Dealing with a leader who bends rules and makes people feel small 12/12
We show that individual skills are not enough when a system organizes itself around arbitrariness. Agency without illusions means choosing clearly, protecting boundaries, and not losing yourself.
Week 12 — Agency without illusions
This is a weekly essay series about power, the undercurrent, and agency.
No diagnosis—just a clear-eyed view of patterns that damage work and people.
Read slowly; choose one move you can already make today.
If you stay long enough in a dominant dynamic, something strange happens.
You start thinking your exhaustion is a personal failure.
That you should be “stronger.”
That you should communicate “more skilfully.”
That you should set boundaries “better.”
Of course skills help. Of course choosing your words helps. But there is another truth, one that is often spoken only late: some systems organise themselves around arbitrariness. And as long as the system does not choose norm restoration, your individual skill remains patchwork.
That’s why the moves in this series were not tricks. They were adult ways of bringing reality back. Always the same direction: from person to pattern, from duel to holding environment, from shadow to light.
You may have noticed something in yourself as you read. That some chapters gave you breathing room. That others triggered resistance because they came too close to a choice. That isn’t strange. This work isn’t only about a leader. It’s also about your relationship to loyalty, fear, autonomy, and courage.
Sometimes this route works within the organisation. Then you see recovery. People dare to speak again. Decisions stabilise. Fear decreases. Quality rises.
Sometimes it doesn’t. Then the system teaches you something more painful: it cannot yet protect itself. And then your agency is not to pull harder, but to choose clearly. Not impulsively, but precisely.
Agency without illusions is: I do what I can, with allies, with facts, with frames. And I recognise in time where my influence ends.
You don’t have to win.
You don’t have to heal.
You don’t have to rescue.
Above all, you don’t have to lose yourself.
Write down one sentence today: your lower limit. A stop criterion. Not as a threat, but as truth. Share it with one reliable ally—not to create drama, but to honour your own reality.
And let this series end with an open question, one you don’t have to answer in one go: when you look back on these twelve weeks later, what do you hope you can say about yourself—not about the leader, but about your dignity and courage?
Take what fits, leave what doesn’t match your context.
If this resonates: don’t discuss it alone, discuss it in the plural.
What one step brings you closer this week to dignity and a holding environment?