When Someone Shows You Who They Are

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." - Maya Angelou

This month we've been talking about relationships. Nurturing them. Auditing them.

Restoring them through humility. Cultivating the ones that matter most.

There is another side of relationship navigation that doesn't get discussed honestly at this level. If we're going to talk about relationships in professional life, we have to talk about this too.

Relationships require nurturing and they require managing. Both are true. Both require skill. Knowing which one you're in is the difference between thriving and surviving.

What I Have Seen

In more than two decades of revenue leadership and working alongside senior leaders across organizations, I have seen things that don't make it into leadership development curriculum.

I have seen C-suite leaders intentionally sabotage projects because the idea didn't originate with them. Deliberately dismantling them while publicly expressing support.

I have seen senior leaders stir conflict between members of their own team. Manufacturing tension. Planting rumors. Creating division among people who would have otherwise collaborated beautifully, because a unified team felt threatening to someone whose power depended on being the most indispensable person in the room.

I have seen people with significant character deficits get promoted repeatedly because they could produce results, present well, and charm the people whose opinion mattered most. The numbers told one story. The people working alongside them told an entirely different one.

I have seen serious personnel infractions dismissed as personality conflicts, and when that framing didn't hold, dismissed as personal drama. The person who raised the concern became the problem. The person whose conduct warranted concern continued to advance.

I have seen senior leaders quietly dismantle the opportunities of bright, upcoming talent out of fear and intimidation. In the quiet ways that are almost impossible to prove and devastating to experience.

We have all been in proximity to at least one of these situations. Some of us have watched it happen to someone we respected and didn't know how to help. Some of us have been the target. Some of us have stayed silent when we shouldn't have and carried the weight of that silence longer than we expected.

I have navigated versions of all of these. I have made mistakes in them. I have also learned what it takes to come through them with integrity intact.

Why This Is So Hard to Navigate

These situations are uniquely difficult because the normal frameworks don't apply.

When someone lacks character but delivers results, the organization has already made its choice. Leadership sees the numbers. They don't see the cost to culture, to trust, to the people who have to work alongside that person every single day. That cost is real and significant, and largely invisible to the people with the authority to address it.

When it gets raised, it gets reframed. Suddenly the person raising it can't handle strong personalities. They're making it personal. They need to be more strategic, more resilient, more professional.

The person with the character issue keeps their results. The person who raised the concern carries the additional burden of being perceived as difficult.

When the person causing harm has institutional power, a long tenure, key relationships with the board, or revenue that leadership is unwilling to put at risk, the normal channels of accountability simply don't function the way they're supposed to.

This is the reality of how organizations actually operate when character and performance point in opposite directions.

What This Costs

The visible cost is what happens in real time. The exhaustion of working alongside someone whose behavior is harmful. The cognitive load of managing your own reactions while performing at a high level. The erosion of trust when you watch conduct go unaddressed.

The invisible cost compounds over time.

Talented people leave. They don't always say why. They cite opportunity or growth or a better offer. The real reason is that they watched the organization choose results over character and decided they didn't want to build their career in a place that made that choice.

The people who stay begin to adapt to the dysfunction. Standards quietly shift. What was once unacceptable becomes normalized. The culture that leadership believes exists and the culture that actually exists become two very different things.

The senior leader who raised the concern and was dismissed carries something that is difficult to name. It is the specific exhaustion of having seen something clearly, named it accurately, and watched the organization choose to look away.

Managing Rather Than Nurturing

When we find ourselves in these situations, the goal shifts entirely. We are in a relationship that must be managed with the same strategic discipline we bring to our most complex business challenges.

See clearly and stop rationalizing what you see. The most expensive thing we do in these situations is extend grace past the point where the evidence supports it. When someone has shown you who they are through repeated, consistent behavior, believe them. Adjust your strategy accordingly.

Document with discipline. Keep a private record of what happens, when it happens, who was present, and what the impact was. Memory is unreliable under stress. Write it down. Power dynamics shift over time and having a record when that moment comes matters more than most people anticipate.

Build the coalition that provides cover. Cultivate relationships with other senior stakeholders who serve as informal checks on this person's influence. Know who in the room sees what you see. Know who has the standing and the willingness to redirect when things go sideways.

Make your impact undeniable. Your strongest protection is a record of results that speaks for itself. Make your contributions visible. Build relationships with stakeholders who can speak to your performance independently of the person working against you.

Protect your people. Be honest with direct reports and cross-functional partners about what you can and cannot control. Advocate for them in the rooms where they don't have a seat. Their careers should not absorb the cost of someone else's character deficit.

Know your non-negotiables in advance. There is a line. Knowing where yours is before you reach it is one of the most important things you can do for yourself in these situations. In the moment, when career and financial security and organizational relationships are all in the balance, clarity is extraordinarily difficult to access. Establish it in advance.

Protect your mental and emotional health with ruthless intentionality. Navigating this kind of dysfunction while performing at a high level requires resources most people underestimate. You need people outside the organization you can speak to honestly. A trusted mentor. An executive coach who understands organizational power dynamics. A therapist who can help you process what you're carrying. This cannot be done alone.

The Hardest Truth

Sometimes the answer is to leave.

I have made this decision. I have supported others through it, and I have watched people stay far longer than they should have, absorbing a cost that compounded quietly until it became impossible to ignore.

Some organizational dysfunction is structural rather than situational. Some people will never be held accountable within a system that has decided their value outweighs their conduct. Staying in proximity to sustained ethical compromise has a cost that is difficult to see clearly until you're standing outside of it.

Leaving is not losing. Sometimes leaving is the clearest expression of values available to us. When we leave, we take our integrity, our capability, and our record with us.

Both Can Be True

Relationships in professional life are not one thing. They are the most rewarding part of the work and sometimes the most challenging part of the work. They require nurturing and they require managing. They call us to our best selves and sometimes they test whether we can hold onto our best selves under sustained pressure.

We can navigate the most difficult relationship dynamics at the highest levels of organizational life and still be successful. Still lead with integrity. Still build careers and teams we're proud of.

The goal is to become clear. To see accurately. To respond strategically. To protect ourselves and the people we lead without losing the qualities that made us worth following in the first place.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

And then decide, with clarity and intention, what believing them requires of you.