When Leadership Feels Like a Fight
What strikes me most about toxic leadership is how quickly people begin adjusting around the environment.
You can feel it happening. People become more careful with their words, conversations tighten slightly, and ideas start arriving with a kind of hesitation as everyone quietly gauges how safe it is to say what they actually think.
Sometimes the behaviour is obvious - raised voices in meetings, someone being shut down publicly, or a moment where a contribution is dismissed in a way that makes the rest of the room fall a little quieter.
Other times it’s more subtle. A comment that carries an edge, an idea brushed aside without much interest, or a look across the table that signals disagreement.
The more I think of these kind of cultures, the more I find myself wondering what might be sitting underneath them.
Leadership can feel like a fight, particularly for people who have spent years proving themselves and pushing forward in rooms where they felt they had to earn the right to be taken seriously. When that has been the path, it’s easy for that fight to follow someone without them even noticing.
Control can start to feel safer being open, certainty can feel stronger than curiosity, and shutting something down can feel less risky than allowing a conversation to unfold in ways that might challenge your position.
From the outside those moments can look like bullying, gatekeeping or quiet attempts to undermine someone else.
From the inside they may simply feel like survival.
And when I think about that, I sometimes find myself feeling compassion for those kinds of leaders rather than judgement. Not pity, but compassion, because somewhere underneath that behaviour there is often fear.
Fear has a way of narrowing how we show up with other people. It can quietly turn leadership into something that feels like a constant fight, somewhere to defend your position rather than a space where people can think together.
The leaders who create the strongest cultures are rarely the ones who dominate the room or win the most arguments. They are the ones who stay curious a little longer, listen more carefully, and create the kind of space where other people feel able to think out loud without worrying that they are stepping onto dangerous ground.
Are these same leaders also structured, driven and determined with exacting standards? Yes. They are both curious and driven.
Leadership will always carry pressure, and fear will always show up somewhere along the way. The real question is what we do when it does.
Do we armour up and tighten our grip on the room, or do we choose the harder path of staying open enough for other people to contribute fully to the conversation?
Because it is usually in those moments of shared thinking that better ideas emerge and the work genuinely moves businesses forward.
