"He needs to develop thicker skin."
I've heard this, um, “advice,” doled out for twenty years. Always about someone young getting destroyed by someone powerful. The engineer who got screamed at for missing a deadline. The designer whose work got torn apart in front of the entire team. The PM who got interrupted seventeen times during her first board presentation.
That PM was mine, actually.
The night before her first board meeting, she was in my office at 9pm, clicking through her deck for the twentieth time. She'd nailed it, I thought. Sharp strategy, clean data, and vision that actually made sense.
"You're ready," I told her.
"Yeah, except for him." She meant our President. "He's going to interrupt me three slides in, probably make some comment about how we're overthinking this, then hijack the conversation to talk about whatever he read on TechCrunch this morning."
She said it like she was describing the weather.
"But whatever," she added, forcing a smile. "It'll toughen me up, right?"
I said something useless like "just stick to your narrative" and let her go home to a sleepless night I’m sure.
The next day went exactly as she predicted. Three slides in: "Why are we making this so complicated?" Twenty minutes of him pontificating about some competitor's feature we'd already evaluated and dismissed. Her sitting there, politely nodding, while months of her work got casually shit on.
She handled it perfectly. Professionally. Even salvaged fifteen minutes at the end to cover her key points. Everyone said she did great for her first time.
She quit six months later. Took two of my best PMs with her.
Here's what pisses me off: I let it happen. I sat there watching him derail her presentation, and I did nothing. Told myself she was learning. Building resilience. Developing that thick skin everyone says you need to survive at the top.
But thick skin isn't strength. It's scar tissue. It's what happens when you stop expecting better and start expecting survival.
You know what thick skin actually does? It teaches people to take the hit without questioning why it came. To normalize dysfunction. To mistake endurance for growth. Eventually, you stop feeling the bad stuff. Sure, but you also stop feeling the good stuff. You stop noticing when someone's struggling. You stop caring when culture turns toxic.
I've watched brilliant people turn into corporate zombies this way. They learned to absorb abuse, smile through humiliation, play the game. They got promoted. They got rich. They also got hollow.
What that PM actually needed wasn't thicker skin. She needed someone to interrupt the interruption. To say, "Let her finish." To pull the President aside afterward and tell him he was out of line. She needed courage from her leaders. The active kind that steps forward and says, "this isn't okay."
But courage is harder than telling people to toughen up. It means risking your own comfort. Maybe your job. It means being the person who makes things awkward by calling out bad behavior when everyone else is looking at their shoes.
Most leaders won't do it. Including me, for too many years. We tell people to develop thick skin while the assholes run wild. We prioritize our own survival over our team's dignity. We call it "learning to play the game" or "understanding executive dynamics" or whatever garbage helps us sleep at night.
I regret every time I failed to give someone the backup they deserved.
Meanwhile, talented people keep leaving. Not because they can't take the heat, but because they realize the heat is unnecessary. That other companies exist where you can do great work without developing PTSD. Where challenge comes with support, not humiliation.
That VP who quit? She's a VP of Product at a successful startup now. She messages me sometimes. Never mentions that board meeting, but I think about it every time I see her name.
I think about how I chose the easy path—letting her "toughen up"—instead of the right one. How I confused her surviving with her thriving. How I failed her by not having the courage to protect the courage she walked in with.
These days, when someone tells me a junior person needs thicker skin, I ask a different question: "What does the senior person need to stop doing?"
Because when you tell someone to develop thicker skin, what you're really saying is: "I'm not going to protect you from this. You're on your own."
And that's not leadership. That's cowardice.
Especially when you have the power to stop it but choose not to.
Great, inspiring writing!