There is a moment, somewhere between irritation and exhaustion, when you think: now I am going to say it. No more beating around the bush. No more diplomacy. Just out loud. You are unreliable. You manipulate. You don’t care about rules. Sometimes even: you are a narcissist.<\/p>\n
It sounds like courage. And honestly, it can feel like relief. As if you are finally naming what everyone already sees but nobody says out loud.<\/p>\n
But right at that point, a side path often opens that you do not want to walk down.<\/strong><\/p>\n The discussion shifts. No longer towards what is happening, but towards who you are. No longer towards the effect on the work, but towards your tone. No longer towards the agreement that was not honoured, but towards your intention in raising it. And before you know it, you are no longer standing for a standard, but for your own emotion, which has now become the subject of the conversation instead of a side issue.<\/p>\n This is not a coincidence. It is a recognisable mechanism. The leader who plays the rule of the strongest rarely depends on better arguments to win. He depends on a different skill: making the conversation revolve around his own arena. In that arena, invisible rules apply. Whoever doubts, loses. Whoever adds nuance, is weak. Whoever offers criticism, has a problem of their own. These are rules that are never spoken aloud, yet they function as the actual rules of every conversation.<\/p>\n Research into organisational justice draws a distinction that is directly relevant here: the difference between procedural justice, the fairness of the process by which decisions are made, and interpersonal judgement, the assessment of someone’s character or behaviour as a person. Researchers consistently show that procedural fairness is evaluated as a separate, traceable standard, whereas character judgements remain subjective and difficult to verify. In other words: a conversation about process is a conversation you can have on the basis of facts. A conversation about character is a conversation that can always be bounced back as opinion against opinion.<\/p>\n That is why the subtle but powerful move is this: name the pattern, not the person.<\/p>\n Pattern language is not soft. It is precise.<\/strong><\/p>\n It says: this does not happen once, but repeatedly. This is not merely annoying, but disruptive. This is not about taste, but about effect. And above all: this affects the task, the work, the people who depend on it.<\/p>\n Imagine a team makes a decision on Monday, implements it on Wednesday, and is told on Friday that the decision was actually different, because a conversation took place in between that nobody on the team was part of. Once, that could be a misunderstanding. Three times, it becomes a rhythm. After six times, it becomes culture. People start delaying implementation. They postpone decisions. They stop investing in clarity, because they have learned that investing in clarity does not pay off in this environment.<\/p>\n The pattern that emerges here has a name in organisational behaviour research: learned helplessness on a small scale. Not the clinical form known from psychology, but a functional variant: people learn that their effort has no influence on the outcome, and adjust their behaviour accordingly by investing less. It is a rational adaptation to an irrational environment, and precisely for that reason so difficult to break without the environment itself changing.<\/p>\n If you then say: “You always reverse everything,” a duel over words begins. Always? Never before? You, me? You lose time, you lose energy, and you lose the support of bystanders who have no desire to take sides in a personal fight that is none of their concern.<\/p>\n If instead you say: “We are seeing a recurring pattern where decisions made by the team are later revised individually; that makes execution unsafe and ownership impossible,” it suddenly becomes discussable. Not as an attack, but as an observation. Not as a character judgement, but as a systemic observation that everyone in the room can check against the facts.<\/p>\n Psychodynamically, this does something important as well. Pattern language reduces shame, and shame is precisely the emotion that feeds the dynamic. A dominant leader is often triggered by loss of face. A direct character attack provokes a defensive response: denial, counterattack, turning the tables so that you suddenly become the attacker. Pattern language leaves less room to frame you as the problem, because the conversation is no longer about you. And it helps others join in without having to take a side that puts them personally at risk.<\/p>\n A conversation about behaviour you often will not win. A conversation about effect, you can.<\/strong><\/p>\n There is a reason this difference plays out so strongly, and it has to do with how people respond to criticism. Research into what psychologists call face-threatening acts, behaviours that threaten someone’s social status or self-image, shows that direct criticism of the person almost automatically triggers a defensive response, even in people who consider themselves reasonable. That is not a matter of good or bad intentions. It is how the human brain responds to a threat to status. Pattern language bypasses that reflex, not because it is less true, but because it asks a different question: not who is right about who you are, but what works and what does not for the task you share.<\/p>\n This does not require softening your truth, by the way. It requires packaging it differently, in a way that actually works rather than one that feels liberating but ultimately changes nothing. That distinction matters, because many people in this situation feel that softer language is the same as giving in, a form of weakness. It is the opposite. It is the language that actually has a chance of being heard, rather than the language that mainly discharges your own frustration without changing anything about the situation that caused it.<\/p>\n There is another layer beneath all this worth drawing out. When you constantly think and speak about the leader in character terms, you start living in those terms yourself too. You become the person who has to “deal with that narcissist,” rather than the professional who safeguards a process. That is a subtle but important difference in identity. The first position makes you dependent on what the other person does or does not do. The second gives you a role that exists independently of the other person, a role you can shape yourself, regardless of how the leader behaves on any given day.<\/p>\n That may be the deepest reason pattern language works, beyond the tactical advantages described above. It does not only change how the other person hears you. It changes how you position yourself in relation to the situation. You are no longer the opponent of a person, with all the emotional weight that carries, but the guardian of an agreement, with all the calm that brings.<\/p>\n Try it as a metronome. One sentence, calmly repeated, at the moments it matters. Not to win in the moment, but to keep the real subject in the room, again and again, until it can no longer be waved away as an incident.<\/p>\n That takes patience, and patience is exactly what is difficult when you are already exhausted by the dynamic. But the alternative, the direct character attack that feels liberating, costs you more in the end. It costs you the support of bystanders. It costs you the credibility of your own position. And it hands the leader exactly the weapon he needs to shift the conversation from his behaviour to your tone.<\/p>\n Take ten minutes and write down your pattern sentence. As factually as possible. Not exaggerated, not softened. So that you can say it out loud without your voice betraying the struggle you are actually trying to avoid. The difference between a good and a less good pattern sentence often lies in leaving out words like “always” and “never,” which invite a he-said-she-said debate, and adding a concrete effect, which is harder to deny than a general complaint.<\/p>\n It can help to say your pattern sentence out loud to someone uninvolved in the situation first, before using it in the conversation that actually matters. Not to get feedback on the wording, though that can be useful too, but to experience how it feels to speak the sentence without the emotional charge that normally accompanies standing in front of the leader themselves. That exercise alone often changes how solid the sentence feels when it really counts.<\/p>\n And ask yourself afterwards, almost in passing, something sharper than it sounds at first: what truth have you been shrinking down by calling it “a matter of style,” when it is actually “a matter of structure”?<\/p>\n That distinction, between style and structure, is exactly the distinction this whole move turns on. Style is an opinion. Structure is a fact that can be checked. And only the latter gives you something to build on.<\/p>\n Notes for those who wish to read further:<\/em><\/p>\n You’re unreliable. You manipulate. It sounds like relief to finally say it. But right at that moment, the conversation shifts from what is happening to who you are. Part two of a series on dealing with a leader who bends rules.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1650,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,96],"tags":[94,89,99,95],"class_list":["post-5005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-dominant-leadership-series","tag-dominance","tag-english","tag-narcism","tag-toxic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005","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=5005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5091,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions\/5091"}],"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=5005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n