The Ben Mulroney Show - How to survive a toxic boss!

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

GUEST: Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett / author of " I Wish I'd Quit Sooner: Practical Strategies for Navigating and Escaping a Toxic Boss" If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Shop in store or at metro.com. Welcome to the first day of the rest of your lives. It is Monday the 19th of January 2026. I'm the host of the Ben Mulroney show, Ben Mulroney, and I'm here with the team. Please welcome intrepid producer Mike Droulet. Oh, la, signor. No, that's San Diego's move.

What an intro. It's so cool in this building that I'm speaking different languages. Well, for Santiago, we would just be the language. Santiago, welcome. Thank you, Ben. Amy, how are you? I'm freezing. Yeah, well, it was a little cold upstairs today.

A little bit. This building is just... They just haven't fixed the heat for about a month and a half. I'm not complaining. I could, but I'm not. We complain to each other. Yeah, we complain to each other. But we stay, you know what?

We sit there, we do our work. We get it done. It's the first day of the rest of my life. I'm excellent. Should that be how I start every show? Yes. Yeah. Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.

There you go. Well, welcome to the first show of the rest of your life because technically your day probably started already. I guess, yeah. But welcome. Welcome. And thank you so much for joining us here on the show. And look, for us, we're optimistic, we're upbeat. I very much love Mondays because I like my job. I love my job. I've actually said that out loud. I've said it out loud to this guy over here, to Amy. I said, I love doing this show. But for a lot of people right now that today, they are not feeling it, even if they do love their job. Because today's Blue Monday, considered to be, by some, the most of the most,

depressing day of the year. It's a combination of lack of sunlight and also how a lot of bills are now due from Christmas. And I'm sure some other factors, and when you put it all together, they've just decided calculus-wise, it's the most depressing day of the year. I don't necessarily

feel it because I'm living in denial. Me too. Those bills will get paid. But the weather is a big problem for a lot of people, right? In Winnipeg today, it is minus 21. In Edmonton, it's minus eight. Calgary has the benefit of the Chinook. It's minus one. And Toronto, they claim it's

minus six. It feels colder than minus six today. It feels really cold. It's not minus six. It's going to be minus 20 in a few days. Is it really? Again. Yeah, it's going back down. Going to feel like minus 30. Oh, serenity now. But that's just, you know, July and what Yeah. Well, how about how about Kamchakta, Russia, in the east? Everything is about perspective, everybody. Mine is one in Calgary, minus six in Toronto. Spend a day or two in Kamchakta. It's in Russia's far east, and it has been facing the heaviest snowfall in 130 years.

When I say burying towns and crippling daily life, that's the only way to say it. That's not hyperbole. That's not exaggeration. That's not me adding a little zing to get you interested or curious. That's exactly what it is. There are snow drifts of up to 40 feet. To go along with minus 24 Celsius temperatures. 40 feet.

It looks like the day after tomorrow. It does. Yeah. The videos I've seen, I don't know how a city, I don't know how they function. Like there are videos of streets lined with 15 feet of snow on either side. And yet, the streets are plowed well enough for the cars to drive. Yes. And we've got...

Somebody from Toronto needs to just spend a couple of days as Kamchatta to find out how they're doing things. Is it near Mongolia? Where's Kamchakta? It's right. It's that peninsula in the far east of Russia that you see sort of hanging down. Near Vladivostok? Yes. Yes. All right. Exactly.

Yeah. Go check the videos out. It is absolutely insane. There's one shot of a main street with snow on either side, but the roads are pristine. Part of me thinks that when they built that road, they heated it. No, no, because then you see... Is that possible?

Well, you see other videos. You see other videos of the same city, very well-traveled roads, and there's snow, like, you can see the treadmarks of the tires, but there's still snow on the road. There's no snow, no snow on this one street, and it's like in front of what looks like a government building. So part of me thinks that they did that,

for that one place. Kamchakta. Kamchakta. Khamchakta. Hey, one of the conversations we have been having ever since Mark Carney went to China

is on the EV dynamic, right? The fact that we've opened the door to 49,000 EVs made in China. And what that means, we're going to be talking about over the course of the day.

Here's what the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, said about what he calls spy cars. You know, when you get on your cell phone, it's the Chinese that are going to be listening to your, and I'm not making this stuff up, they're going to be listening to your telephone conversation. I find it ironic. I find it ironic that the prime minister is using a burner phone and all the staff over in China. But we're making a deal. It's Huawei 2.0 to come back into Canada and we get nothing but potential job losses. Yeah, listen, there's a lot to talk about.

And I think there's some, I think there's some misinformation or some worry that may be a little too early. But that is definitely what is on a lot of people's minds. The Premier of Ontario said what a lot of people are worried about. Earlier in the day on the Brad Smith show on 680 Toronto, 640, 640, 640 Toronto. Jesus, Ben, come on, it's Monday. David Shipley, the CEO of Boceran security. He's a cybersecurity expert. he sort of explained how EVs can be turned into quote unquote spy cars.

So first of all, any of these EVs that have more cameras on them than a football game can easily be converted into a spy machine. In some cases, you can have dozens of these cameras, particularly depending on how much they rely on cameras over technology such as LIDAR with them. And they're often sold as features, right? So many of these Teslas on the road have these 360-degree degrees. cameras and they've been hilariously in a variety of scenarios. In fact, one guy was caught nude in his own garage. He was running out for a snack by the camera. It turns out the lots of people could see it. And we know the Chinese are thinking about this because they ban Teslas

when they do their annual Communist Party meeting in China. They're like, we don't want American spy cars. Yeah, look, so I've decided I'm going to be patient on this one. I'm going to be before I condemn Mark Carney for signing away the Canadian automotive industry. You know, it's important to note that the language that was used doesn't tell us whether the cars that are going to come over are Chinese EVs or EVs made in China. And that's two different things. Chinese EVs is B.D. It's a show me. It's a whole bunch of companies that are owned at least partially by the Communist Party.

And the other is something like Tesla, like other countries that own those factories and make those cars and ship those. They do say it's Chinese EVs, so I would lean towards the former, but the latter is possible. Yeah. So it's the difference between an iPhone made in China and everything else that's made in China. And I would also say this to the Premier of Ontario, whom I respect greatly. People have been, anybody who has TikTok on their phone, and it has TikTok on their phone, has opened their phone up and their life up, their entire life up, to the Communist Party of China. I asked a great friend of mine years ago

when this debate was first coming up, is TikTok a security threat in terms of the technology that we use? And he said, absolutely, absolutely it is. Oh, gosh. So let's talk about what, let's use his last clip from David Shipley on what the Chinese are looking for, possibly.

If you're doing any kind of leading research these days in any field, so what China does is they have a five-year economic plan. They have a shopping list of all the things they need to learn about. And then they will go and acquire it by any means necessary to advance the interest of their state. Canada had its clock cleaned when our national research council back in the 2010s, I don't know how to pronounce that decade properly, in the 2010s, had billions of dollars of Canadian intellectual property stolen. And then they came back and signed

an agreement with us that said, we won't steal from you again. Well, yeah, when I ate the last cookie out of the cookie jar from mom, I would make the same promise that I wouldn't raid the cookie Joe, there's no point. And then they came back. Yeah. So look, listen, we had problems with China before this deal was signed and we're going to have problems with China after this deal was signed. But after this deal was signed, our canola farmers found their lives and their livelihood less under pressure because 100% tariff went down to about 15. That in and of itself is a win. Like I said, I'm not ready to say whether this deal is a home run or a strikeout. But I do know that from Saskatchewan, Alberta's perspective, today is better than last week, and so credit

where credit is due. Coming up, what is the difference between a toxic boss and just a bad boss, and how do you deal with it? We've got a conversation with Dr. Laura Hamley, love it next. What does top talent really want? Do our tax research tools make us seem outdated? What does top talent really want? How can we stop losing people to our competitors? What does top talent really want to? What if new grads don't want to work like it's nice? With BlueJ, you can give your people the tools they need to succeed. Tools that make it possible to go from tax question to client comms in minutes. Get better answers to tough questions.

BlueJ. AI for tax experts. Cookies or crackers for just one 98 each. Shop in store and online until January 21st. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of your day with us. And I want to say welcome wherever we find you. We are a radio show, but we're also a podcast.

We're also on the IHeart Radio streaming app. We're also all over social media and YouTube. We want to find you where you are so that we can grow this community on all different platforms. We appreciate you. All right. One of the best and funniest movies in my recent memory is horrible bosses. Three great friends with three horrible bosses each, and they decide that the best path forward for them is to murder their bosses. Now, I don't advocate that.

And I think there's probably a more constructive path forward if you find yourself with a horrible boss. And that's what we're going to discuss next with our next guest, Dr. Laura Hambrely, Love It. She's the author of I Wish I'd Quit Sooner, Practical Strategies for Navigating a Toxic Boss. Dr. Laura, thank you so much for being here. It's my pleasure, Ben. Thanks for having me. So I think we should probably level set because in a lot of the conversations I have on this show, you know, people have different points of view and points of reference.

toxic and horrible for one person is just a bad situation for another. So what is the difference between having a difficult boss and a horrible toxic boss? That is a good question and I feel like the word toxic can be overused and we need to be careful about that because a truly toxic boss harms your mental well-being, your physical health and ultimately will derail your career the longer you stay. And a toxic boss should never have been put into a people leadership role. And they will not become a better people leader simply because they don't think anything needs improvement with them.

They're not open to self-insight and growth. Whereas a difficult boss, there are plenty of them. In my 25 years in organizational psychology, I've worked with a lot of them. They are open to getting better and they don't want to cause harm to people. And they're just learning the ropes and they're frustrating. to work with that they can improve and that's the biggest difference you can learn to navigate a difficult boss but not a toxic boss in the long term so so i guess one of the key distinctions is a a difficult boss doesn't know what they don't know they don't know that what they're doing

is causing harm they don't know that the the the way that they are are leading you isn't optimal and they don't so they don't know those things but were they to come into contact with that information they would be open to changing their style and you're saying a toxic boss probably knows that they're causing harm and doesn't care yeah they may or may not realize the impact but they don't care but you nailed it ben it's about a lack of empathy and narcissism runs through a lot of them as well so they don't feel that natural empathy and it's all about themselves so very very egotistical and people ask me dr laura do you think i'm a toxic boss and i say no because it's

if you ask the question, you're not. A toxic boss would never ask that question, whereas a difficult boss does sometimes ask that question. Okay, so let's put ourselves into the shoes of the employee. The employee is not going to know whether they have a difficult boss or a toxic boss until certain, I don't know, certain clues are revealed or certain questions are asked, correct? Yeah, over time it tends to get worse, and the behaviors harm you, and they get worse. worse over time is the best way to put it. Yeah. And so, okay, so now you find yourself knowing, at least in your heart, that you're dealing

with a toxic boss. What can an employee do? Well, an employee has six options, essentially. So people often feel like they're trapped in a cage. That's why I have a bird cage on the front of I wish I'd quit sooner, because they feel stuck and it's usually financial. They can't leave because they're financially tied in and they're dependent. on that role in that organization.

But people actually have six options in total, which I go through in the book, because people need to get back into the driver's seat of their career and realize there are different things that you can do. You have choices to make in the scenario. And before we jump into those, let's stick with the boss for a second. You know, writ large, we talked about narcissism. We talked about a lack of empathy. But practically, what are some of the boss?

some of the traits that govern the activity of a toxic boss? Sure. So we interviewed toxic boss survivors, people who had left a toxic boss in North America, and we did surveys across North America and had hundreds of behaviors and stories, and I had to categorize them in a way that was memorable and easy for people to understand what was happening.

So that's where the eight personas of a toxic boss come in, So, for example, one of them is the great divider. So they're the type of toxic boss that love to pit people against each other on the team. And it's nasty because people who are once your colleagues and friends, they're all of a sudden on the other side. So there's the in-group and the out-group. And it's really quite toxic. It destroys the trust on the team.

That's one example. Do you want any more? Well, you know what? Why don't we save those for the next segment? but because I find I find each one of those archetypes fascinating but I guess look because we talked about the movie horrible bosses where they decide okay we're going to kill our toxic bosses and and then there's then there's the far less dramatic I'm going to quit option there have to be some there have to be some options to empower employees to take control and still stay at the company yeah so there's filing a complaint with your human resources and I go into that in detail because that can go two different ways. It can work out or it could potentially make things worse depending on the organization and how much influence HR has.

And whether the toxic boss is higher level than HR, it's really hard for HR to deal with because they're not at the same level. So that complaint can end up not going the way you want it to. So I always encourage doing your legwork, doing your homework before going that direction. but it is one direction out of the six options. Yeah. And, you know, when you said, you know, things could get worse, that would be the worst outcome, I have to believe.

Like you're living in a, you're dreading going to work every single day because you have to deal with this person that just sucks the life out of you, it makes you doubt your life choices, it makes you doubt yourself and probably has an impact on your mental health. And then you try to take steps to make that better and it only gets worse. I can't even imagine what that would be like for an employee. It's horrible, and there's a lot of high achievers that fall prey to a toxic boss. So they work hard, like you said, Ben.

They'll double down on their effort to prove themselves, and they think that will win over the toxic boss. And in fact, it typically doesn't. Things tend to erode after that and get worse for them. How does someone who has these toxic traits rise through a company? You would think that somebody at some point would know, notice this is not a good dude and do something about it. The fact that they can rise to those levels is, I mean, besides a startup where the toxic

person is the founder of the company, which I understand and I've experienced firsthand. But how does that, like what are people not seeing in that toxic person that allows for them to rise through the ranks? Well, what they're seeing is the one side that that person, puts forward to the higher-ups, which is they're good at convincing, their influencers, they're charismatic, they're confident, and they're good at managing up. And narcissism runs through a lot of toxic bosses. So they have this big, grandiose sense of self, and the higher-ups can think,

okay, that's good, that's confidence. We need that to make money here or to grow our company. That's great. that what they're missing is what's the impact on people around this person. And they're not curious enough to ask those questions and get the data on how is this person doing as a people leader? Yeah, yeah. Well, listen, don't go anywhere, Dr. Laura, because when we come back, we're going to break down the eight toxic boss personas because people listening at home are saying to themselves, I wonder if the boss that I can't stand isn't just a bad boss, but a toxic one.

So we're going to delve into that when we come back right here on the Ben Mulroney Show. Well, the Ben Mulroney Show marches on. Very glad to have Dr. Laura Hambly love it sticking around with us. We're talking horrible bosses and the difference between a bad boss and a toxic boss. And a lot of people, Dr. Laura, have been listening with bated breath, hoping that you were going to break down so the archetypes that make up these bad bosses, you know, the buckets that they fall into because some people are genuinely wondering, Maybe my radar's off.

Maybe I'm not getting this person. But in the case of a toxic boss, there probably isn't that much to get. They're just out there to suck the life out of you. And before we jump in the archetypes, you know, let's talk about burnout. This could make somebody need to take mental health day after mental health day. The productivity of the company could suffer. And it's probably in the best interest of the company largely and generally to not want these people inside their organization. Amazing days is on now with your local Metro.

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Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Yeah, it's costing billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions of dollars across North America in the cost of turnover as a result of toxic bosses' turnover and productivity losses are the two huge. costs. That's interesting. You know, but that's where sort of like the data would help if a company's wondering like, why do I have such high turnover in this one department? They might want to look at the person leading the department. Yeah, that's what I say. Curiosity. If you have people leaving a certain boss one after the other, you should be treating that data like

gold and alarm bells going off, not just delegating it to HR to check off a box that they did an exit interview, they need to be really understanding why and what's going on. All right. Well, we don't have a lot of time and we've got a lot of archetypes to go through. So let's start with the first one, the micromanager. Well, I call it the control freak. So I'd say difficult bosses. Micromanagement is common because when you become a leader at first,

delegation can be a tough thing to get used to. So micromanagement is common. It's not great, but it's not terrible. compared to the control freak, which is micromanagement on steroids. So they're micromanaging everything, and you feel like you have a constant eye on you, and you're walking on egg shells. It's brutal. Yeah.

I work at a startup, and the CEO is so good. He can do everybody's jobs. That's how good he is, but he knew what to look for in the people he hired and trusted them to do it. And it's amazing. I don't know, a single person who works at the company that doesn't love being there. We'll go right back to your personas. Yeah, okay. So I'll talk about the self-serving egomaniac is one of them, all about themselves.

They'll climb the ladder over people, no problem. They'll throw you under the bus, take credit for your work. Then the control freak, we talked about already. The dishonest manipulator is all about lies. Everything's a lie, and it's a matrix of lies, which makes it really, really hard to navigate. Hard to navigate. Hard to navigate, but I would assume if somebody's leaving a trail of lies, then chronicling those lies and bringing them to the appropriate people within the organization should extract justice. It should, but that can take time.

And again, we talked earlier, this person is really good at managing up. They're good at manipulating and putting on a false face because they usually have a healthy dose of narcissism. Yeah, yeah. All right, back to the archetypes. Yeah, no doubt. The unethical corruptor. So that kind of goes without saying they're stealing money, they're fudging data, they're changing numbers, that sort of thing. The abusive A-hole, that's the one that you think of when you think of a terrible boss.

So the yelling, screaming, harassing, bullying type. And then the disordered personalities, the narcissist and the sociopath. We talked about narcissism. Sociopathy is absolute lack of empathy and compassion. and actually taking joy and causing other people pain. So that's really scary. Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

And it's a gas lighter. Gaslighter makes you doubt your sanity. They make you doubt your memory. They make you question your ability to do your job. I mean, to me, I guess when you're in it, right? It's sort of like an abusive relationship. You don't necessarily know how messed up it is until you take a step back from it or somebody with a better perspective can tell you,

yet what you're going through is not right. Because that abusive gaslighting relationship, it can become normalized. And you as somebody who's just trying to get along, you're going to do your best to figure a way to work with that. And next thing you know, you're in one way, shape, or form, you're used to it. Yeah, I mean, you can be,

and you can become very complacent. You lose your confidence, and you lose your confidence, and you lose your energy. So people say the best time to look for a job is when you're working, yes, and no, it's not if you've lost your energy and your confidence and you're feeling depleted and you don't have that ability to shine in job interviews. Yeah. So would you say just generally, I know we've gone through a lot of archetypes, but is there a common

thread for the employee, like a common first step they should be taking to figure their way out of a situation like this? Well, I mean, I published this book to give people a guide, right, a structured way of looking at what am I dealing with? What harm is it causing me? So I have checklists and everything around. Is it causing you mental harm? How is it affecting your anxiety? Is it causing depression?

Is it causing lack of confidence? Is it causing sleep disruption? And then is it causing physical problems? So we see people with hypertension as a result with gut issues, with muscle strain. So we go through all of that. What's it causing you? And then what are the options that you have in front of you? You have the six options.

And then beyond that, how do you actually recover? And then I have a chapter on how you can avoid working for a toxic boss in your future. So what to look out for in the future. And is there, you know, is there safety in numbers? Or is there a danger in sharing your concerns about the boss with your colleagues? I think you have to be careful. that you can trust who you're sharing with. But what I've seen work well is when you do have colleagues,

you can trust oftentimes the toxic boss is harming multiple people. So then you have a little support group inside the organization. And in my interviews, I definitely talk to people like that that said when our toxic boss was finally let go, it was like a window opened and the negative energy left for all of us. And all of us could breathe again. And they had been talking about it as a cohort, but they had no control.

So I see it go either way. Some people get quite isolated because they don't have anyone to talk to. Yeah. And I can imagine if you don't believe you can trust your boss, I don't know that you would necessarily believe that you can trust your colleagues. And so people might sort of self-isolate. But if they could find a way to band together and complain together, that show of force might be more compelling to say HR or whomever is above

that toxic boss to make that change than if it's just one person complaining. Yeah, there's a case in my city where multiple people have left and had major stress leaves and medical leaves and traumas from a toxic boss. And I've encouraged them to come forward as a group because this person is so charismatic and so that so many people don't see through it. And I think that numbers do make a difference. But it takes a lot of courage, right? People don't want to relive the trauma, like bring it up all over again in a legal claim necessarily.

Yeah. Well, Dr. Laura Hambly, love it. The book is called I Wish I Quit Sooner. Practical Strategies for Navigating a Toxic Boss. Thank you so much for this conversation. Like I said, I'm sure there are people listening right now saying, she's talking about me. She's talking about me. Is she talking about you?

No, I don't. Well, first of all, I've never had anybody who would view me as a boss. Like, I've worked on teams where I'm the senior person on a team. But listen, I've only had great bosses and problematic sort of superior is beyond that boss. And I've been very lucky to have great bosses most of my career. Yeah, that's all I've got to say about that. How about you? I've had bosses that were problematic for others, but not me, if that makes any sense.

Yep. One of my first ever news directors when I got into this industry would be, he would start, he would yell, openly scream at people in the office. I never did anything that required him to yell at me. So that was, I didn't have a problem with me because I guess I lucked out. But there were certain people that he just went after. Yeah. And, you know, at one point I realized that people were treating, would treat me differently than others.

Because in a lot of cases, I was there longer than anybody. I had seniority over, even the people above me on the org chart. Okay. But I realize if I could help others, you know, because of that leverage I might have, I would. Amazing days is on now with your local Metro. Save big on amazing items, like selected varieties of Campbell's broth for only 125 each. And fresh, boneless, skinless chicken breast value packs for just 488 per pound. Only till January 21st.

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