Three Ways to Confront the Leader Everyone Fears
You’ve got one of these leaders in your company. High-power, dominant, brilliant at what they do. They also intimidate, micromanage, and leave people afraid to speak up. You know who I mean. You’ve probably been avoiding them for a while now.
But tolerating this has a cost: your best people leave first, and they don’t always tell you why. The ones who stay stop bringing you their real thinking. And the damage doesn’t show up as one big incident; it shows up as a slow leak nobody wants to name out loud.
Naming it is the only thing that works. Here are three approaches:
Give them a mirror. Use DiSC, use the Enneagram, whatever gets you a shared language for what’s actually happening. This isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a way to describe the pattern without it sounding like an attack, so the conversation can actually happen. They’ll most likely be a high “D” in the DiSC or an Enneagram type 8.
Have the courage to speak up. Stop working around them. Stop running assertiveness workshops, how-to-speak-with-authority sessions, or manage-up training for everyone else while the person causing the problem never hears a word about their controlling patterns. That’s backward, and it doesn’t work. Have the courage to call them out and say it straight: here’s the pattern, here’s what has to change. Then stop talking and let them face the mirror. This works because they’re usually the ones calling the shots; when someone does it to them, they pay attention.
Bring in someone from outside. Not someone too close to them, and not someone they can charm or outrank. Someone who can hold the mirror steady and isn’t afraid of what they’ll see reflected.
I’ve seen this happen many times, but when we take the courage to put a mirror in front of them and call out what they clearly need to hear, they are the ones who will listen. And if they are honest, they’ll reveal how exhausted they are of holding the ship afloat, making all the decisions, and feeling lonely at the top. They are tired of not being able to trust anyone else to get things right. They are stuck in a trap they have built for themselves, and they want out.
Two people emailed me after reading my book. Both said the same thing: “I didn’t realize you were describing me.” Both recognized themselves the moment somebody put it in front of them plainly.
Most organizations already know who this leader is. They just haven’t had the conversation, because the hard part isn’t identifying them. It’s deciding to stop working around them.
Roberto
A Letter to My Exes: How I Learned to Lead Without Being a Tyrant, available on Amazon.
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