, project management, quality, and systems engineering. We are trying to build engineering leaders to offset the prevalence of bad bosses that people quit.

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📡 OPPORTUNITY: There is a special prize I am challenging my students to chase.

The Sacknoff Prize, awarded since 2011, is designed to encourage original research by students in the field of space history.

Undergraduate and graduate students submit their original manuscript for consideration.

The winner receives an $850 cash prize, publication in the peer-reviewed journal Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly, a free one-year subscription to Quest, and an invitation to present at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology.

Submissions are due by November 25, 2026.

More details are available here.

I am telling my EMEN 5065 Global Topics in Aerospace class that they should apply, but any interested students can consider it.

📚RESOURCE:  I feel fortunate to have attended some universities I am proud to have degrees from, but this is another one I would be proud to receive a diploma from.

Planet University provides over 100 on-demand and live training resources, including introductory courses on Planet products and best practices using Planet data.

It is a very clever way to get you interested in the various remote sensing products that Planet offers with data gathered from its fleet of satellites (it has built and deployed 450 satellites with 200+ currently in orbit).

Learn more here.

🌎 COMMUNITY: The community that convinced me I could be a creator is Archimedes.

It is an exclusive community of LinkedIn thought leaders that taught me many of the skills I continue to execute every day.

You can learn more about it at their free masterclass on Friday, October 30^th by going to this invite.

They are starting their next cohort on November 16th. You can sign up here.

Let them know I sent you their way if you sign up.

I am happy to answer any questions you may have.

How has the commercialization of the spaceflight industry impacted the way that nations think about national security?

- Kate Mulholland, University of Colorado Global Topics in Aerospace student

My Global Topics in Aerospace students ask the best questions.

On October 11, 2026, Kate submitted this question.

Two days and four days later, this question went from the theoretical to real.

On October 13, 2026, the capabilities of Starshield, SpaceX’s military-grade satellite network, were temporarily reduced. Although it is disputed who gave the direction to implement this change, it immediately had an impact on Ukraine’s military capabilities against Russian drones and operating its own drones.

Between October 15 and October 19, 2026, the Russian military satellite Cosmos 2612 engaged in a close-proximity maneuver in low Earth orbit stalking the ICEYE-X36 synthetic aperture radar imaging satellite registered in the United States and operated by ICEYE US, the American arm of the Finnish company ICEYE. The Cosmos satellite approach was estimated to range from roughly 200 to 500 meters and potentially as close as 30 to 50 meters, according to Scientific American. ICEYE provides high-resolution radar imagery used by the Ukrainian military.

Sometimes real life gives you examples more powerful than any theoretical answer you provide.

If nations weren’t thinking about how space commercialization impacts their national security, these two examples in one week gave them a reason.

Got a question about navigating your aerospace career? Reply and ask. I’ll answer the best ones right here.

If you have a bad boss, what can you do about it?

Having worked with numerous less-than-inspiring bosses across my career, I’ve learned they can provide opportunities to develop important leadership skills of your own as well as identifying “what not to do” when you get the opportunity to lead.

The secret is to “manage up”. Melody Wilding wrote a whole book on this topic (you can find it here )( #ad). When your boss is difficult, think of them instead as a difficult client that you need to figure out how to work with if you want to get ahead, even if you would rather not.

A few quick strategies to employ.

First, learn their ‘Why’ using the skills you already learned about yourself to identify your own Why in the first issue of Star Compass. As well as their why that motivates them, try to understand what they care about and what they fear, as well as how they measure success.

Second, support their success by working around their weaknesses. It may be surprising to support a bad boss, but there is nothing to be gained by making them look bad. Let them take care of that themselves. You need to take the high road because your own reputation rides on it. Never let the bad behavior of another be an excuse for your own.

Third, never be intimidated by a bully. If you are doing the best job you can, keep your head held high, and don’t give the bully the satisfaction of pushing you around. Don’t respond with anger, but rather ask questions to understand, to defuse the situation, and present facts and data in response to arguments. Obviously, if your safety is in question, then crossing that line merits a different response.

Fourth, if the situation becomes untenable, explore alternative opportunities where you currently work or, in some cases, wait it out because many organizations have frequent management changes purposefully where your boss may be given a “different opportunity.” If you decide to exit your current organization, make sure you research any new situations to make sure you are not jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Sadly, as we said earlier, bad managers are common, so you may escape one to only end up with another. I have had that experience firsthand.

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