The Quiet Tactics That Take Leaders Apart

Suppression at the executive level is rarely loud. Here’s how to see it, and how to handle it.

The first time I walked into an organization that was destroyed from the inside, the dysfunction was so far gone that journalists were writing front page news about it.

The mayor and the council brought me in. Not to consult. To take it over and turn it around. The executive team, and people under them, were running shadow operations. The board had lost control -even though they pretended they hadn’t. The people still trying to lead with any integrity were being shut down, fast and quietly – or let go. And every person in that building somehow believed they were the victim of everyone else.

It was almost comical - it was also completely real. And it taught me something I’ve watched stay true in every turnaround since. It is also true in every organization.

The most dangerous power moves at the top aren’t loud. They don’t look like conflict - they look like collaboration, process and concern. That’s exactly why they work.

Most people picture a power play as a raised voice or an open fight. It’s the complete opposite. It’s polished. It’s deniable. And it’s designed to take a capable leader apart one small, reasonable-sounding move at a time.

I am sure you recognize the moves even if you’ve never had language for them.

You make a clear point and the room moves on. Ten minutes later someone restates it in their own words and now it counts, now it has momentum, now it’s theirs. You sit there wondering if you were unclear. You weren’t - the room just couldn’t hear it from you.

Or a decision that sits squarely in your scope gets made without you, and when you raise it you’re told it must have been an oversight, they assumed you were aligned. You weren’t consulted. You were informed after the fact.

Or you get feedback about your tone. Not your analysis, not your judgment. Your tone. Vague enough that there’s nothing to fix, just enough to make you start managing how you come across instead of what you’re saying.

Or you’re praised, warmly and publicly, and somehow that praise arrives at the exact moment your scope is being quietly narrowed. Valued. Appreciated. And sidelined in the same breath.

None of it is dramatic. All of it is strategic. And it’s most effective when you turn it on yourself. You start thinking “maybe I overstepped, maybe I need to prove myself more, maybe I should say it differently next time”. So you shrink - and the play wins without anyone ever having to confront you.

I worked with a founder who kept finding that decisions about her own company were being shaped in side conversations she only heard about afterward, by an investor who liked to arrive at the formal meeting with things already settled. She thought she was bad at managing her board. She wasn’t. She was being managed.

It helps to know this has a name and a history. In 1945 a Norwegian writer, Ingjald Nissen, described nine techniques people use to dominate and diminish others in groups. In the 1970s the Norwegian psychologist and politician Berit Ås distilled them to five and gave them the name they still have, master suppression techniques. Making someone invisible. Ridicule. Withholding information. The double bind, where you’re wrong whatever you do. Heaping blame, where raising the problem makes you the problem. She later added two more, and others have extended the list since. The point isn’t the academic lineage. The point is that this behavior is old, studied and patterned. It isn’t personal to you, and it isn’t new. Once you see the pattern, you stop experiencing it as a private failing and start reading it as what it is.

Because here’s what the tactics are actually protecting. Not someone’s ego, even though it can look that way. They protect the system. They protect comfort, legacy and concentrated influence. When a leader is clear, effective and hard to manage, that leader becomes inconvenient. And inconvenient leaders don’t get confronted. They get contained or removed as soon as it’s legally possible.

I was effective in those turnaround rooms for one reason, and it's the same reason clients hire me now. I read the room and the people in it, I saw the plays before they were made, and I worked out how to keep leading anyway. I had no interest in pretending they weren’t happening.

A colleague told me later I’d earned two nicknames behind the scenes. The Rottweiler with silk gloves. The Grim Reaper. I took both as compliments. They meant I saw the game, I didn’t flinch, and I delivered.

And here’s the part that matters for you, regardless if the play is being run on you directly or you’re watching it happen to someone on your team. You don’t counter it by getting louder. You don’t counter it by playing the same game back. You counter it by getting cleaner.

When someone restates your point as their own, you don’t fight for credit - you anchor it. “That’s the direction I laid out a few minutes ago. Thank you for bringing it up again. Let me take it the next step.” Calm, no edge, and the room recalibrates.

When you’re looped in late, you name it without heat. “Let’s walk back through what was decided before I was brought in, so I understand where I can still shape this.” You’re not accusing anyone. You’re making the exclusion visible, which is the one thing the move can’t survive.

When the feedback is vague, you make it specific. “Tell me the exact behavior and the exact impact, so I have something to work with.” Vagueness is the weapon - precision disarms it.

And when the concern is suddenly about your tone, you move it back to substance. “Let’s stay with the content. If the message is uncomfortable, that’s worth looking at, but it still needs to be heard.”

None of these are aggressive. That’s the point. You’re not matching the play. You’re refusing to be destabilized by it, in language so clean it can’t be argued with.

And it doesn’t only run on you from above. A leader who can’t see these moves sometimes tolerates them inside her own team without noticing, and under pressure occasionally reaches for one herself. Seeing the whole pattern is what lets you run a room where it doesn’t take root.

Here’s what shifts once you can do this. You stop being surprised. And once you’re no longer surprised, you’re no longer destabilized. You see the redirect before it happens. You hold your ground instead of over-explaining. You stop trying to be seen by the people who benefit from overlooking you. You're in the driver's seat - not the passenger seat.

The plays don’t stop. The arena doesn’t change. But the spell breaks. You stop reading the room as a verdict on your worth and start reading it as information, which is all it ever was.

And the leader who can do that, calmly, without theatrics, becomes the one thing these systems can’t manage.

Someone who sees the whole board, and doesn’t flinch.

/Ulrika Drawn from real work and adapted to protect confidentiality. Identifying details have been changed.