Your Value Was Never Theirs to Give - An Essay on Leadership

I've been thinking about leadership as a psychological question, not a management one. Because what happens inside you when someone leads you badly is worth examining. It doesn't just make work harder. It distorts the way you measure your own competence, your own value, your own read on reality.

I've had bosses on both ends of it. I've worked across Chicago, Japan, Melbourne, and Hong Kong. I've had people who made me better and people who made me question work I knew was solid. I wrote about what that career taught me in What I've Learned in 20 Years of Corporate Work. This is a different cut on the same material. It's less about the career itself and more about what bad leadership does to the person inside it.

What Good Leadership Actually Felt Like

At an analytics and CRM consultancy in Chicago, my boss had one principle: "get it done when it needs to be done, and I don't care when or where you do it." That was the whole framework. No performative presence. No expectation that being seen at your desk was the same as doing your job. He trusted me to manage my own time and deliver. He treated me like an adult. I did deliver. Most people do when they're trusted.

Then an international media agency where I stayed for six years. Over that time I was promoted three times, eventually to Director of Analytics in Melbourne, AUS. That kind of progression doesn't happen in a broken environment. What I remember from those years is fairness. Bosses who were clear about what was expected. An environment where you could make a mistake, learn from it, and not be quietly written off for it. I felt like I was in it alongside the people above me, we were a team, not being managed at from a position above. Six years is a long time to stay anywhere in media. I stayed because the environment made it worth staying.

Those two experiences set a reference point. I knew what good felt like. And I knew what it produced.

I used these leaders as templates when I grew into my own leadership role. I always trusted my team to get it done. They were the experts. My job was to lead, to protect, and to give opportunities for advancement, not to monitor. Whatever they needed to do good work, they could have it. Sit at their desk or don't. Come in at 9AM or don't. I would approve annual leave requests with very little review of their upcoming workload. Why?? They were adults; responsible adults. They knew what needed to be done and by when.

Work from home, work from a café, work from wherever. I didn't care. Outcome was the measure, not presence. Treat people like adults and they almost always act like it. Micromanage them and you get people who are very good at looking busy (and looking for an exit).

I've talked about the psychology of work pressure in more depth in my In The Rooms series. Similar complaints show up in almost every job related counselling session, and they all connect to the same root. Worth watching if any of this is familiar.

“

At some point, that corporate ladder you're climbing stops being ambition and becomes a trap, because you're always looking for the next thing.

William Ferrell, M.Couns.

Watch Video3:47

What Bad Leadership Actually Does

My first regional APAC agency role in Hong Kong had three different bosses in six months. No KPIs ever set. No strategic direction. No sense of what I was supposed to be building toward. I had the experience to create my own structure, but that's not the point. Leadership is supposed to orient people. What I got instead was a series of transitions and an absence where direction should have been. Thankfully, that job didn't last long.

In one of my last corporate roles, I was working for a luxury skincare client in China. The client was tough, but during one meeting she stepped over my line. Remember the job of a leader? Protect the team, watch out for them. The client started yelling at the team on the phone, threatening the business. I stepped in and tried to get control to let the client know this was not acceptable. But my China MD cut me off, started apologizing to the client on the teams behalf. I was shocked. I had never seen a leader act this way. After the meeting I took my team aside and I apologized to them not only for the client, but also for the GM who did not have their back. I understand protecting a business and revenue, but if you don’t protect your team they will look for roles elsewhere, and you won’t have a business to protect.

Then a large international FMCG oral care conglomerate. The first year was genuinely good. I got a significant amount done and got recognized by the global CMO for it. Then my manager changed, and things shifted. He moved substantial parts of my work to other people. He never sat with me on strategy. He never shared his vision for what we were building together. He never really even had meetings with me or talked to me throughout the week.

To sum up my experience with him, there was one meeting that crystallized my time there.

We built a project brief together. Sat in the same room, agreed on scope, KPIs, deliverables, the full scope of work. Documented. Signed off. I completed the project and presented it back.

He told me it was completely wrong.

I brought up the brief. Specifically. "This is what we agreed. This is exactly what I built."

Still wrong.

But he couldn't tell me what was wrong. He said he'd expected something different, but he could not say what that different thing was. Not once across multiple conversations. He would look at my work and tell me he didn't like it, but he was never able to articulate why, what he wanted instead, or what specifically missed the mark.

That is not feedback. That is someone in a leadership position who either doesn't have the language to say what they want, doesn't know what they want, or isn't willing to own what they're actually saying. The damage it does is specific: you start to doubt work you know is good. You start to wonder if you're missing something obvious that everyone else can see. You start to second guess everything you do. You start to try to reverse-engineer the feedback, which means you start working from someone else's vague dissatisfaction rather than from your own competence. You actively work against yourself.

You weren't missing anything. But the doubt is real, and it sticks.

When the Environment Itself Is the Problem

At another job, there was a biannual anonymous engagement / morale survey from HR. If you work corporate, you know these. Feedback came in. Some of it about me was not kind. Instead of handling that as a private management matter, my boss sent the full survey, including the anonymous feedback about me, out to the entire company. The reason given was transparency.

What it actually did was put me in a defensive position in front of people who had no context for what they were reading. One person's anonymous view, broadcast company-wide, became the lens through which I was seen from that point until I left.

It cut my legs out from under me. It told the team not to trust me. It made everyone else I worked with question my judgement. Not because the feedback was accurate or inaccurate. But because something that should have been handled between leadership was made public before I had any ability to address it. I suddenly found myself walking into a hostile toxic work environment every single day until I left.

That is not transparency. That is abdication. A leader who can't contain a personnel matter and instead externalizes it to the group is managing by consensus and calling it a principle.

Then there was my Christmas holiday (asked for and approved months in advance).

Before I left, I briefed my team, handed everything to my manager, and told people to reach out if something came up. I monitored our Teams chat while I was gone and saw nothing that read as a red flag. No one came to me with a fire to put out.

For context (not that it matters), I was on a boat in the middle of the ocean with my 75-year-old father. The internet was what it was.

The day I returned to work, I was reprimanded and yelled at for being offline. My boss had even spoken to my colleagues and my team about it while I was gone. He had shared his frustrations about my absence with people who reported to me. "He was reallllllly pissed about that", a few of them told me.

Setting your team up to function without you is not a failure. It's the fucking point. A leader who can hand off, step back, and trust the systems they've built is demonstrating exactly what good leadership looks like. Being reachable at all times is not the measure of whether you've done your job. Outcome is.

I had set everything up. Nothing fell over. The reprimand was based on his perception. What it communicated was that presence was the expectation, not result.

What All of This Actually Does to You

The pattern across all of it is the same, even if the specific situations are different.

Bad leadership is not only difficult to work under. It distorts your internal reference point. The manager who can't articulate what's wrong with your work trains you to second-guess years of success. The boss who broadcasts anonymous feedback trains you to stop expecting that personnel matters will be handled as such. The leader who reprimands you for being on holiday trains you to feel guilty for having a life outside of work.

Over time, if you're not careful, their standard becomes your standard. Their judgment becomes the measure you use to assess your own work. That's the real danger to mental health. And when it gets genuinely costly. It's also the thing I find most often underneath why high-performing men in Hong Kong don't ask for help. Because admitting something is wrong feels like it disproves the whole story. That pattern is worth reading about separately.

I left my last job having met every KPI I set out to meet when I joined. I accomplished what I went there to accomplish, in an environment that wasn't always working in my favor. I kept to my own standards. I knew what I had done and what it was worth.

These experiences taught me things I come back to regularly in sessions. You are not your job title. You are not your performance review. You are not the feedback of someone who couldn't tell you what was actually wrong. Your own values matter more than any employer's expectation.

The question worth sitting with at the end of any role, in any environment, is straightforward: Did you do what you set out to do? Did you act in line with your own values? Did you give it what you intended to give?

If the answer is yes, that stands, regardless of how the environment chose to respond.

That's not the answer that resolves the anger or confusion that comes from being undermined by someone with authority over you. It doesn't fix the harm. But it gives you something to stand on that nobody can pull out from under you.

Your value was never theirs to give. And it was never theirs to take.

If you're working through what a difficult environment has done to how you see yourself, men's therapy is built for exactly this. I've sat on both sides of that experience and it shapes every session.

If you're sitting with something from a work environment that's affected how you see yourself, that's worth looking at. Book a session.