Your Leadership Interrupted Their Power.

There is a difficult leadership lesson I have learned across organizations, systems, sectors, and stages of my career:

Some people do not object to your leadership because they misunderstand it.

They object because your leadership interrupts something that benefits them.

It may interrupt their access.

Their influence.

Their ability to operate without oversight.

Their control over information.

Their proximity to decision-making.

Their authority without accountability.

Or their comfort within an organizational culture that has allowed blurred roles, weak boundaries, informal agreements, and harmful practices to become normalized.

When that happens, the disagreement rarely stays focused on the actual decision.

It becomes personal. Your tone is questioned. Your competence is scrutinized. Your motives are rewritten. Your character becomes the subject of conversations you were never invited to. People who once praised your leadership may suddenly describe you as difficult, rigid, controlling, arrogant, uncollaborative, insubordinate, or incapable of receiving feedback.

Not always because your decision was wrong.

Sometimes, it is because your decision made it harder for someone else to continue benefiting from the dysfunction and secrets you exposed.

When Structural Resistance Becomes a Personality Story

Organizations are systems and systems are flawed because people make up systems.

Organizations contain formal roles, written policies, reporting structures, legal responsibilities, and stated values. They also contain informal systems which include longstanding relationships, unspoken agreements, unofficial gatekeepers, inherited practices, private alliances, and people who have accumulated influence without necessarily holding formal authority.

Those informal systems can become so familiar that people stop recognizing them as choices. They become:

“We have always done it this way.”

“That is just how things work here.”

“You have to understand the history.”

“That person has always handled it.”

“No one else has ever had a problem with it.”

But familiarity does not make a practice ethical, equitable, legal, safe, or sustainable.

When a leader begins asking questions about liability, governance, policies, professional boundaries, financial stewardship, safety, decision-making authority, or the appropriate use of organizational resources, the questions may expose more than an outdated process.

They may expose who has been benefiting from the lack of clarity.

When leaders challenge those entrenched systems, people often convert structural resistance into a story about the leader’s personality.

The concern is no longer discussed as: “Does this practice create organizational risk?”

Instead, the conversation becomes: “Why are they being so difficult?”

The issue is no longer: “Have we been operating outside our roles and creating risk?”

It becomes: “She/he/they are not collaborative or fit for the job.”

This reframing is powerful because it moves attention away from the practice and places the leader on trial.

When People Cannot Dismiss the Issue, They Discredit the Person

I have experienced this pattern throughout my career.

I have entered organizations and discovered practices that created serious governance, liability, ethical, clinical, or reputational concerns. In some environments, people without formal authority were making decisions, using organizational resources, directing staff, or operating under the organization’s name without meaningful oversight.

In others, informal gatekeepers expected me to seek their permission even though they did not supervise me and held no authority over my work. Their influence existed because people had become accustomed to accommodating them; when I did not participate in those arrangements, I became the problem.

Early in my career, I also learned how power and professional hierarchy determine whose knowledge is considered credible.

While working in a psychiatric setting, I repeatedly advocated for a patient who had been in the hospital for almost two months and was not improving under the existing treatment plan. My clinical observations were dismissed because I was “just a social worker.” I was called insubordinate by the treating psychiatrist for continuing to raise concerns. The issue was that the primary psychiatrist didn't believe in mood disorders and instead believed everything was connected to psychosis. This meant that they refused to give the patient any medications that would treat mood (mood stabilizers).

When that physician went on an extended vacation, I spoke to the covering psychiatrist who reconsidered the treatment approach and prescribed the mood stabilizers I'd been advocating for. The patient improved and was discharged within two weeks.

That experience stayed with me.

Not because I believe I am always right. I do not.

It stayed with me because formal authority had been treated as more important than sustained observation, interdisciplinary expertise, and the patient’s actual response to care.

It showed me that when people could not easily dismiss the concern, they tried to discredit the person naming it.

That pattern appears in many forms:

If the concern is valid, question the person’s motives.

If the risk is real, question their competence.

If the boundary is necessary, question their temperament.

If they continue speaking, call them difficult.

Research on employee voice has consistently found that people assess the interpersonal and professional risks of speaking up before deciding whether to raise concerns. In toxic and psychologically unsafe workplaces, people may fear being ignored, embarrassed, punished, or subjected to retaliation. Leadership responses are especially important because formal reporting mechanisms mean little when people learn that dissent will be treated as disruption rather than contribution. This is even more pronounced when considering employees with marginalized identities.

Power Is Not Limited to Position

We often speak about organizational power as though it flows neatly through an organizational chart.

It does not.

Formal power comes from role, title, decision-making authority, control over resources, and supervisory responsibility. Informal power may come from longevity, relationships, proximity to executives, access to information, professional reputation, institutional memory, social influence, or the ability to shape how others perceive a person or situation.

Someone may have no formal authority over you and still hold significant power within the organization. They may control information others need. They may have relationships with board members, executives, funders, or longstanding employees. They may recruit people into a narrative before you know a narrative is being created.

That is how a concern becomes gossip. Gossip becomes consensus, and consensus becomes “what everyone is saying,” even when the story is distorted and fabricated.

I have had people later apologize for misjudging me. They told me they had heard that I was mean, arrogant, unapproachable, or difficult. After working with me, they realized their direct experience did not match what they had been told. Some admitted they had believed the gossip or remained silent while watching me be targeted because they didn't want to become subject to the abuse and/or felt powerless to intervene.

This matters because workplace bullying and organizational retaliation do not always move from the top down. Research describes power imbalance as a defining feature of workplace bullying, but that imbalance may be formal or informal. Bullying may include rumors, reputational attacks, social exclusion, humiliation, withholding information, obstructing someone’s work, or repeatedly undermining their competence.

A person with the higher title is not always the person with the greater protection.

A leader may hold formal responsibility while being surrounded by people with stronger informal alliances, deeper institutional history, or easier access to the systems that shape reputation and harm.

That is why leading change requires more than authority.

It requires understanding the power landscape.

Resistance Has a Human Cost

It is easy to describe these experiences in strategic language.

Entrenched systems.

Informal power.

Organizational resistance.

Retaliation.

Bullying.

Governance failures.

But living through them is not abstract.

It affects your body, confidence, sleep, relationships, sense of safety, and ability to trust your own perceptions. It also impacts your capacity to enter the next organization without anticipating the same harm.

There were times when I understood intellectually that I was being targeted because I had introduced accountability. That understanding did not protect me from the emotional consequences. Being repeatedly mischaracterized is harmful. Watching people distort your intentions is harmful. Knowing influential people are disparaging your character behind closed doors is harmful. Being expected to continue functioning while defending your credibility is harmful.

These experiences affected my well-being and they were deeply traumatic.

Research supports what many people already know through lived experience. Bullying, low procedural justice, low relational justice, inadequate support, role conflict, and lack of respect are associated with increased risks of anxiety, depression, stress, emotional exhaustion, and other mental health concerns.

Workplace harm does not become less traumatic because it occurs in a boardroom, hospital, religious institution, nonprofit, government agency, university, or professional organization. The nervous system does not distinguish between reputational danger and other forms of threat as neatly as organizational policies would like to pretend.

Reflection Is Necessary. Self-Erasure Is Not.

Leaders must remain open to feedback.

Position does not make us infallible and good intentions do not guarantee positive impact.

I can identify moments when I might have paced change differently, assessed informal power earlier, built coalitions sooner, or sequenced difficult truths more gradually. I know in many cases, I was disturbed by the dysfunction and wanted to quickly stop the harm. My error was in believing that others were simply unaware of the harm, because other wise, would they not have stopped it sooner? The hard lesson was accepting that they were aware. They benefited from it and had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

That is part of my leadership development.

But reflection is not the same as accepting a false narrative. Accountability is not self-erasure and adaptive leadership does not require pretending that all resistance is reasonable, neutral, or offered in good faith.

Some feedback strengthens us.

Some feedback reveals an impact we did not intend.

Some feedback helps us communicate more effectively.

And some “feedback” is retaliation wearing professional language and a suit.

Leaders need the discernment to know the difference.

What These Experiences Taught Me About Leadership

1. Diagnose the system before changing the practice

An organizational chart tells you who holds formal authority. It does not tell you who controls information, relationships, reputation, access, or history. Before disrupting an entrenched practice, identify who benefits from it, who protects it, who is harmed by it, and who may quietly support changing it.

2. Separate resistance to the decision from resistance to accountability

People may have legitimate concerns about implementation, timing, communication, or unintended consequences. Those concerns deserve attention but leaders must also recognize when the true objection is that accountability has arrived.

3. Document more than you think you need to

In environments where stories shift quickly, documentation protects organizational memory.

Record decisions, concerns, recommendations, roles, timelines, and follow-up. Documentation will not eliminate retaliation, but it can make revisionist history more difficult.

4. Build sincere relationships before you need witnesses

Trust cannot be manufactured during a crisis. Consistent, respectful relationships across roles and functions help people evaluate your leadership through direct experience rather than gossip.

5. Do not confuse harmony with safety

I value harmony. I care deeply about understanding people and I do not enter any situation looking for conflict. However, harmony without accountability is often avoidance; peace that depends on one person’s silence is rooted in erasure, power, and control. That is violent.

6. Protect the person carrying the accountability

Organizations frequently praise courage while abandoning the person who demonstrates it.

Leaders, boards, human resources departments, and governing bodies must do more than encourage people to speak up. They must protect them when they do.

7. Pay attention when the conversation shifts from the issue to the person

The moment people stop discussing the decision and begin attacking someone’s personality, tone, competence, or character, leaders should become curious. What issue is being avoided?

What power is being protected? Whose interests are served by making this personal?

The Leadership Questions Beneath the Conflict

Not every person who resists change is protecting power.

Not every disagreement is retaliation.

Not every difficult organizational experience is bullying.

And not every leader who introduces accountability is automatically correct.

Nuance matters.

But organizations must become more willing to examine what happens when a leader, employee, clinician, practitioner, or community member raises a concern that threatens an entrenched system.

Do we evaluate the concern?

Or do we evaluate whether we like the person raising it?

Do we examine the risk?

Or do we critique their tone?

Do we clarify the roles?

Or do we protect the ambiguity?

Do we welcome dissent as information?

Or do we punish the person who disrupted our comfort?

The answers reveal more about organizational culture than any values statement ever could.

Closing Reflection

Some people will misunderstand your leadership.

But others understand it very well.

They understand that your boundaries will limit their access.

Your clarity will expose ambiguity.

Your questions will reveal risk.

Your accountability will interrupt informal power.

Your integrity will make familiar dysfunction harder to maintain.

When they cannot easily dismiss the issue, they may try to discredit the person naming it.

I know what that can cost.

I know that silence has a cost too.

The work is not to become fearless, unaffected, or endlessly strong.

The work is to remain teachable without internalizing manufactured narratives, to navigate power without abandoning integrity, and to protect the people and responsibilities entrusted to our leadership.

They did not misunderstand your leadership. Your leadership interrupted their power.

And your work is to be okay with that truth.