The Loyalty Trap
Thirteen years. Same company.
He'd taken on fourteen extra people without a title change, without a raise, without anyone noticing. Leadership forgot. Again.
And he kept going. Because that's what the strong one does.
Here's the thing about loyalty in organisations. It creates invisible contracts. You give more. They expect more. Nobody renegotiates. And the part of you that decided "I stay because I'm good" slowly becomes "I stay because leaving would mean I wasted it all."
That's not loyalty. That's a trap wearing loyalty's clothes.
I see this pattern more than almost any other. The sunk cost fallacy, but personal. The leader who has built so much institutional knowledge, so many relationships, so much quiet infrastructure — that the thought of starting over feels like erasing themselves.
And underneath that thought, something darker: if I leave and they're fine without me, what does that mean about what I gave?
That question keeps people in organisations for years past the point of growth. Not because the work is meaningful. Because leaving would force them to answer it.
We didn't work on negotiation skills. We didn't prepare a pitch for a raise. We didn't polish the LinkedIn profile and start networking.
We worked on the part that believed his worth was measured by how much he could absorb.
The strong one. The part that decided early — maybe at seven, maybe at fifteen, certainly by his first promotion — that his value lay in his capacity. To hold. To carry. To endure without complaint. The one everyone could rely on, because relying on others felt like weakness.
That part had been running the show for thirty years. It didn't need fixing. It needed to be seen.
Once he could see it — "oh, that's a part of me, not all of me" — something loosened. Not dramatically. Quietly.
He left. On his terms. Built a succession plan that actually worked. Did the right thing without drowning in it.
Not because he stopped caring. Because he started including himself in the care.
The last session he said something that stayed with me: "I didn't leave the company. I left the version of me that needed the company to know I existed."
If you're the one everyone leans on — and nobody asks how you're doing — that's not strength being recognised.
That's strength being consumed.
And the invisible contract you're honouring? Read the fine print. You wrote most of it yourself.
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