Four stories, head to head. You pick the winner.
Each story here is a composite, pieced together from patterns that senior women across Central Ohio keep describing. None of them belongs to a member, a client or a real submission, since our inbox has not opened yet. That begins next month. For now, meet four bosses and decide which one is the worst.
Keep this guiding principle in mind. A bad boss is a pattern that repeats and drains your money, your standing or your sleep, and no amount of extra effort on your own work would fix it. Every entry carries a price tag, because the worst boss is the one who ends up costing the most.
Path One. The Credit Converter
Not once does he say anything unkind to anyone in the room. He just converts. What she calls her research gets rebranded as "the team's thinking": a point she raised in a meeting he didn't attend shows up, credited to him, in his Thursday update to the CEO. When she brings it up, he looks puzzled and a bit wounded: "We're a team." The cost: two promotion cycles in which the review panel could not point to a single thing she had accomplished, because all of it carried his name.
Path Two. The Weather System
She is brilliant on Monday and dangerous by Wednesday, and no one knows which version is arriving until she walks through the door. The team runs a side channel to warn one another and spends the first hour of every morning reading her mood instead of the business. The cost: a senior team that quit delivering bad news, which is how a $4 million forecast miss turned into a $4 million surprise. Treat that figure as illustrative. The pattern is not.
Path Three. The Sponsor Who Wasn't
Each performance review ends with him promising that her name is "next," and for three years she takes that promise at face value. In year four a peer tells her the role went to an outside hire, and that he sat on the panel without once saying her name. According to a 2025 McKinsey and LeanIn study, for every 100 men advanced to manager, only 93 women are. Someone who says nothing when it counts cannot truly be called a sponsor. He is a roadblock dressed up as encouragement.
Path Four. The Twenty-Four-Hour Clock
Around 11:40 p.m. is when he tends to send his boldest proposals. He wants her answer back before 6 a.m., when his day begins. run. Nowhere does he spell out that he expects this kind of response. He simply notices who answers. She keeps replying for two years, until a visit to her Dublin doctor turns up trouble with her sleep. Looking back, the price includes a health scare, a résumé with one title stretched over far too many years, and a habit of glancing at her phone during family dinners.
Tips from experienced executives
Senior women who have lived through all four rank them in ways that surprise the younger women they mentor. The Weather System is the most frightening and also the easiest to leave, since everyone can see it coming. "The Clock" does the most damage to health, yet it is also the easiest to end, since one plain sentence can do it: "I'm offline from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m." If something is urgent, call." The Credit Converter and the Sponsor Who Wasn't cost the most in the long run, because they stay hidden from the outside and courteous up close. Only years later does it sink in that nothing he promised ever became anything.
The verdict
What counts depends on what you decide to track. Judged by money and years of service, the quiet kinds of bosses come out ahead. Judged by what you would tell a friend to watch out for first, choose the loud one. Every woman in our Columbus circle who came through all four agrees on one point: the boss who does the most harm is the one you keep covering for.
Vote
Pick A, B, C, or D and pass your choice along to your chapter. We will publish the results next month. If you have been through an experience like this one, we would welcome your account too, with names removed. Next month's stories should come from Columbus women.