Redefining Success: Personal and Professional Growth
with Ken Corey
The Corvus Effect / Episode 16
Released: March 3, 2025
Overview
Ken Corey used to want to code in a dark room forever — he thought people were too ‘squishy’ to manage. Then he discovered something the management literature backs up: a manager has up to 70% variance on an employee’s performance, and a boss has roughly the same impact on someone’s life as their spouse. This conversation is about what Ken and his wife Deb teach through Bad Bosses Ruin Lives — that nobody lives in the ‘good boss box’ or the ‘bad boss box,’ and the first useful thing a manager can say is ‘yeah, I might have done that once or twice.’
About Ken Corey
Ken Corey is a senior engineering leader who managed teams of up to 43 people at Santander before co-authoring Bad Bosses Ruin Lives with his wife Deb. He works with managers who never got trained on the people part of the job — most of them — and helps them recognize the unintentional behaviors (avoider, blamer, hoarder) that cost their teams 70% of the performance they could be hitting.
Listen to the Full Episode
Key Takeaways
1. A manager's 70% variance, and the spouse-equivalent impact
A manager can swing an employee’s performance by up to 70% in either direction — that’s not a soft claim, it’s the math underneath every team that ever surprised its leader. Even more striking: a boss has the same impact on an employee’s life as their spouse, more than their doctor or therapist. Yet we pick our spouse and don’t pick our boss — and almost no new manager gets trained for the responsibility they just inherited.
2. You are not a label
Ken wears a shirt that says ‘You Are Not a Label.’ We turn ourselves into boxes — ‘I’m an introvert,’ ‘I’m an Android dev so I can’t read that code,’ ‘I’m a good boss so I don’t need the training’ — and the box becomes the excuse. Nobody actually lives in the good-boss box or the bad-boss box; everyone is somewhere in the middle, and the work starts the moment you accept ‘yeah, I might have done that once or twice.’
3. All credit passes down, all blame stops here
Ken’s pattern as a leader is simple to state and hard to hold: when good things happen, it’s the team’s win and you name the person; when bad things happen, it’s the leader’s. Once the team starts believing you actually mean it, the conversation changes — they relax, they tell you the truth, they take risks. Ken will also admit he was an ‘avoider boss’ in his last role because his calendar ate every gap, and a ‘hoarder boss’ because he kept information he should have shared — the point being that nobody escapes the behaviors entirely; you just learn to catch them faster.