The Tyrant in the Room

We’re watching authoritarian patterns everywhere right now, in institutions, governments, and organizations. Leaders consolidating power, silencing dissent, demanding loyalty over truth. The scale is staggering, and the damage is real.

The uncomfortable truth I’ve learned from coaching dominant leaders for a decade is that these patterns don’t start at scale. They start in small moments: in how you walk into a room, in the energy that shifts when you speak, in the way people learn to phrase things carefully around you, in the resigned looks, in the silence where ideas used to be.

It starts with you.

I know because I’ve been that person. The one whose intensity made rooms go quiet, whose certainty shut down debate, whose need to be right made collaboration feel dangerous. I thought my decisiveness was leadership, my directness was efficiency, and my control was strength.

But control isn’t strength. It’s fear dressed up as competence.

The dominant leader, whether running a country or running a meeting, operates from the same core belief: “I can’t trust anyone else to get this right, so I have to control everything.” When you believe that, you create exactly what you fear: teams that can’t function without you, people who comply but don’t commit, innovation that dies in silence.

At work, colleagues stopped bringing me problems because they knew I’d take over. At home, partners who loved me learned to manage around my intensity, to wait for the storm to pass. Different rooms, same damage.

Most of us don’t see ourselves as tyrants. We see ourselves as competent people surrounded by incompetence, as decisive leaders in a world that moves too slowly, as the only ones who care enough to get it right.

That story of the hero holding everything together is the same story every authoritarian tells themselves. And it’s costing us innovation, the talent that quietly leaves, relationships that end not with explosions but with exhaustion. The loneliness of being right but being alone.

I wrote “A Letter to My Exes” because I finally understood I was the problem. Not because I was a bad person, but because I was operating from a playbook that doesn’t scale: control everything, be the strongest person in the room.

What gives me hope after working with dozens of leaders through this transformation is that you can redirect your strength without losing it. You can build psychological safety without lowering your standards.

If you recognize yourself in these patterns, start by checking your impulses.

The next time you’re in a meeting and someone says something you disagree with, notice your body before you open your mouth. The tight chest. The clenched jaw. That urgency rising to jump in, to correct, to take control. That physical response is your early warning system telling you you’re about to choose being right over being connected.

Instead of jumping in, pause. Just three seconds. Then ask instead of telling: “Tell me more about that,” or “Help me understand your thinking.” As a genuine attempt to let someone finish their thought without you controlling where it goes.

These seem trivial, and yet hard to implement, especially in heated moments. I coach executives on this exact practice, and even in our sessions, they forget and jump back into old patterns, then we laugh about it because transformation isn’t linear; it’s messy.

Those small pauses, those simple questions instead of immediate corrections, that’s where psychological safety gets built, one moment at a time. Try it in your next meeting. Notice what happens when you create space rather than fill it.

The patterns we see at scale are playing out in your meetings, your relationships, the micro-moments where you choose control over curiosity, being right over being connected.

That’s where it starts. And it ends when you decide to lead differently.

If you’ve recognized the tyrant in the mirror, or know a leader who needs to see this? Share your transformation #TyrantNoMore

A Letter to My Exes - How I Learned to Lead Without Being a TYRANT, book publishing June 2026.

More soon.Roberto

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