The Deprogramming
A Journey from Authoritarian to Participative Leadership
Every leader carries a cultural virus, an ingrained set of assumptions about how power, authority, and decision-making should operate. For the first decade of my career, I was a carrier of the authoritarian strain. I contracted it in the high-pressure, command-and-control environments of investment banking, a world where the leadership model was brutally simple: information flowed down, and obedience flowed up. It was a culture that felt normal, even necessary, until I left and discovered it was a pathology.
This is the story of my deprogramming, a journey from one deeply embedded leadership model to another, and the painful but necessary inoculation that made the transition possible.
The Infection: Life in an Exploitative Authoritative System
I started my software career at Goldman Sachs a few years after the first dot-com bust. At the time, investment banking was the destination for a certain kind of ambition, one that accepted a notoriously authoritarian, high-pressure, and cutthroat culture as the price of admission. The leadership style, in the language of Rensis Likert’s management systems, was a textbook “System 1: Exploitative Authoritative.”1 Its tenets were control, fear, and top-down decision-making.
This wasn’t a subtle phenomenon. It was common to witness engineers being subjected to withering public berating by their managers for mistakes, large or small. These exchanges were performed in the open, outside managers’ offices, serving as a clear warning to the rest of the team: comply, or you’re next. Fear was the primary management tool. Employee well-being was a foreign concept; professional development was limited to mandatory compliance training on regulations like SOX and KYC. The idea of a one-on-one meeting as a space for coaching or connection was nonexistent. Meetings with managers were prescribed corporate rituals (i.e. annual reviews, compensation discussions) not dialogues.
Leaders were distant, high priests in a corporate religion where subordinates were expected to be mindless followers. They held all decision-making authority, and the core expectation was unquestioning obedience. Autonomy was a liability. Fortunately, as my career progressed at Deutsche Bank, I encountered more empathetic managers who modeled a more humane approach. When I eventually stepped into management, I tried to be a respectful leader. But I was still operating within the same authoritarian OS. I followed the models I had seen because I wasn’t aware that management was a practice, a craft with skills that could be learned, developed, and mastered. I was a product of my environment, unknowingly perpetuating the system that had forged me.
The Inoculation: A Hard Collision with a Healthier Culture
It is more difficult to move from an authoritarian style to a democratic style than vice versa.
Ten years in banking had steeped me in that authoritarian culture. The transition to Etsy was a systemic shock. Suddenly, I was immersed in a world where one-on-ones were the heartbeat of the team, where participative decision-making was the default, and where authentic care for employees was the baseline expectation. It was an entirely alien mindset, and in hindsight, the most important deprogramming I would ever undergo.
Old habits, however, die hard. A few weeks into my new role, convinced I was helping my team, I unilaterally designed a new process and announced it via email. It was a classic command-and-control move, an echo of my past. The response was immediate. Within five minutes, my new manager asked to speak with me in private.
Sitting in one of Etsy’s many dedicated 1-1 rooms (!), he asked a simple, disarming question: “Did you run this by the team before you sent it out?” He knew I hadn’t. He understood my background and was empathetic, but his feedback was delivered with surgical precision: that top-down approach wouldn’t work here. My first reaction was defensive, a flicker of indignation. Then, embarrassment.
Around that time, I had read Carol Dweck’s Mindset,2 and the concept of a “growth mindset” resonated deeply. It posits that we are not captive to our history or our perceived limitations; they are merely data points from which we can grow. If not for that book and my conscious effort to internalize its lessons, I’m not sure I could have set aside my ego to truly hear the feedback. I’m glad I did. In that small room, I was being offered an inoculation against the cultural virus I’d carried for a decade.
It had never crossed my mind to involve engineers in team-wide decisions. It wasn’t a skill I lacked; it was a category of thought that didn’t exist in my professional vocabulary.
The Lucid Outcome: The Compounding Returns of Trust
The more I exercised this new muscle of participative leadership, at Etsy and in every role since, the more unequivocal the results became. A leadership model built on trust and collaboration isn’t just “nicer”; it’s dramatically more effective. Genuinely caring about your people and meaningfully involving them in decisions that affect them unlocks a level of engagement, quality, and ownership that an authoritarian system can never achieve.
The lesson was painfully obvious in hindsight, but that’s the nature of cultural pathogens: you don’t know you’re infected until you’re exposed to a healthy immune system. That difficult conversation was a gift. It forced me to confront my ingrained behaviors and begin the slow, deliberate work of building a new leadership OS, one based on the profound and simple idea that the best outcomes are achieved with people, not through them.
Wikipedia, “Likert’s management systems,” June 2, 2025, wikipedia.com.
Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Ballantine Books, 2016.