For a long time, I believed leadership was revealed through vision.
Through strategy. Through confidence. Through the ability to inspire people toward a shared future. That was the story I had been told, and for years I wanted it to be true.
What I eventually learned is that leadership is revealed most clearly under pressure.
Not when things are going well. Not when budgets are healthy and outcomes are easy to claim. But when resources tighten. When mistakes surface. When accountability becomes uncomfortable.
That is when values stop being words and start becoming actions.
I watched leadership change hands quickly. People who had held senior roles for years were made redundant one after another. Each exit was framed as necessary. Strategic. Forward looking. The language stayed smooth even as the reserves quietly drained.
Then the hiring began.
New roles appeared. Senior titles. Large salaries. People with personal connections moved into positions of influence. Loyalty seemed to matter more than capability. Alignment more than competence.
All of this happened while the narrative shifted publicly.
There was suddenly no budget. No money for proper exits. No capacity for transparency. And yet people continued to be pushed out quietly, without the dignity of honest conversations or fair processes.
That contradiction stayed with me.
It is one thing to make hard decisions. It is another to disguise them behind ethics you no longer practice.
What became clear over time was that leadership was not failing to see the consequences. It was choosing which consequences to absorb and which to pass down.
Financial pressure was not shared evenly. Risk was not distributed fairly. The people with the least power carried the greatest cost.
I noticed how quickly responsibility disappeared upward and reappeared downward. How decisions were framed as unavoidable rather than owned. How harm was softened through language rather than addressed through action.
This is how ethical erosion happens.
Not through one dramatic failure, but through a series of small justifications that slowly disconnect leadership from the human impact of their choices.
What troubled me most was how normal it all appeared from the outside. Meetings continued. Performance language remained intact. Public messaging stayed optimistic. There was no acknowledgment of the instability being created beneath the surface.
And inside that gap, people were being asked to absorb uncertainty, stress, and loss without explanation.
Leadership often speaks about resilience in moments like these. About adaptability. About shared commitment.
What it rarely speaks about is responsibility.
Responsibility looks like telling the truth even when it damages reputation. It looks like protecting people, not just positions. It looks like making decisions that cost those in power something real.
When leadership chooses self preservation instead, the ethical cost does not disappear.
It transfers.
It shows up in burnout. In fear. In silence. In people doubting themselves for situations they did not create. It shows up in exits that feel diminishing rather than respectful.
I carried the impact of those choices longer than I expected. Not because I did not understand the business realities, but because I could see the alternatives that were never explored.
Leadership always has options.
The question is which values those options serve.
What I know now is this.
When leadership protects its inner circle at the expense of transparency and fairness, it is not neutral. It is a choice. And that choice shapes culture far more powerfully than any values statement ever could.
If you have ever watched an organisation talk about ethics while quietly abandoning them, I want you to know that your discomfort was not naivety.
It was awareness.
And noticing that difference is often the moment you stop confusing authority with integrity.
Copyright © 2026 Lynette Diehm.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced without written permission of the author.
