The Art of Faking It

I’m terrible at faking it.

No, not orgasms, I am talking about organisational obedience or corporate conformity. Call it what you will, but I have now come to accept that I simply lack the emotional bandwidth to engage in the corporate “house of cards”. I am simply incapable of pretending that dumb ideas are brilliant, my face gives it away.

The corporate world looks like theatre with terrible lighting—pretending leadership is this sacred art form when it’s often just an adult version of “Simon Says.” The difference? In kindergarten, Simon actually had better ideas.

I didn’t learn about leadership from a LinkedIn post on “servant leadership.” One of my better leadership lessons comes from having worked with a political leader who doesn’t just tolerate being challenged—he invites it, like it’s a goddamn RSVP-only event.

This man can pull rank at any moment, but instead, he does something radical: he has no qualms about admitting that he doesn’t have all the answers. He doesn’t confuse confidence with omniscience.

When he says, “I’d like to hear what you think about this,” it isn’t weakness; it is power dressed as humility. He doesn’t perform intelligence; he curates it. His job isn’t to be the smartest person in the room; it is to build a room that is smarter than him. Inspiring no?

And then there was this other leader I once worked for, let’s call him M. Ganesh.

Ganesh wasn’t just a terrible manager, he was a leadership cautionary tale in human form. Working for him felt like a hostage situation with daily check-ins that lasted hours (a daily meeting once lasted 6 hours) .

Every meeting felt like a TED Talk no one asked for, where the only acceptable response was allegiance masking existential dread.

Disagreeing with M. Ganesh was like bringing a fork to a gunfight. He didn’t debate; he retaliated like two-year old toddler - “You’ll do this because I am your boss, and I’m asking you to do it.”

Criticism wasn’t an opportunity for growth—it was career suicide served with passive-aggressive feedback. And the worst part was that it wasn’t a bug in the system. It was the system.

M. Ganesh didn’t “accidentally” create a culture of fear. He was the architect. He didn’t lead with vision; he led with insecurity wrapped in a black T shirt. The goal wasn’t organisational success—it was personal validation. His company wasn’t thriving; it was surviving. It still is. Barely.

Did the rest of his leadership team notice? Oh, they most definitely did. Except, they didn’t care. “You know, he’s one of the saner leaders in the industry,” they’d say, as if the bar for sanity was somewhere between “functional sociopath” and “didn’t light the office on fire.

That’s when it hit me: toxic leadership isn’t an accident. It’s a group project.

It thrives because people are more committed to comfort than truth. They’d rather protect fragile egos, collect their pay checks and company stocks than risk discomfort. And let’s be honest—comfort is the currency of corporate survival.

But growth doesn’t live in comfort. It lives in tension, in friction, in those uncomfortable moments when someone finally says, “Hey, this idea sucks,” and no one gets fired for it.

Leadership isn’t about titles, org charts, or how many times someone says “noted your massage” without gagging. It’s about creating spaces where people are allowed to be smarter than us—and where we’re smart enough to let them.

Because if everyone agrees with us, we’re not leading. We’re just monologuing in an echo chamber, slowly mistaking the sound of our own voice for wisdom.

And that? That’s not leadership. That’s just noise. If dissent feels like a threat instead of a gift, we’re not leading; we’re managing fear. Leadership that doesn’t invite challenge isn’t leadership at all. It’s a stage play of control, a hollow exercise in ego preservation.

So, let’s drop the corporate cosplay.

We don’t need a gym in the office to say we care about employee well-being or culture. We need commitment for building spaces where dissent is valued as the ultimate form of respect. The most revolutionary act in any organization is creating an environment where people are more committed to growth than to comfort.

The systems we build can either liberate human potential or suffocate it.

The choice is ours.