There are leaders who make room. And there are leaders who take it.<\/p>\n
The difference between the two is barely noticeable at first. An agreement that turns out, in practice, to be something other than what was discussed. A decision quietly rewritten a week later, in a conversation you were not part of. A compliment delivered just a little too publicly, as if it were a chain placed around your neck: you belong, but you are also stuck.<\/p>\n
Nobody calls this a problem in the moment. It feels too small. Too harmless. You doubt your own perception before you doubt the other person.<\/p>\n
But after a while, the rhythm acquires its own music.<\/strong><\/p>\n Whoever stands close to the leader gets the benefit of the doubt. Whoever asks a question is assigned a role: difficult, slow, too principled. And the most insidious part is not what the leader does. It is what you yourself start doing afterwards. You shorten your sentences. You prepare for meetings as though you need to defend yourself before anything has even been said. Without anyone asking you out loud, you start trading ambition for caution.<\/p>\n One day you hear yourself say something you never used to say. “Never mind, it’s not worth it.” And in that moment you know: this is no longer only a conversation about work. It is a conversation about power.<\/p>\n That realisation often comes late. Not because people are foolish, but because the pattern grows so gradually that each individual step feels too small to raise an alarm over. Research on what the psychologist Albert Bandura calls moral disengagement shows how this mechanism works: people adjust through small, individually defensible steps, until the whole has become something they would never have accepted in one go. That applies not only to the leader pushing the boundaries. It applies equally to the person adapting to them.<\/p>\n In situations like this, the word narcissistic often comes up. It is a quick word, a kind of container in which you can park a complicated feeling. I am cautious with it. Not out of softness towards the leader, but out of precision for you. A label opens the door to a discussion about someone’s inner world, their intentions, their childhood, their wounds. That is tempting; it gives meaning to chaos. But it also pulls you into an arena where you have little to gain. Making a diagnosis is not your job, and it will not get you anywhere. What you can influence is the pattern.<\/p>\n That distinction is not semantic. It is strategic. It is also a distinction most people only learn to make after they have already spent some time in this situation. At first, the person seems to be the problem. He is difficult, erratic, unreliable. And that may well be true in itself. But if you stay there, you are effectively entering his arena: a debate about character, about who is right about who the other person really is. That is a debate with no winner, because no one can fully know or prove what is inside another person.<\/p>\n The pattern is something else. The pattern is what you can observe, what repeats itself, what has a measurable effect on the work and the people in it. The pattern can be discussed without your having to fathom anyone’s soul. And that is precisely why it is the place where you can actually do something.<\/p>\n In the visible layer of the organisation, the part you can see and name, you see unpredictability. Rules apply selectively. Information is dosed out, sometimes in a way that stays just out of view of whoever is not part of the inner circle. Goals shift without explanation. Success is claimed by whoever happened to be standing closest when it occurred. Mistakes are delegated to whoever was standing furthest away.<\/p>\n In the undercurrent, the part you feel before you can put it into words, something quieter and therefore more dangerous happens. People start to adapt. Not to the task, but to the unpredictability. Teams become cautious. Colleagues fall silent. Loyalty is no longer measured in expertise but in compliance.<\/p>\n Psychodynamically, this is an almost classic pattern. Where stability is absent, where people cannot rely on consistency, they look for safety elsewhere. They start pleasing. They start avoiding. They start rationalising what they see, because nuance feels too costly to hold onto. They split the world into allies and enemies, because a grey area carries too much uncertainty. And slowly, the moral compass dims. What was called a boundary violation last month is now: well, that’s just how he is.<\/p>\n The most treacherous aspect of all this is that the system confirms itself. The leader experiences pushback as an attack and responds by tightening control. The team experiences that control as a danger and grows quieter. Silence is read by the leader as agreement. And so the rule of the strongest grows into a habit, as though there had never been an alternative, as though this had always been the normal way of doing things.<\/p>\n I want to add something here that is rarely said, because it is uncomfortable to say as an outsider. People who get caught up in this pattern are rarely naive or weak. They are often exactly the people who care most, who are most invested in the work and the organisation. That very investment is what makes them vulnerable. Whoever cares nothing about the outcome simply leaves. Whoever does care stays, rationalises, hopes for improvement, and in doing so invests more and more in a dynamic that gives them less and less in return.<\/p>\n That is not a criticism. It is an observation worth making, because it removes the shame that often accompanies these situations. If you notice you stayed longer than was sensible, or accepted more than you should have, that is not a sign of weakness. It is proof that something mattered to you. The question is not whether that investment was wrong. The question is what you do with it now.<\/p>\n Nobody ever consciously chose this. And yet everyone went along with it.<\/strong><\/p>\n That is the paradox that makes this dynamic so difficult to break. There is no clear moment at which you could have said: now it changes. It is an accumulation of a thousand small moments, and each one on its own was too small to make a point of.<\/p>\n Here is the moment at which you need to make one choice that is bigger than it first appears. Will you adapt to the arbitrariness, or will you bring the work back to a framework that is bigger than one person?<\/p>\n That is not a rhetorical question meant to induce guilt. It is a factual question, because the answer determines which next steps make sense. Whoever adapts to arbitrariness teaches themselves, over time, that their own perception is unreliable. Whoever brings the work back to a framework gives both themselves and the organisation something to rely on again.<\/p>\n This text, and the series it opens, is not about fixing someone else. That is not your job, and it is usually not within your power either. It is about taking charge, without illusions about what that can achieve.<\/p>\n Sometimes that means: helping the system remember its own rules, calmly and repeatedly, until the repetition itself becomes a form of structure. Sometimes it means: finding allies, so the dynamic no longer exists only inside your own head but is shared with people who see the same thing. And sometimes it means: honestly acknowledging that you are not the one who can carry an entire organisation on your shoulders, and that this acknowledgement is not failure but a form of self-respect.<\/p>\n You do not need to fight immediately. That is a misunderstanding that stops many people in this position from doing anything: the idea that the only options are fighting or staying silent. You do not need to leave immediately either, which is the other misunderstanding. What you do need is a first step that gives reality back a little firmness.<\/p>\n That starts with something small and concrete. Take fifteen minutes and write down three situations from the past month. A date, a fact, an effect. No interpretation. No diagnosis of anyone’s character. Just: what exactly happened, and what did it cost, in time, in trust, in energy.<\/p>\n That might seem like a small gesture against something that feels large and overwhelming. But it is precisely the opposite of what the dynamic asks of you. The dynamic asks for vagueness, adaptation, reasoning your own perception away. Three factual sentences on paper do the reverse. They make reality a little harder than it has been these past months.<\/p>\n There is one more thing that makes this first step so valuable, and it has to do with how memory works under pressure. When you are constantly in an unpredictable environment, your memory distorts along with that unpredictability. You start doubting whether something was really as bad as it felt, or whether you exaggerated it. That is not a personal weakness. It is how the human mind works under chronic uncertainty: it adapts to the norm it is being shown, even when that norm is unreasonable. A written, factual record works against that as an anchor point. It is not primarily meant as evidence for a formal procedure, though it may become that later. It is meant first to help you remember what you actually observed, before the dynamic makes you doubt it again.<\/p>\n And ask yourself, at the end of that page, one quiet question, not to judge yourself but to gain clarity: where have you already started shrinking, when nobody ever asked you to out loud?<\/p>\n The answer to that question is the starting point for everything that follows. Not because it solves anything immediately, but because it is the first time in a while that you are looking at reality without distortion. From there, every next step, however small, is a step you choose yourself, rather than one the dynamic chooses for you.<\/p>\n Notes for those who wish to read further:<\/em><\/p>\n An agreement that turns out different in practice. A decision rewritten in a conversation you weren’t part of. That is how it starts, almost invisibly. The first instalment in a series about dealing with a leader who bends rules and makes people feel small.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1650,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,96,81],"tags":[94,89,99,95],"class_list":["post-5003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-dominant-leadership-series","category-english","tag-dominance","tag-english","tag-narcism","tag-toxic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5003"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5093,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5003\/revisions\/5093"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n