The Leader in the Room Changes Everything

How one person's presence can build or quietly break the people around them

I have been fortunate enough in my career to work for someone who changed the way I understood what leadership could be. I have also worked for someone who made me question everything I thought I knew about myself.

Both experiences stayed with me and shaped me in ways I am still unpacking. I think about them far more often than I think about any project I delivered or any target I hit.

They tell me something important about what leadership actually is — and what it is not.

The Leader Who Gave His Time

He was Chairman of the company, busy in every sense that word implies — decisions to make, relationships to manage, a business to build. Yet, every week, without fail, he set aside almost two hours for me.

Not a performance review. Not a briefing. Two hours of his thinking — his perception of the business, how he read the market, what he expected and why. Week after week he opened up the inside of his mind patiently and without hurry, to the younger me who was still finding her footing.

What those two hours gave me over time was something I had not expected. Clarity came first. Not just about what was expected of me but about how my leader thought, what he valued, how he made decisions. That clarity removed the guesswork that exhausts so many people at work — the constant effort of trying to figure out what the person above you actually wants. I stopped guessing and started knowing, and from knowing came confidence.

The confidence that grew under him was different from anything I knew before. It was not the fragile kind that depends on someone telling you that you are doing well. It was grounded. Built through the experience of understanding the work deeply, delivering results that met expectations, and over time earning the trust that led to full autonomy. He let me make key decisions. He stepped back and gave me the platform to execute them in my own way. He encouraged innovation, creative thinking, solutions that nobody had tried before.

When I got things right he said so — specifically and genuinely, never in the hollow way that some leaders use praise as a management technique. When things did not go as planned, which they sometimes did not, he never left the team in uncertainty. He stepped in, helped find the way through, and treated difficulty as a problem to be solved together rather than a failing to be assigned to someone.

The result was a team that was not afraid of mistakes. We learned from them. We took risks because we knew that taking a risk and falling would not define us. We brought our best because the environment made bringing our best feel both possible and worthwhile.

I have never forgotten what it felt like to work in that room. The ease of it. The energy. The sense that the work mattered and that the people doing it mattered equally. That is what a good leader builds — not just visible results, but people who are capable of far more than they knew when they arrived.

The Leader Who Took Everything

Then I met the other kind.

I have worked for narcissistic leaders — people who place themselves at the centre of every universe and organise everything around that need. I want to describe what that experience actually feels like from the inside, because it is rarely described honestly.

It feels, at first, like confusion. Directions change frequently — not because the situation demands it but because consistency would mean committing to a course that might not keep the leader at the centre of the conversation. Decisions are made and then unmade. People are asked to execute and then blamed when the execution of a bad decision produces a bad outcome. Credit flows upward to the leader. Blame flows outward to the team.

The gaslighting and scapegoating are exhausting in a way that is hard to describe unless you have experienced it. There is a particular kind of dread that comes from knowing that failure — even failure that had nothing to do with your decisions — will find its way to your door. People stop taking risks because the cost of being blamed for an outcome they could not control has become too high. They stop speaking up in meetings. They start protecting themselves instead of building things.

The triangulation was perhaps the most destructive thing I witnessed. Setting different people against each other, creating factions, cultivating different camps and then blaming those same people for not being cohesive. I watched colleagues who had genuinely liked and respected each other become suspicious and guarded. The trust that should have been the foundation of the team was systematically dismantled by the person who should have been building it.

Through all of this — the chaos, the blame, the unpredictability, the constant recalibration of who was in favour and who was not — the effect on people's mental health was real and serious. People who were confident and capable when they arrived began to question whether they had ever been either. The self-doubt accumulated so gradually that most people mistook it for their own failing rather than the environment's. I made that mistake myself.

Walking into work became something to dread rather than something to look forward to. Every day was a performance — not of good work but of careful navigation. Reading the room before speaking. Watching for signs of shifting mood. Managing up in the exhausting way that toxic environments require, where the most important thing is not the quality of your work but whether the person above you feels sufficiently central on any given day.

The chaos did not stay at work. It followed me home. It affected how I slept, how I thought, how I felt about myself in contexts that had nothing to do with the job. It almost reduced me to someone I could not recognise anymore. That is the true cost of a toxic leadership environment — and it is a cost that almost never appears in any organisational accounting.

What I Have Come to Understand

Having lived both experiences, I have come to understand something that I wish more organisations would take seriously.

Leadership is not a title. It is an environment that one person creates for everyone around them. A good leader creates an environment in which people grow beyond what they thought they were capable of. A poor leader creates an environment in which people slowly become less than they were when they arrived.

Both happen quietly over time, and both leave marks that last far longer than the tenure of the leader who created them.

Most organisations evaluate their leaders on what they deliver — revenue, growth, results. These things matter. Nobody is suggesting otherwise. What they rarely measure is what the leader costs in human terms. What happened to the people in that leader's orbit? Did they grow or did they shrink? Did they bring more of themselves to the work as the years passed, or progressively less?

A leader who delivers results while quietly dismantling the people delivering them is not a success story. The results and the cost need to be read together.

For The Person Reading This from Inside a Difficult Environment

If any of this sounds familiar — if you recognise in your own working life the slow erosion of confidence, the dread on Sunday evenings, the exhaustion of navigating a culture built around someone else's need to be central — I want to say something clearly.

What you are experiencing is not a reflection of who you are. It is a reflection of where you are. The two are not the same.

The version of you that performed brilliantly under good conditions has not disappeared. It has been waiting somewhere safer for an environment that deserves it.

Find that environment. It exists.

And when you find it, you will be surprised by how quickly everything you thought you had lost comes back.

— The Meridian Mind