They Were Right. They Were Also Wrong.

There is a sentence I have carried for more than two decades. A manager said it in a one-on-one I had walked into expecting something routine: I’m the one who makes stars here, and trust me, you’re never going to be one of them. The room did not change. He moved on to the next item on his agenda. I spent the rest of that meeting trying to decide if the sentence had been a statement or a threat.

It was, I came to understand, both. But telling this story honestly means saying something first.

I Made It Easy

In those early years, I was not easy to manage. I was confident to the point of abrasion, outspoken in ways that shut down rooms rather than opened them, and privately certain that my approach was the only defensible one. I argued past the moment when arguing stopped being useful. I had no patience for process that felt like bureaucracy, which at that stage in my career covered most process. I took feedback badly and delivered criticism in ways that were more accurate than they were kind. Some of what was said about me in those years was entirely fair. Looking at it now, some of it was understatement.

I say this first because what follows is not a grievance. It is something more complicated – a reckoning with the fact that my own behaviour gave certain managers a handhold, and that what they did with that handhold was not development. It was something that looked like management from a distance and felt, from the inside, like being slowly persuaded that you were the problem and that the problem was unfixable.

Seven Sentences

Some of what was said to me during those years was blunt, specific, and deserved. Some of it was not. The seven sentences below fall into the second category. Names and companies have been removed. Nothing else has been changed.

Read together, they have something in common. Not one of them tells me what, specifically, I should stop doing or start doing differently. They are verdicts – delivered with the authority of the role, about a conclusion that had already been reached before the conversation began.

What Those Sentences Were

Performance feedback is specific, behaviourally grounded, and actionable. It describes a pattern and points toward a change. “You interrupted three people in that architecture review. Here is what that cost the conversation.” That is something I can work with. “No matter how good you are, if I don’t like you, you won’t advance here” – that is not a standard being applied. It is a veto being announced. The difference is not subtle once you have experienced both.

The more damaging version is the sentence that borrows the language of care. “I know I reprimand you constantly, but that’s just my way of mentoring – it’s all for your own good.” What that sentence does is take the moral authority of development and apply it to something that is, on any honest inspection, punishment in a mentor’s clothing. The real cost is not the immediate sting. It is the confusion it creates in the months and years that follow. After those encounters, I could not reliably tell whether a difficult experience at work was feedback I should lean into or a pattern I should be walking away from. That uncertainty – the inability to read the room clearly, to trust my own read of what was happening – was the most lasting damage.

There is also a specific harm in being told “you’re a resource, but not irreplaceable.” It is designed to make a person feel disposable – to strip the work of meaning and replace it with low-grade fear. Fear does not produce good engineering. I have written about how fear functions as technical debt – it compounds silently, invisibly, until the carrying cost exceeds the cost of addressing it. The same is true of the fear a manager installs in a person by making them feel permanently at risk.

What I Kept

The uncomfortable truth about toxic management is that it can be technically correct. My behaviour was a genuine problem. The managers who pointed to it were often not wrong about the observation. What they were wrong about was the method. Naming someone’s flaws and then using those flaws to close doors are two distinct acts. One is feedback. The other is leverage. I came to understand that distinction by standing on the wrong side of it long enough to feel the difference in my bones.

I eventually learned to do what I should have learned much earlier: take the part of any feedback that is behaviourally specific and act on it, and decline to absorb the personal-verdict layer as truth. When someone says “I can find someone with a better résumé any day,” they have stopped describing my performance and started performing their authority. That second thing is not mine to carry. It took me longer than it should have to tell the two apart, and the confusion cost me more than I would like to admit.

There is something those encounters gave me that no course or book could have: I know precisely how a harsh word lands in a person who is already under pressure. I know what it does to someone’s sense of their own competence when a manager has quietly decided, in advance, that they are not going to be allowed to grow. That knowledge sits behind every piece of feedback I now give. I do not call it wisdom. I call it calibration – earned the hard way, in rooms I would not choose to re-enter.

Six Words I Did Not Find in a Book

The leadership culture I try to build now has six cornerstones: growth, respect, psychological safety, trust, openness, and fairness. I did not arrive at those words from a framework. Each one came from a specific memory of a room where the opposite was present. Psychological safety because I know what it costs to work somewhere that treats speaking up as a career risk. Fairness because I know what it does to a person when advancement is decided by personal feeling rather than demonstrated performance. Growth because I once sat across a desk from a manager who had decided, before I had said a word, that I was not going to be allowed to grow – and I can still describe that desk in precise detail.

I also need to say this clearly: I later became, for a time, my own version of what I had experienced. I was a Technical Lead whose team feared me. I used authority the way it had been modelled to me – as control, not as stewardship. The story of how I came to see that, and what it took to change, is one I have told in full elsewhere; it is, I think, the only thing that earns me the right to speak about all of this from both sides. Being on the receiving end of bad management did not automatically make me a good one. What it gave me was the material to become one, eventually, if I chose to do the work. There was a great deal of work.

The admired mentor who turned out to be a narcissist completed the picture. Three vantage points on the same problem: the junior receiving it, the lead inflicting it, and the observer finally naming it. Between them, they taught me everything I know about the gap between authority and leadership, and why the gap matters more than most people admit until they have fallen into it.