The least useful way to tell the story of a destructive boss is as the story of a monster — the bully, the narcissistic founder, the inevitable spectacular fall. Kathleen Saxton, who spent twenty years assessing executives as a headhunter, then held executive authority herself as a global chief marketing officer, and now meets power from the other side as a psychotherapist, argues that framing answers the wrong question. The interesting question is not how such a person got hired. It is why, once the behaviour was visible to almost everyone, nobody stopped them.
The stab vest
Saxton begins with Andrea, a senior legal executive with decades of credibility who began reporting to a powerful new colleague. Within months, expectations shifted without warning, feedback contradicted itself, and she was talked over in public and undermined in private, until she was questioning her own competence and her grip on reality. When she went to HR, a senior executive offered what sounded like sympathy and functioned as an admission: “People work longer at McDonald’s than they work for him.”
What disturbed her most was discovering that everyone already knew. Colleagues confessed they had cried when they heard the executive was returning. One gave Saxton the sentence the piece is built around: “You’ve been an emotional stab vest for us. You protected us.”
Two candidates, one interview
The selection problem is that a healthy leader and a dangerous one can read identically at interview. The vocabulary of the senior job specification — bold, decisive, resilient, charismatic, comfortable under pressure, “executive presence” — describes both. One candidate is decisive because they have experience and a secure enough ego to make the hard call; another because doubt itself is intolerable. One is resilient through self-regulation, the other through emotional detachment.
Corporate language then launders the difference: low empathy becomes decisiveness, ruthlessness becomes high standards, detachment becomes resilience, manipulation becomes influence. A 2015 meta-analysis led by the psychologist Emily Grijalva found that narcissism meaningfully predicts leadership emergence — getting the job — and has almost no relationship with leadership effectiveness. Dark-triad traits are disproportionately useful for impression management, and while psychopathic traits appear in roughly 1 percent of the general population, studies of corporate samples suggest markedly higher concentrations among business leaders.
Saxton adds the mechanics of how it holds. The first meeting that feels like the best of your professional life can produce a rapid attachment, trust forming before the relationship has been tested. What follows — withdrawing warmth and restoring it just often enough — runs on the logic of a slot machine, keeping people hopeful and vigilant, working harder to recover the golden beginning. By the time the storm breaks, the job is accepted and the mortgage signed.
Trauma, and what it is not
Some of it starts earlier. Research in the Leadership Quarterly found an association between supervisors’ experiences of family undermining in childhood and abusive supervisory behaviour in adulthood, particularly among those with lower self-control. Saxton is careful with the finding: trauma does not create toxic leaders and disqualifies nobody from leadership. The distinction that matters is between trauma and unprocessed trauma — between a leader who has made sense of their experience and one whose unexamined wounds keep seeping into how they use power. The child who survived chaos by monitoring everything can become the executive who must control everything.
Survival mechanisms do not vanish; they professionalise. Hypervigilance becomes “strategic oversight.” An inability to trust becomes “strong leadership.” Emotional suppression becomes “composure under pressure.” The organisational psychologist Manfred Kets de Vries put the compounding risk bluntly: “When people get into a situation of power, unfortunately, narcissism is a very heavy drug and many people cannot handle it.” Saxton’s own line is the corrective — explanation is not exoneration, and an explanation of the leader must never become an alibi for the institution.
The architecture of accommodation
Public cases rarely turn on concealment. In the accounts of the CBI’s implosion, the Ted Baker staff petition against the founder’s culture of “forced hugging,” and Harvey Weinstein as Hollywood’s open secret, the recurring detail is that none of it was hidden. The Ethics & Compliance Initiative reports that about three-quarters of employees who witness wrongdoing do report it, internally or externally. The signals arrive. What fails is the response, especially when the person involved is judged too valuable to lose.
Around a destructive leader grows what Saxton calls an architecture of accommodation: colleagues who privately disapprove, boards that soften the language, investors who admire the numbers, employees who decide that their mortgage matters more than becoming the next target. Nobody has to intend to protect abuse. Each person only has to make the safest decision available to them. Hierarchy then compounds the effect — we doubt what we are seeing because nobody else appears alarmed, assume somebody senior knows more than we do, and watch what happens to the first person who speaks before deciding not to become the second.
The bill is quantifiable. When MIT Sloan researchers analysed 34 million employee profiles, toxic culture proved ten times more powerful than pay in predicting who quits. Britain’s Health and Safety Executive identifies the way managers manage staff as a major cause of work-related stress, and Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer, studying workplace mortality, concluded that harmful management practices are “literally killing people.” We banned smoking in offices, Saxton notes, so why is this tolerated?
Governing behaviour as we govern money
Companies audit everything except conduct. Financial integrity is never entrusted to goodwill, so there are audit committees, risk registers, compliance functions and external auditors. When the subject is the most powerful person in the building, the apparatus disappears: it is a leadership style, a personality clash, an HR matter, something sensitive to be mediated quietly. HR is structurally the weakest player in the room — Saxton’s own 2022 research across the media industry found it ranked the least respected function by senior executives, which means the people charged with guarding behaviour are marginalised exactly where power most needs guarding.
Her prescription is unglamorous. Boards could test independently whether people can safely disagree with senior leaders, read attrition as a pattern rather than a series of unrelated departures, connect complaints, settlements and confidentiality agreements instead of letting organisational memory reset with each exit, and assess a leader at three, six and twelve months in, once the interview performance is over and the experience of working beneath that person has begun. Above all, those mechanisms have to be independent: asking a function embedded in a hierarchy to investigate the most powerful person in that hierarchy is a straightforward conflict of interest.
Silence has architecture; so does its dismantling
The law is beginning to catch up, in Britain at least. Since October 2025, new NDAs in England and Wales cannot prevent victims — or those who reasonably believe they are victims — from making specified disclosures about criminal conduct, and the Employment Rights Act 2025 will go further, voiding clauses that stop workers speaking about harassment or discrimination, or about how an employer handled their complaint. Zelda Perkins, the former Weinstein assistant whose Can’t Buy My Silence campaign has driven the reform, describes NDAs as sitting at the foundation of that architecture of silence, concealing patterns rather than individual incidents. Workplace bullying itself is still not a standalone criminal offence in Britain, and no specific law against it exists.
Toxic leadership survives through repetition: one generation learns to tolerate it and quietly teaches the next how to survive it. Saxton’s argument is that the inheritance can be refused — by the board member who asks the harder question, the colleague who declines the whispering afterwards, the investor who asks how the numbers were achieved, the organisation that protects the person telling the truth rather than the person holding the power. The people who benefited from the silence are counting on it continuing. She proposes something far less onerous than governance reform: simple humanity.