I have been thinking about a client of mine, a brilliant, capable woman, who spent the better part of two years working for someone who made her feel small.
I won’t use names. I won’t use details that could identify her. But I want to talk about the pattern, because I see it more often than I wish I did.
Her manager was unkind. Not occasionally sharp, not having an off day, but consistently, structurally unkind. Critical in front of others. Quick to make people feel foolish. Entitled in a way that made every interaction feel like a transaction where she always won.
And here is the detail that stayed with me: this manager never brought her team together. No shared learning, no debriefs, no moments where people could compare notes and realise they were not imagining it, not alone in it, not the problem. Everyone was kept just separate enough to doubt themselves in private.
That is not bad management style. That is a strategy.
Isolation is one of the oldest tools of control there is. When people cannot compare experiences, they cannot build a shared, accurate picture of what is happening to them. Each person quietly wonders if they are too sensitive, not resilient enough, somehow failing to manage a relationship that was never theirs to fix.
My client’s engagement dropped. Then her confidence. Then, predictably, her performance, because nobody does their best work from a state of fear. She started making mistakes she would never have made a year earlier, which only fed the cycle, because now there was evidence, real evidence, that something was wrong with her.
Except nothing was wrong with her. Her body just started saying what she could not yet say out loud. Skin rashes. Mouth ulcers. A stye that would not heal. The kind of small, stubborn physical complaints that do not show up on a performance review, that you treat one at a time without ever connecting the dots, until someone helps you see that your body has been trying to tell you something for months.
Here is the part that made me genuinely angry on her behalf. This manager was, by all accounts, untouchable, because she always hit her revenue targets. The organisation kept her in place, season after season, because the numbers were good.
I want to say something simple about that, because I think it gets lost. The cost was still being paid. It just was not on that spreadsheet.
It was being paid in a body that could not settle. In turnover the company didn’t track back to its source. In the quiet erosion of people who used to be confident and stopped being confident on her watch. In the talent that left without ever naming why in an exit interview, because by then they no longer trusted that naming it would matter.
Revenue is not the only thing leadership produces. It produces a climate too. And climates show up eventually, in the body and in the business, in ways that are harder to spot and far more expensive than a missed quarterly number.
What I am proudest of is not anything I did. It is what my client did. Slowly, she stopped asking “what is wrong with me” and started asking “what happened to me, and what do I need to rebuild.” She started listening to her body instead of overriding it. She started separating her manager’s behaviour from her own worth, which sounds simple and is one of the hardest things a person can do under that kind of pressure. She started trusting her own read of situations again, instead of constantly checking it against someone who had every reason to keep her checking.
She is not fully out of those woods yet. But she is no longer alone in them, her body is finally settling, and she no longer believes the story that she was the problem.
If you are working for someone who makes you feel small, and the organisation seems to look away because the numbers are fine, I want you to hear this: the numbers being fine does not mean the cost isn’t real. It just means no one has measured it yet.
Your body often knows before your mind is ready to admit it. You are allowed to trust what you are noticing.
