Doing some reflecting today. For a long time, I believed good leadership meant absorbing the impact.
If the organization was under pressure, I would carry it.
If people were frustrated, I would stand in the middle.
If something needed to be fixed, I would figure it out.
If the culture was unhealthy, I convinced myself that I could take enough of the weight so other people would not have to.
I thought that was leadership. It wasn't.
It was self abandonment dressed up as responsibility.
I loved the work. I cared deeply about the people. I believed in the mission. And because I believed in all of it, I kept making myself more available to the dysfunction.
I became the buffer.
The translator.
The protector.
The one who could take the hit.
What I didn't understand then was that the body keeps score of what the mind has been trained to normalize.
Years later, I am still walking out the impact.
Not just intellectually.
In my body.
In my spirit.
In the way I respond to pressure.
In the things I now know I cannot tolerate in a leadership environment.
There are things I used to call commitment that I now recognize as overfunctioning.
There are things I called resilience that were really signs that I had stayed too long.
There are things I thought proved my leadership capacity that, in hindsight, revealed how willing I was to sacrifice myself for the work.
That experience changed me.
And honestly, I am grateful for some of what it taught me.
It taught me that competence can become a trap when everyone learns they can depend on you to absorb what they refuse to address.
It taught me that being the person who can handle everything does not mean you should.
It taught me that loyalty without boundaries can become self betrayal.
It taught me that you can love a mission and still leave the environment.
And perhaps most importantly, it taught me this:
Never sacrifice yourself for a job, no matter how much you love it.
Not your health.
Not your identity.
Not your relationships.
Not your peace.
Not your voice.
Not your ability to recognize yourself when you walk through the door at the end of the day.
Leadership should require courage.
It should require sacrifice at times.
But there is a difference between sacrifice and self destruction.
I know that difference now.
And it has fundamentally changed the way I lead.
I am less interested in being the leader who can endure the most.
I want to be the leader who can build something that does not require people to endure what should have been changed.
That is a very different kind of leadership.
And perhaps that is one of the most important lessons toxic leadership environments can teach us:
Your capacity to survive an unhealthy system is not evidence that the system was healthy.
Sometimes the lesson is not how to become stronger.
Sometimes the lesson is learning that you should never have had to be that strong in the first place.