There is a trap that catches precisely the most competent people. You set out to win the debate.<\/p>\n
You come armed with arguments. With analysis. With the kind of reasonableness that has worked for you your whole life, at school, in your previous roles, in every discussion where the facts eventually carried the day. Deep down, you believe that if you just explain it well enough, the penny will drop.<\/p>\n
But in a context where power personalises, status rarely loses to logic.<\/strong><\/p>\n Then the actual rule of the game is different from the one written on paper: whoever can most forcefully determine what is true, determines what is true. Not whoever has the best argument. Whoever has the most influence over what counts as truth in the room.<\/p>\n That is a sobering realisation for someone used to good arguments winning. It feels almost like a betrayal of your own skills to admit that persuasion is not the instrument that works here. But accepting that reality is the first step towards an approach that actually achieves something.<\/p>\n The way out is not to talk harder. The way out is to shift from content to structure. From improvisation to mandate. From the person to the role. That sounds formal, perhaps even bureaucratic, but in practice it is a form of protection: governance as civilisation.<\/p>\n Governance is the quiet agreement that decisions do not depend on someone’s mood on a given day. That roles are bigger than the personal relationships between the people who hold them. That rules apply not only to those with little power, while quietly fading for those with a great deal of it.<\/p>\n Research into organisational justice confirms why this offers such a powerful counterweight. Procedural justice, the fairness of the process by which decisions are reached, consistently proves to be one of the strongest predictors of trust in leadership, even when the outcome of a decision is unfavourable to those affected. People accept an unwelcome outcome more readily when the process was fair than a favourable outcome reached through an opaque process. That is precisely why mandate language is so effective: it shifts the conversation from what is decided to how it is decided, and the latter is far harder to manipulate than the former.<\/p>\n There is another reason this mechanism works so strongly, and it has to do with what researchers call the legitimacy of a process. A decision reached through a recognisable, repeatable process retains its validity even when the person who made it is later replaced, or when circumstances change. A decision that rests solely on the authority of one person at one moment disappears the instant that person’s attention shifts or their opinion changes. Governance is therefore not only protection against arbitrariness today. It is a form of continuity that keeps the organisation upright at the moments when individual leaders fail, change, or behave differently than expected.<\/p>\n What does that look like in practice, in language? They are the questions that call the structure back into the conversation. Not accusatory in tone, more curious, almost boring in their precision.<\/p>\n What is the mandate here? Who owns this decision? What criteria are we using to determine whether this is the right choice? Where do we record this, so we can refer back to it later?<\/p>\n If you do this well, it feels as though you are slowly returning the room to an adult footing. You drain the electricity from the duel, the emotional charge that turns every conversation into a personal contest of strength. You lay down a track the conversation has to run on, regardless of who happens to be at the wheel at that moment.<\/p>\n Psychodynamically, this is a break with the implicit family system that often emerges in these dynamics without anyone intending it. The leader as parent figure, employees as children constantly trying to guess what is safe to say or do today. That system is not only uncomfortable, it is also regressive: it pulls adult professionals back into a position of dependency that has nothing to do with their actual skills or responsibilities.<\/p>\n Mandate language puts you back in an adult position. You are a role-holder within a system, not a child asking a parent for permission. You are not asking for approval of your feeling or your perception. You are asking for a framework, for the structure within which everyone, including the leader, ought to operate.<\/p>\n This psychodynamic point deserves further attention, because it explains why so many people in this situation feel powerless, even when they are objectively capable and experienced. In a healthy organisation, everyone functions as adult to adult: equal parties who carry responsibility within their own role and can hold each other accountable for it. In a dynamic where power personalises, the structure quietly slides into something else. The leader becomes the figure who determines what is right and wrong, what is rewarded and disapproved of, often based on mood rather than consistent criteria. Employees, however senior and experienced, end up in a position that psychologically resembles that of a child constantly reading a parent’s mood to know what is safe. That is not an exaggeration. It is a recognisable pattern extensively described in the psychodynamic literature, and it explains why adult, competent people sometimes start to feel small and uncertain in this dynamic, even though they are nothing of the sort in any other part of their lives.<\/p>\n You can expect resistance when you first apply this. Governance is often ridiculed in dominant contexts. Bureaucracy, people will say. A brake on progress. Not entrepreneurial enough for the speed that is needed. But look carefully at what is actually being defended when someone resists governance: freedom without accountability. And that is precisely the system’s problem, because freedom without accountability is what sustains arbitrariness.<\/p>\n It helps to connect governance to something everyone genuinely wants, not as a smokescreen but because it is true: speed in the long run, quality that lasts, predictability that allows people to do their work well. Not because you must answer to some higher authority, but because you want to keep the conversation in a place where it cannot be manipulated by whoever happens to hold the most informal power at that moment.<\/p>\n Start small. One format for decisions, so everyone knows the minimum that needs to be recorded. One place where agreements can be found, so nobody depends on their memory or on what someone else happens to recall. One rhythm in which decision-making and execution do not get tangled, so a decision once made cannot be reopened halfway through implementation without a formal moment for doing so.<\/p>\n And then, perhaps the most important part of all: being consistent. Not dramatic. Not militant, as if waging a crusade. Simply, every time, bringing the structure back into the conversation in exactly the same way.<\/p>\n That sounds simpler than it is. Consistency is constantly tested, especially at the start, when the old patterns are still the norm and your new approach feels like a deviation, even to yourself. There will come a moment when it feels easier to go along with a quick, informal decision than to ask about the mandate. That moment is precisely the test. If you give in even once, the system learns that your request for structure is negotiable, and you lose the strength you had just built.<\/p>\n It is worth accepting this in advance, rather than hoping it will go differently. The first few times you ask about mandate or criteria, it will feel uncomfortable, perhaps even excessively formal to you. That discomfort is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. It is a sign that you are breaking a pattern that has existed long enough to feel normal. As you do it more often, not only how others respond shifts, but also how it feels to you. What seems forced at first becomes, after a number of repetitions, your new, natural way of working.<\/p>\n Take a quarter of an hour today. Pick one recurring topic that keeps shifting, a decision that keeps seeming to be remade without there ever having been a definitive moment. Write down: which table decides this, what input belongs to it, where the decision is recorded once it is made.<\/p>\n And ask yourself afterwards a simple question that says a great deal about where your energy has been going lately: where have you been trying too long to be proven right, when you actually needed to restore the mandate?<\/p>\n The difference between those two, being proven right and restoring a mandate, is the difference between a fight you wage and a structure you build. The first wears you out. The second holds, even on the days you are not in the room.<\/p>\n Notes for those who wish to read further:<\/em><\/p>\n You believe that if you just explain it well enough, the penny will drop. But where power personalises, status rarely loses to logic. Part three of a series on dealing with a leader who bends rules.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"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-5007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","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\/5007","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=5007"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5089,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5007\/revisions\/5089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n