The Throne Room and the Back Office
What Fifteen + Years Behind the Curtain Taught Me About Power, Performance, and the People Who Confuse the Two
I’ve spent fifteen + years in rooms most people don’t know exist.
Not the stages. Not the podcasts. Not the carefully lit video studios where transformation gets packaged and sold.
The back offices. The green rooms. The strategy calls at midnight when the launch is failing. The private conversations where the mask comes off, and you see who someone actually is when no one’s watching.
I’ve worked with people who’ve built empires, teaching others how to live. I’ve seen $50 million launches from the inside. I’ve watched audiences of hundreds of thousands weep while the person on stage checked their phone in the wings thirty seconds later.
I’ve witnessed genuine greatness—the kind that makes you believe humans are capable of extraordinary things.
And I’ve witnessed the other kind. The kind that looks identical from the audience but feels completely different when you’re close enough to see the gears.
This is what I learned.
If this resonates, share it with someone who needs to hear it.
The Education You Can’t Buy
Let me tell you about the first time I understood what I was really learning.
I was twenty-six years old, sitting in a conference room that cost more per hour than I made in a week. Around me were people whose net worth I couldn’t comprehend, whose names appeared in publications I read for aspirational entertainment. And at the head of the table was someone I’d admired for years—someone whose books had shaped how I thought about business, about ambition, about what was possible.
I was there to take notes. To be invisible. To absorb.
And what I absorbed that day changed everything.
Because in that room, with no cameras and no audience, I watched this person I’d admired berate a team member for a mistake that wasn’t actually a mistake. I watched the room go silent. I watched everyone’s eyes find somewhere else to look. And I watched this leader—this person who wrote about emotional intelligence and conscious leadership—demonstrate neither.
It lasted maybe ninety seconds. Then the meeting continued. But something in me had shifted permanently.
I realized I wasn’t just there to learn what they taught. I was there to learn who they were. And those were two very different curricula.
There’s a particular kind of education you receive when you’re the person behind the person.
You learn that charisma and character are not the same thing. That someone can move a room to tears and then berate their assistant in the hallway. That the language of transformation can be learned like any other language—fluently, convincingly—without the speaker having transformed anything except their bank account.
You also learn what the real thing looks like. And once you’ve seen it, the counterfeits become obvious.
I’ve had the privilege of working with leaders who were exactly who they appeared to be. People whose private behavior matched their public teaching. People who treated the newest intern with the same respect they gave the biggest donor. People who, when no one was watching, were somehow more impressive than when everyone was.
These people changed me. Not through their frameworks or their content, but through the consistency of their character. They taught me that integrity isn’t what you say—it’s the absence of a gap between what you say and what you do when it costs you something.
But I’ve also worked with the other kind. And they taught me something too.
They taught me how to see.
The First Pattern: Watch How They Treat the Invisible
Early in my career, I was on a team supporting a major launch for someone whose name you’d recognize. The kind of launch that requires dozens of people working eighteen-hour days for weeks.
On the final day, when the numbers came in and exceeded every projection, this person gathered the core team. I expected a celebration. Gratitude. Some acknowledgment of the sacrifice everyone had made.
Instead, they spent forty minutes dissecting what could have been better. What was missed. Who had dropped balls. The critique wasn’t wrong—there’s always room for improvement. But the timing revealed something. In the moment of victory, their instinct was to diminish rather than celebrate. To remind everyone of their inadequacy rather than their contribution.
I watched the energy drain from the room. People who had given everything left feeling like they’d failed.
Later that week, I watched this same person give a keynote about servant leadership. The audience was moved. I sat in the back, thinking about the team members who’d quietly updated their resumes after that meeting.
The lesson: Watch how leaders treat the people who can do nothing for them. The assistant. The tech person. The caterer. The driver. Watch what happens to the “we” language when something goes wrong. Watch whose name gets mentioned in victory and whose gets mentioned in defeat.
The way someone treats the invisible people tells you everything about how they’ll eventually treat you—once you’re no longer useful.
I write about the patterns no one talks about. If you want more:
The Second Pattern: Listen for the Shift in Private
There was another leader I worked with—someone who taught emotional intelligence, communication, and conscious relationships. Their content was genuinely good. Their frameworks helped people.
But in private, something different emerged.
In private, there were the comments about other people in the industry. Not critique—contempt. A steady undercurrent of positioning, of comparison, of needing to be seen as the best, the most evolved, the one who really understood.
In private, there was the subtle rewriting of history. Stories that shifted depending on the audience. Credit that migrated. Origins that became more noble with each telling.
In private, there was the reaction to being questioned. Not curiosity—defense. A tightening. A subtle punishment for anyone who challenged the narrative.
The public content was about growth and openness and the courage to be wrong. The private behavior was about protection and control and the need to be right.
The lesson: Listen to how people talk about others when those others aren’t present. Listen to what happens when they’re challenged, questioned, or disagreed with. Listen to whether their stories stay consistent or reshape themselves for convenience.
The private frequency always tells you what the public broadcast is hiding.
The Third Pattern: Follow the Trail of Former People
This one took me years to learn, because I kept making excuses for it.
I’d notice that certain leaders had a pattern of people who used to be close to them. Former partners. Former executives. Former collaborators. People who had once been in the inner circle and were now... gone. Not just gone—erased. Not spoken of. Or worse, spoken of as cautionary tales.
“They couldn’t handle the growth.” “They weren’t aligned with the mission.” “They had their own issues.”
And I’d accept these explanations. Because the leader was compelling. Because the mission seemed real. Because I wanted to believe.
Then I became one of the former people.
And I discovered that the same story was now being told about me.
The lesson: When there’s a pattern of former people, get curious. Not suspicious—curious. How do exits happen in this orbit? Cleanly, with honesty and care? Or suddenly, with narratives that protect the leader?
The trail of former people tells you what your eventual exit will look like. And everyone eventually exits.
Have you ever been one of the “former people”? What did that teach you?
The Fourth Pattern: Measure the Distance Between the Sermon and the Supper
I once sat at dinner with someone who had spent the day teaching about presence, about really seeing the people in front of you, about the sacred act of attention.
At dinner, they spent the entire meal looking at their phone. When they did engage, it was to talk about themselves—their next project, their recent success, their ideas. The questions they asked weren’t questions; they were setups for their next monologue.
The people at that table were accomplished in their own right. They had things to offer, insights to share. But in the economy of that meal, there was only one person whose contribution mattered.
The sermon was about presence. The supper was about performance.
The lesson: Watch what happens when there’s no audience. When there’s no camera, no stage, no launch to promote. Watch whether someone can be with you or only at you.
The distance between the sermon and the supper tells you whether you’re witnessing integration or just a very good act.
What the Real Ones Taught Me
But here’s what I don’t want you to miss: I’ve also worked with people who were the genuine article. And they were different in ways that are hard to articulate but unmistakable when you experience them.
I remember one leader—someone who had built and sold multiple companies, who could have commanded any room they walked into—who spent the first thirty minutes of every team meeting asking about people’s lives. Not as a warm-up exercise. They actually wanted to know. They remembered that someone’s kid was applying to colleges. They followed up on a parent’s health scare. They noticed when someone seemed off and made space to ask about it privately.
In fifteen years, I’ve never seen another leader do this with the same consistency. And I’ve never worked with a more loyal team. People would have walked through fire for this person—not because of the money or the title, but because they felt genuinely seen.
They were more interested than interesting. In private, they asked questions. Real questions. They wanted to know about you—not as a networking exercise, but because they were genuinely curious about humans. They remembered what you told them. They followed up. They saw you.
They owned their shadows publicly. They didn’t just talk about growth; they talked about their actual failures. Not the curated failures that make for good storytelling, but the ugly ones. The ones that don’t have redemptive endings yet. The ones that still cost them things.
I once watched a leader stand in front of their entire organization and talk about a decision they’d made that had hurt people. Not a business failure—a character failure. A time they’d let their ego override their judgment, and people had paid the price. They named it specifically. They didn’t spin it into a growth story. They just owned it, publicly, and committed to doing better.
The room was silent. Not uncomfortable silence—sacred silence. The kind that happens when someone does something so rare that nobody quite knows how to respond.
That’s what integrity looks like in leadership. It’s not the absence of mistakes. It’s the willingness to stand in front of the people who trust you and say: I got this wrong. And I’m still here. And I’m still trying.
They celebrated others’ success without comparison. When someone in their orbit won, they were delighted. Not performatively—genuinely. There was no subtle diminishment, no “yes, but,” no quiet repositioning of themselves as the real source.
I watched one of these leaders spend an entire hour of their own platform promoting someone else’s work. Not a strategic partnership—just genuine enthusiasm for something good. When I asked about it later, they seemed confused by the question. “Their work is excellent,” they said. “Why wouldn’t I share it?”
That kind of abundance—the belief that someone else’s success doesn’t diminish yours—is rare. Most people in positions of influence are running a constant calculation of relative status. The real ones aren’t keeping score.
They handled endings with care. When professional relationships concluded, there were conversations. Real ones. Not always comfortable, but honest. There was an attempt at understanding, at closure, at preserving the humanity of everyone involved.
I once left an organization led by someone like this. The exit conversation took two hours. They asked what they could have done differently. They offered to write recommendations. They checked in three months later, then six months later, then a year later—not to recruit me back, but to see how I was doing.
That’s how I knew everything they’d taught about leadership was real. The ending matched the beginning.
They were consistent across audiences. The person you met backstage was the person you saw onstage. The person at the team meeting was the person at the dinner. There was no code-switching based on who was present and what could be gained.
These people exist. They are not the majority, but they are not unicorns either. And once you’ve experienced what it’s like to work with someone whose inside matches their outside, you can never again mistake the counterfeit for the real.
This is the kind of thing they don’t teach in business school.
The Geometry of It
Let me give you a framework, because frameworks are how I think.
Imagine every relationship as having an energy vector—a direction and a magnitude.
When you’re in the presence of a genuine leader, the energy vector points toward your growth. Toward your becoming. Even when the interaction is challenging—even when you’re being pushed or confronted or held to a standard you’re not sure you can meet—you can feel that the energy is for you. It’s moving you forward.
When you’re in the presence of a performative leader, the energy vector points toward them. You are a supporting character in their story. Your growth matters insofar as it reflects well on them. Your struggles are inconvenient unless they can be mined for content. You feel it as a subtle but persistent drain—a sense that you’re always giving more than you’re receiving, always somehow slightly less important than you were led to believe.
This isn’t about generosity or selfishness in the simple sense. Genuine leaders can be demanding, exacting, even difficult. They can push you harder than you’ve ever been pushed. But the vector still points toward you.
Performative leaders can be charming, generous, and apparently giving. They can shower you with opportunity, access, and praise. But the vector still points toward them.
The lesson: Learn to feel the vector. It will save you years.
The Practical Advice
Because theory without application is just intellectual entertainment.
Before you go deep with any mentor, leader, or organization:
Talk to the former people. Not the testimonials—the exits. Find someone who used to be in the inner circle and is no longer. Ask them what happened. Listen for the details.
Watch the team, not the leader. How do the people closest to this leader behave? Do they seem alive, engaged, growing? Or do they seem diminished, careful, managed? The team is a mirror.
Test the disagreement. Early in any relationship, respectfully disagree with something. Watch what happens. Curiosity, or defense? Engagement, or punishment?
Notice your own body. After interactions with this person, do you feel expanded or contracted? Energized or drained? Clearer or more confused? Your nervous system knows things before your mind does.
Ask about failure. Not “what’s your biggest failure” in the interview sense—everyone has a rehearsed answer to that. Ask about something that’s still unresolved. Something that still costs them. Watch whether they can go there or whether they redirect to safer ground.
Wait. Give it time. Twelve months minimum before you fully invest your trust. Patterns take time to emerge. Anyone can maintain a performance for a quarter. Very few can maintain one for a year.
When you’re in the orbit of power:
Keep your own counsel. Don’t let proximity to someone impressive erode your own judgment. Your discernment is the most valuable thing you have. Don’t trade it for access.
Document quietly. Not from suspicion, but from clarity. Keep notes on what’s said, what’s promised, and what happens. Memory is malleable. Records are not.
Maintain outside relationships. The most dangerous position is total immersion in one person’s orbit. Keep connections outside the circle. They’re your reality check and your safety net.
Know your exit before you need it. Understand what leaving would look like. What would you need? What would you lose? Don’t wait until you’re in crisis to figure this out.
Trust the first crack. When you see the first inconsistency between the public story and the private reality, don’t explain it away. File it. Watch for the second one. And the third. Patterns reveal themselves to people who are paying attention.
Which of these lessons landed hardest for you?
The Inheritance
Here’s what I want you to understand:
I don’t tell you this from bitterness. I tell you this from gratitude.
Every leader I’ve worked with—genuine and otherwise—taught me something. The genuine ones taught me what to aspire to. The others taught me what to watch for. Both educations were necessary.
I am a better strategist because I’ve seen strategy deployed for service and for manipulation. I am a better leader because I’ve seen leadership that builds and leadership that extracts. I am a better human because I’ve been close enough to watch the gap between sermon and supper, and I’ve learned to feel it in my bones.
This education cost me things. Time. Trust. Relationships I thought were real and turned out to be conditional. A certain kind of innocence about the people who stand on stages and talk about transformation.
But it gave me something too. It gave me discernment. And discernment, once earned, cannot be taken away.
The Invitation
If you’re reading this and you’re early in your career, working in proximity to someone impressive, building someone else’s empire while you figure out your own—I want you to know: this is valuable work. The access you have is rare. The education you’re receiving is real.
But keep your eyes open.
Watch what happens when no one’s watching. Listen to the frequency that only plays in private. Follow the trail of former people. Measure the distance between the sermon and the supper.
And when you see what you see, trust it.
You don’t have to blow up your situation. You don’t have to make enemies. But you do have to honor your own perception. You do have to remember that your judgment is not for sale, regardless of how much access you’re being offered.
The greatest gift you can give your future self is to remain someone whose discernment is intact. Don’t trade it. Don’t explain it away. Don’t let proximity to power convince you that what you’re seeing isn’t real.
See clearly. Move wisely. And when it’s time to go, go cleanly.
That’s how you inherit the best of what you’ve witnessed and leave the rest behind.
A Final Word
There will come a day when you’re the one in the position of power.
When you have the team, the audience, and the influence. When people are watching how you treat the invisible ones. When your private frequency is being compared to your public broadcast. When the trail of former people starts to form behind you.
When that day comes, remember what you learned in the back office.
Be the person whose inside matches their outside.
Be the person who can be questioned without punishment.
Be the person whose former people speak well of you—not because you bought their silence, but because you earned their respect.
Be the person who handles endings with the same integrity you bring to beginnings.
Be the person whose sermon and supper are the same meal.
That’s the real work. That’s the real transformation.
Everything else is just performance.
Know someone building in proximity to power? Send them this.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from watching leaders up close?
For more on patterns, power, and what actually works: