Bad Days Leadership Podcast

Every leader has a story they still cringe about. The decision that blew up. The hire that cost them a year. The thing they said in a meeting that they would give anything to take back. Bad Days Leadership is the show where those stories get told out loud, so the rest of us can learn from them.

The Show

What Bad Days Leadership is about.

The worst days make the best teachers.

Most leadership content shows you the highlight reel. The launch that worked. The quarter that beat projections. The quote that looked great on a graphic. This show is about the other days.

Bad Days Leadership pulls back the curtain on the messy, honest, and occasionally hilarious side of leading people. Every episode, Dr. Matt Paden sits down with a leader who is willing to talk about the moments that did not go in the social media feed. The decisions they regret. The rooms they misread. The feedback they waited too long to give, or gave badly. The failures they carried a lot longer than they should have.

The point is not to shame anybody, including the versions of ourselves we used to be. The point is that leaders are lifelong learners, and the fastest learning almost always happens on the days that hurt.

If you are in the middle of a bad day right now, you are in good company.

Who This Show Is For

Made for leaders who are still figuring it out.

(Aka all of us.)

New and emerging leaders

You got promoted because you were good at the work. Nobody told you that leading the work is a completely different job.

People who went from teammate to boss

The jump from being on the team to leading the team is the hardest transition in leadership, and almost nobody gets trained for it.

Seasoned leaders who want the truth

You have been doing this a while. You also know how few people in your life will tell you what you actually need to hear.

Anyone having a hard season

Every guest on this show has been where you are. Most of them have been somewhere worse.

What To Expect

Conversations. Honest stories. Something you can use tomorrow.

Every episode follows the same rhythm. Matt asks a guest to take us back to a moment they still cringe about, and then the two of them dig into what it taught them.

Along the way, most guests answer the same handful of questions. What did you used to think was great leadership, before you knew better? What is a red flag you can spot instantly now that you would have missed early in your career? What would you tell a new leader about failure? The answers are never the same twice because there is always something new to learn.

Recurring themes include:

Failure and what to do the morning after
Feedback, and why most of it lands wrong
The jump from doing the work to leading the people doing it
Burnout, grit, and the difference between quitting and a necessary ending
Building teams where people will actually tell you the truth
Character, humility, and the slow drift nobody notices

Your Host

About your host, Dr. Matt Paden.

Dr. Matt Paden has spent his career around leaders. Twenty two years in higher education, years teaching in a master's in leadership program, and now leading Great Days Leadership, where he works with organizations on the parts of leadership that do not fit neatly into a training module.

He is the co-author of The Core, written with his longtime mentor Dr. Ken Jones, with a foreword by Dr. John Delony. The book makes an argument that runs underneath every episode of this show: leadership is not primarily about skills. It starts with who a leader is, and why they lead in the first place.

Matt has a particular passion for people who have just made the jump from being on the team to leading the team, which is why Great Days Leadership built a program specifically for that transition. He also has a standing belief that the hardest leadership principle to practice is the simplest one to say. Lead with your ears.

He started this show because he got tired of leadership conversations that only covered the wins. His guests are people he knows, respects, and trusts to tell the truth about the days that did not go well.