I am helping train public defense leaders for the National Association of Public Defense this week, so I can’t record a new essay. Enjoy this blast from the past instead.
I’m no poker player, but I know enough about the game to understand how the basic bluff works. A player with a poor hand will bet as though they have a sure thing, hoping to trick the other players into folding.
The truth is that the player who attempts to bluff always does so from a position of deficiency. You wouldn’t be bluffing if you placed a high bet on, say, a straight or a flush unless you somehow knew for a fact that your opponent held four of a kind. Therefore, bluffing is always a de facto admission of weakness even when the bluff works and the player wins.
We see a more nefarious version of this paradox play out with schoolyard bullies. Bullies never pick fights they don’t think they can win. When they become adults, we call this “punching down.” The whole point is to look tough, not to actually be tough—similar to a poker bluff. Bullying behavior exposes the true coward lurking beneath the aggression.
Even entire nations betray their own ineptitude by showing off. It’s axiomatic that the bigger the parade, the frailer the leadership. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was famous for its large military displays featuring a slow procession of tanks, missiles, and other armaments punctuating endless columns of synchronized soldiers.
While an impressive sight and more than a little intimidating, the world knew that Soviet leaders relied on such spectacles to distract from their failures. Without these attempts to inspire awe, their internal weakness would be evident, but ironically the displays themselves were all the evidence we needed.
It’s even worse when you see sad, little dictators use the full force of the police and military to crush dissent. Fear of dissent is a special kind of spinelessness and when combined with bullying and cruelty, it takes on a whole new cowardly dimension. Political violence may cow the populace for a time, but it’s a sign of fear and fragility at the top—the manifestation of an administrative inferiority complex.
In the everyday working world, it’s the same with bosses. Bigwigs who bluster and boast are compensating for some shortcoming or other—real or imagined. No matter how successful the boss, you can bet that their tough-guy act is a cover for their lack of confidence.
Compare all this false bravado to the behavior of true leaders, who go out of their way to eschew showing off. In the workplace, even if they land the big corner office and the designated parking space, they avoid flaunting these symbols and may even subvert them. Leaders don’t have to show off because they have the intestinal fortitude to act with humility.
Bosses, in contrast, crave displays of their position and power. Too often, it takes the form of bombast and bullying, a hallmark of incompetence. But even when the boss is relatively civil, garish symbols of power loom as in-your-face reminders to employees of what should be perfectly obvious—who’s the boss.
Not every display has to be large and loud, though. They often can be quite subtle, designed to set the boss apart and above without much noise. For instance, in a workplace that demands employees arrive on time and work late, perhaps the boss strolls in whenever or leaves early. Or, in an office where everyone else puts paper in the printer when needed, maybe the boss has no idea where it goes.
I’ve even seen it where a perk is offered to select employees, and the boss takes one for themself, denying someone else the privilege. For instance, there’s the university executive who regularly redirected gift money designated to fund an annual faculty trip so that he could tag along. That meant that every year, one faculty member who otherwise would have attended was left behind.
I’m sure you know of others: the patronizing boss who never fetches her own coffee, the pompous CEO who always has to have the most prominent seat, the self-important executive who makes you wait and wait to start a scheduled meeting and then cuts it short or cancels.
Maybe you’ve witnessed bosses who think that working remotely means you’re always on call or managers who use group messaging apps to convey individual communications.
These moves may seem small and even innocuous, but they’re still power plays. And they add up. Each time a boss aggressively or passive-aggressively asserts privilege or position, they undercut the status of their employees. It’s insidious and—like the bloated Soviet military parades and the vicious crackdown on dissidents—pathetic.
Contrast these displays of weakness with the behavior of leaders, who become expert at recognizing and avoiding even subtly symbolic power plays. Leaders know expressions of power undermine morale. They also know that only the weak need to rely on power plays to project strength.
To be clear, I’m not saying that leaders can or should eschew all trappings of power. For instance, when I was an executive, I dressed the part, wearing suits and sporting French cuffs and natty fedoras. Partially I did so out of vanity and partially as a reminder that no matter what I thought or wanted, my position set me apart.
What I never did was suggest that my bold clothing choices made me better than, nor were they how I projected power. I assured that the distinction between individual expression and a demand for deference was plain to everyone. I liked nice clothes, and my job gave me the opportunity to wear them. That was all.
Leaders know not to mistake or substitute such trappings of power for real leadership. They intuit the distinction between boldness and bluster. For one thing, maintaining boldness demands significant inner strength while bluster merely requires noise.
True leaders understand not to make choices that cut down, belittle, or oppress their team members. If—being human—they ever slip and fall for the trappings of power, they then will admit their error and correct accordingly.
Leaders get it—that real strength derives from honesty and vulnerability, that genuine compassion and kindness emanate only from a solid inner core, and that maintaining decency remains the ultimate challenge. None of these qualities of character are for the faint of heart.
True leaders don’t need entourages, ostentatious perks, or fancy titles. They reject the desire for adoration, sycophancy, and flattery. They laugh at the idea of places of honor, puffed up speeches, and overwrought parades. They recoil at the thought of intimidation, bullying, and cruelty.
Leaders recognize such silliness as the tell-tale signifiers of blowhards, bullies, bluffers, and buffoons. They know that these demands for attention can barely conceal the pathetic whimpers of the insecure. That the need for constant reinforcement—by definition—reveals the existence of some defect, a weakness, a fault line, a failing. After all, you would never reinforce something that’s already plenty strong, right?
A building with a crumbling foundation needs propping up. One with a sound foundation needs none. Similarly, bosses need constant propping up to assert their authority and feel important. True leaders need none.
In fact, the true leader projects strength in one way and one way only—through choices that adhere to their values and sense of human decency. In other words, by behaving as a true leader.
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