Toxic bosses: why do companies protect managers who make working life hell?

Bullying, manipulation and intimidation can destroy lives, yet abusive authoritarians continue to rise to the top. How do they get away with it – and can they be brought to heel?

W hen Andrea finally resigned, her colleagues told her the truth they had always known about her boss. Some apologised. Others admitted they had watched what happened to her and said nothing. One offered the sentence I have been unable to forget: “You’ve been an emotional stab vest for us. You protected us.”

Andrea was a senior legal executive with decades of credibility when she began reporting to a powerful new colleague. Within months, something was wrong. Expectations shifted without warning and feedback contradicted itself. He spoke over her in public and undermined her in private. Slowly she began questioning not just him but herself, her competence, even her grip on reality.

What disturbed Andrea most was the gradual discovery that everybody already knew. Colleagues confessed that when they heard this executive was returning to the organisation, they had cried. When Andrea approached HR, a senior executive told her: “People work longer at McDonald’s than they work for him.” That was acknowledgment, not discovery. And there is something brutally revealing in the stab-vest description. Andrea had become the organisation’s psychological shock absorber. While she took the blows, everybody around her was safer.

Stories like Andrea’s are usually told as stories about monsters: the bullying boss, the narcissistic founder who finally, spectacularly, falls. I have come to think of such framing as the least useful way to tell them. Instead, I’m interested in how such people keep acquiring power and why, once their behaviour is visible to almost everyone, nobody stops them.

I have encountered power through three lenses. For 20 years, I was an executive-level headhunter, spending thousands of hours assessing the people organisations were preparing to entrust with authority. I then held that authority myself, as a global chief marketing officer in New York. Now, as a psychotherapist, I meet power from the opposite side, through people trying to understand what happened to them when somebody wielded it badly. The industries differ; the consequences rarely do. Brilliant people become convinced they are incompetent. Experienced professionals stop trusting their own judgment. Good leadership enlarges people. Bad leadership, at its darkest, persuades a person, slowly, to disappear.

It never begins that way. The leaders who do the most psychological damage rarely arrive as tyrants. They arrive as answers, wrapped in charm and certainty, mirroring your values back to you. That first meeting can feel like the best of your professional life. Clinically, this can create a rapid sense of attachment, in which trust and emotional closeness develop before the relationship has had time to be tested. What follows – withdrawing warmth and then restoring it just often enough – is the logic of the slot machine: intermittent reward keeps people hopeful and vigilant, working ever harder to recover the golden beginning.