Why High Performers Struggle Most Working around Psychopathic Traits

Why High Performers Struggle Most Working around Psychopathic Traits

A few days ago, I wrote a post about Psychopathic Traits and how they show up much more frequently among senior leadership teams.

The people who suffer most around psychopathic leaders are:
- Empathic collaborators
- High-integrity performers
- People motivated by purpose
- Team-first professionals
- Those who assume fairness is the baseline

The mismatch between their values and the executive culture creates emotional and political risk, even if their performance is exceptional. This leads to burnout, confusion, and eventually disengagement or turnover.

So How Do You Succeed Without Losing Yourself?

The goal is not to become more psychopathic to survive. That path leads to burnout, misalignment, and ethical erosion. Instead, the people who thrive use a different playbook:

- Establish Clear Boundaries: Don’t overshare. Don’t get pulled into emotional triangulation. Protect your time, your energy, and your integrity. Keep as much of your personal life to yourself as possible.

- Be Valuable: But Never Threatening. Deliver results, but don’t signal rivalry. Psychopathic leaders often view competence as competition.

- Document Everything: Quiet documentation is your political armor. It reduces the risk of being scapegoated.

- Build Horizontal Alliances: Peers, cross-functional partners, and customers can provide stability that a volatile leader cannot. And, these alliances will help you get your next job when the time comes.

- Stay Emotionally Detached: Treat the environment like a system to navigate, not a family to belong to. Get your emotional need for connection satisfied elsewhere with different people.

- Control Your Narrative: Own your brand, your story, and your visibility beyond any single leader. Find ways to amplify your story.

- Know When to Leave: If the culture requires you to compromise your values or become someone you’re not, you might feel like you can wait it out, endure, or fight it. But, sometimes, exiting on your own timeline is the right strategy.

Not every executive environment is toxic.
Not every demanding leader is a problem.
And not every instance of low empathy indicates psychopathy.

But the normalization of psychopathic traits in leadership is real, it affects organizational health, and it directly influences the experience of countless high performers. Once you can identify these behaviors and understand the dynamics behind them, you have a better chance of not blindsided by them. And, to understand that they don't reflect on you personally.

What are your experiences navigating psychopathic behaviors?