Part 1: Understanding Narcissistic Leadership. When Repetition Masquerades as Expertise
A case worth documenting
As you know, I document everything. The work. The wins. And, when it happens, the slow unravelling of something that was supposed to matter.
I built a charity from nothing. No safety net. No inherited systems. Just sustained effort, grit, and a stubborn belief that the work would count for something. For a community. For a board. For myself. What I did not anticipate was how quickly purpose can be hijacked by sheer volume masquerading as competence.
Picture the familiar cringe of Uncle Jim at a family gathering. White slip-ons. Brill-creamed hair. Full Ron Burgundy “I’m kind of a big deal” energy. Now imagine that same swagger transplanted into a boardroom, stripped of irony, and insulated by authority.
That was the dynamic.
On paper, her CV was compelling. Genuinely so. I was persuaded. Accolades had been earned somewhere, at some point. But credentials are not character, and status is not leadership. Integrity and the ability to lead people were conspicuously absent.
What followed was not leadership but performance. Confidence mistaken for competence. Repetition mistaken for depth. Noise mistaken for substance. Volume deployed to drown out scrutiny.
This is why this case matters.
Because organisations rarely collapse through obvious villains. They erode through unchecked ego, misplaced trust, and boards that mistake confidence for capability until the damage is no longer reversible.
Uncle Jim belongs at the barbecue.
Not in the chair.
Here’s the reality: she did not possess charisma.
That may sound unfair, but it is accurate. What she had was a performance mode she switched on whenever she put on the “Chair” hat. Where it came from is anyone’s guess. Too much 1980s television, perhaps. Dallas. Dynasty. Some half-absorbed idea of what authority is supposed to look like.
What emerged was not leadership but a caricature. An exaggerated, self-conscious imitation of power. The sort of behaviour that, if you saw it in a child, you would gently interrupt and say: please don’t do that, it isn’t clever and it isn’t convincing.
It was profoundly wrong for the setting. Wrong in tone. Wrong in substance. Wrong in instinct.
When she dropped the act and behaved like a normal human being, she was tolerable. Occasionally even reasonable. But she could not sustain it. The performance always returned.
The posture.
The theatricality.
The pronouncements.
Statements like “I must be getting soft in my old age” would surface whenever a trace of humanity slipped through, as if empathy itself were a professional failure that needed to be apologised for and retracted.
That alone tells you everything.
Charisma does not need rehearsal.
Authority does not require cosplay.
Leadership does not announce itself.
What she mistook for presence was affectation. What she believed was gravitas was insecurity. And what she performed as leadership was, in reality, an unconvincing role-play that collapsed the moment it encountered real people, real systems, or real accountability.
The illusion of expertise
She was neither charming nor inspiring. What she had was volume. A constant broadcast of her own supposed expertise. She spoke with confidence, fluency, and authority about how things should be done. But when tested in practice, the substance simply was not there. The thinking was mundane. The methods were outdated. There was no originality, no imagination, no adaptive intelligence.
Competence was performed, not demonstrated.
Around her, people reached for excuses. She’s just set in her ways. She’s strong and stable. No nonsense. These are not defences. They are euphemisms. Empty phrases used to excuse stagnation.
Here is the reality: you cannot be “set in your ways” and lead. Leadership requires movement. You cannot be “strong and stable” while rigid and inflexible. Strength and stability are not about entrenchment. They are about judgment, adaptability, and understanding. None of these were present.
Her operating principle was always the same: this is how it has always been done, and this is how it will continue. No inquiry. No evolution. No room for challenge.
And when that assumption was questioned, when someone pointed out that tradition was not the same as effectiveness, that her way was simply her way and not necessarily the best way, the response was not engagement. It was resistance. Defensiveness. Shutdown.
Expertise does not fear scrutiny. It does not rely on repetition. It does not need to announce itself.
What was on display here was not experience matured into wisdom, but habit calcified into doctrine. An authority sustained by assertion rather than insight. And an organisation that mistook familiarity for competence paid the price.
Her approach was not misguided. It was pathological.
The same methods were applied repeatedly, without reflection or adjustment, followed by visible confusion when the results were predictably mediocre. No innovation. No growth. No learning. Just repetition, dressed up as consistency.
Her central error was believing her own mythology. She regarded herself as the finished article. Fully formed. Beyond challenge. In leadership, that belief is fatal. Leadership is not a destination. It is continuous calibration. Relentless learning. Ongoing adaptation. The moment you believe you are complete, you become obsolete.
For a narcissistic leader, this presents an irresolvable contradiction. Improvement requires admission. Admission threatens the illusion. So the illusion is protected at all costs.
What follows is stagnation masquerading as strength. Inflexibility reframed as conviction. Outdated practice defended as “standards”. Failure explained away as resistance from others rather than deficiency in self.
She did not lead forward.
She stood still, barricaded her position, and called the lack of movement “strong leadership”.
That is not leadership.
It is arrested development with authority attached.
The mentorship that never was
This was one of the most consequential failures of the role.
I actively seek growth. In every position I have held, I have pursued challenge, mentorship, and exposure to people sharper than me. I expect to be stretched. I want to be corrected. I want to learn from those who have already mastered what I am still refining.
Historically, I have been fortunate. Every formative leader in my career has shared the same traits: intellectual generosity, genuine expertise, and the ability to elevate others. They did not posture. They did not sermonise. They modelled excellence so consistently that standards became cultural, not performative. Curiosity was encouraged. Mistakes were treated as data. Learning was constant because leadership was lived, not announced.
When I first encountered this chair and reviewed her CV, I assumed the same would apply. The credentials suggested depth. Experience. Something to absorb. I expected to learn. I expected to be sharpened. I expected mentorship.
That expectation was wrong.
There was nothing to learn because there was nothing being practised. No adaptive thinking. No reflective capacity. No insight beyond repetition of inherited methods. What was presented as authority did not translate into wisdom. What was framed as experience did not produce judgment.
The imbalance became obvious over time. The learning flowed in one direction only. I adapted. I built. I corrected. I stabilised. She absorbed language, frameworks, and surface-level cues, but never demonstrated internalisation or growth.
Mentorship requires humility. It requires the capacity to be unfinished.
She possessed neither.
If there was a lesson in the end, it was an inverse one: not what to emulate, but what to actively unlearn.
Week one after my resignation wasn’t recovery. It was decontamination.
I spent it methodically undoing the psychological distortion caused by sustained exposure to leadership so incoherent, contradictory, and untethered from reality that it required active reversal. Not stress. Not burnout. Damage.
When leaving a role requires deliberate re-anchoring to facts, logic, and your own professional judgement, the problem was never the work. It was the leadership.
If you’ve followed my writing, you’ll know that working under this Chair pushed me to do something I never expected to do: build an AI system solely to analyse her thinking - a running joke among the team, because the confusion wasn’t mine alone. We were all trying to work out how the same conversations could keep happening, produce nothing, and yet be presented as leadership.
Not to caricature it. Not to cherry-pick. To test it.
The material was exhaustive. Years of emails. Governance papers. Self-anointed “thought leadership”. Consultancy lectures. Research outputs. Strategy documents. Read end-to-end, in order, without interpretation.
What emerged was not complexity. It was absence.
No strategic development. No conceptual growth. No evidence of reflection, correction, or learning.
Just the same narrow ideas, recycled relentlessly, dressed in slightly different language, delivered with ever-increasing certainty. Confidence inflated. Substance static.
Individually, some pieces might pass a surface skim. Taken together, the pattern is impossible to ignore: intellectual inertia mistaken for authority.
This is not a difference of opinion. It is not a clash of styles. It is not “strong leadership”.
It is stagnant thinking elevated by position, repeated often enough to sound convincing, insulated from challenge, and enforced rather than examined.
And when that kind of mind is placed in control - unchecked, uncurious, and convinced of its own brilliance - it doesn’t just fail quietly.
It corrodes everything beneath it.
I want to be clear about something before anyone reaches for easy interpretations. This is not character assassination, nor is it a dismissal of intelligence or work ethic.
She is clearly capable. She is self-employed, commercially functional, and by her own measures has done well operating independently. That matters. It also explains a great deal.
Her thinking was shaped by a solo environment. One where control is total, challenge is optional, and success is defined internally. That model can work when you are building for yourself. It does not translate automatically into leading a third-sector organisation built on collective responsibility, shared expertise, and accountability to others.
That distinction is everything.
What was missing was not effort or confidence. It was humility. An understanding that leadership in a mission-led organisation is not about imposing a personal operating system, but about integrating, listening, and recognising that others around the table may possess deeper or more relevant expertise.
Instead of treating the role as a learning opportunity, she treated it as a stage. Her version of reality became fixed, non-negotiable, and resistant to evidence. The result was stagnation disguised as certainty.
To be specific and fair: her strengths sat firmly in administration and structure. She was competent at formatting documents, maintaining templates, and organising information. These are legitimate skills. Necessary ones. But they are foundational, not transformational.
Confidence in administrative competence was repeatedly projected far beyond its limits.
Being able to organise information does not equate to strategic thinking. Producing templates does not constitute leadership. Running a business alone does not prepare someone to lead complex teams, navigate competing expertise, or hold accountability without defensiveness.
There is no shame in that. Most highly successful entrepreneurs recognise it early and hire people who can do what they cannot. They understand that leadership is a distinct discipline, not a reward for confidence or longevity.
The failure here was not that she lacked certain skills. It was that she refused to recognise their limits, and instead forced an outdated, rigid, self-referential model onto an organisation that required adaptability, collaboration, and growth.
That is not cruelty to name. It is accuracy.
And accuracy matters - especially in organisations entrusted with public money, people’s livelihoods, and social impact.
None of what I am setting out here should come as a surprise to the board. These concerns were documented repeatedly, including in formal appraisals and in the staff survey that was issued as a procedural exercise and subsequently ignored. The evidence was neither subtle nor new. It was simply disregarded.
Each attempt to operationalise her so-called “vision” failed on contact with reality. What followed instead were prolonged monologues about her own excellence, professionalism, and standards. Competence was asserted rather than demonstrated, proclaimed rather than practised. The organisation was left carrying the consequences.
If I were engaged as an external consultant in the role I currently perform, assessing organisational effectiveness and governance, the diagnosis would be immediate. The chair would be identified as a primary risk without hesitation. Her consistent mishandling of the major responsibilities under her control would be impossible to overlook.
More concerning still would be the composition of the board itself. The presence of close personal connections and family members represents a fundamental breach of good governance. This is not a marginal weakness. It is a textbook failure that concentrates power, suppresses challenge, and actively enables dysfunction rather than preventing it.
Research Context: Narcissistic Leadership Defined
Research tells us narcissists rise to leadership not by accident, but by exploiting appearance and personality rather than substance.
Narcissistic leadership is characterised by:
Excessive self-importance and admiration-seeking
Inflated self-image, often masking deep insecurity
Mastery of self-promotion and "performance" of leadership
Profound lack of empathy and disregard for others' contributions
They ascend because boards confuse confidence with competence.
A polished CV, fluent self-promotion, and the ability to dominate a room often outweigh evidence of actual capability in leading people, building systems, or sustaining organisations. Where scrutiny is light and challenge is performative, certainty is mistaken for authority. Image wins. Substance is assumed.
Narcissistic leaders flourish in precisely these conditions. Not because they are exceptional, but because the environment rewards assertion over evaluation and visibility over verification.
There is an important nuance that much commentary misses: charisma is not a prerequisite.
Some of the most damaging leaders are not charming at all. They are not inspiring, warm, or persuasive in any conventional sense. What they possess instead is relentless repetition. They tell people, again and again, how capable they are. They restate their brilliance so frequently, and with such conviction, that eventually reasonable, well-intentioned people begin to doubt their own judgement.
Over time, observation is replaced by deference. Evidence gives way to narrative. And what should have been questioned becomes accepted, not because it is true, but because challenging it feels exhausting, awkward, or impolite.
That is how mediocrity acquires power. Not through excellence, but through unchecked assertion.
Narcissistic admiration vs. rivalry: Research highlights two sides:
Admiration (charm, assertiveness, initial attraction)
Rivalry (defensiveness, aggression, hostility when challenged)
Both sides can appear in the same person. And over time, the mask slips- revealing rivalry, blame-shifting, and chaos.
Lived example: when the warning signs first appeared
She did not build a strong board. She constructed an inner circle - family members and a long-standing associate - a configuration that any competent governance professional would recognise as a clear conflict and structural failure. It should have been interrogated immediately. Instead, it was allowed to calcify. Confidence, repetition, and sheer force of assertion substituted for independence, until proximity was mistaken for credibility and loyalty for oversight.
I have a reputation for calling out nonsense. Before this role, I considered myself reasonably adept at it. Working alongside a narcissistic leader recalibrated that assessment to an entirely different level.
As operational failures became harder to conceal, the pattern never varied. People were moved on/ pushed out. Procedures were rewritten after the fact. Responsibility was redistributed downwards or sideways. Accountability was never allowed to settle where it belonged. The organisation was reshaped repeatedly - not to improve performance, but to shield one individual from consequence.
What emerged was not a failing system struggling to correct itself, but a system actively redesigned to protect authority at the expense of truth. The organisation did not adapt to reality. Reality was bent to preserve the narrative.
Practical Insights: Don't Be Fooled by Volume or Credentials
Key takeaways for readers:
A sparkling CV can conceal serious deficits in leadership skill and integrity
Charisma isn't always required - narcissists can succeed through relentless self-promotion and repetition alone
Watch for the gap between what someone says they can do and what actually happens when their ideas meet reality
Early warning signs include self-promotion, resistance to questioning, shifting blame, and assembling a sycophantic inner circle
True leadership is revealed when plans meet reality- watch for how those in charge respond to challenges, feedback, and mistakes
If your gut nags at you about someone's style, listen. If you see rules quietly changed and procedures rewritten just before accountability moments, that's your red flag.
Transition: From Volume to Chaos
This blog is about more than my experience; it's about the structural failures that allow narcissists to flourish. In Part 2, we'll reveal how warning signs escalate- how tactics like credit-taking, blame-shifting, and favouritism root themselves in day-to-day operations. I'll show how a simple CRM project became a battle for reality itself.
Want to see the pattern unfold? Part 2: The Warning Signs—Recognising Toxic Leadership Tactics in Real Time.
Part 3: The Personal Toll. When Toxic Leadership Damages Mental Health and Careers
Part 4: Survival Strategies. Protecting Yourself When the System Turns on You
Part 5: Knowing When to Walk Away – Escalation, Exit, and Protecting Your Future
Part 6 - Recovery and Organisational Accountability: Moving Forward and Preventing Future Harm.