Reade Saunders

There is a particular species of man one encounters in failing organisations.

Not the usurper. Not the saboteur. Not the visionary who sees flames as an opportunity for rebirth.

No.

This man is humbler, softer, and altogether more revealing.

He is the one found in doorways.

Neither fully in the room nor fully out of it, he listens for the tone of the loudest voice before deciding which way to lean. His loyalty is sincere but tremulous, like a fern that grows only when shielded from the wind. In structures that are well-built, he flourishes. In structures that begin to buckle, he turns in circles, searching for the nearest pillar that still appears upright.

When the centre falters, he falters with it.

I once watched a man of this type, let us call him the affable lieutenant, move through the dissolution of a small enterprise with the bewildered grace of someone who has been handed a map in a language he cannot read. He had built his identity around being dependable, modestly competent, and quietly loyal to the captain who guided the enterprise. This loyalty had shaped him for years. It gave him posture.

Then one winter, the captain vanished into crisis.

Not abandonment; necessity.

But absence is absence, whatever its cause.

In that void, power re-arranged itself with the speed of a murmuration.

The ambitious circled.

The pragmatic fortified their positions.

Those with old resentments looked for a moment to exhale their grievances into the air.

And the affable lieutenant stood in the doorway, hearing every footstep as a summons.

He began to apologise before accusations were even formed, a habit common to men who learned long ago that pre-emptive remorse is easier than bearing the possibility of having disappointed someone. When rumours reached him – half-heard, half-imagined – he folded under their weight, drafting confessions of unworthiness no one had asked for. His words were a tapestry of self-reproach stitched together with threads of longing for absolution.

Not absolution from wrongdoing; he had done no wrong.

But absolution from the fear of becoming irrelevant.

This fear is far more destabilising than guilt.

In every message he sent, there echoed the ghost of a boy who once believed affection was earned through usefulness, and that usefulness could evaporate at any moment. The organisational collapse awakened that ancient dread. He gave himself away too quickly – offering to resign, to return, to serve, to withdraw, to help, to disappear. Each gesture contradicted the last, not from deceit but from internal trembling.

Men like him do not betray.

They disperse.

Give them solid walls, and they walk a straight corridor with admirable diligence.

Remove the walls, and they pace, unsure which way forward might be harmful or which backward step might offend. They become mirrors of whoever stands closest, adopting that person’s urgency, fear, or ambition as if cordially borrowing their coat in bad weather.

The tragedy, if one wishes to use such a theatrical word, is that these men are often deeply kind.

They remain the ones who protect the documents, lock the door carefully behind them, chase unpaid invoices, and keep the lights on during the final hour of dusk.

Yet beneath their dutiful exterior lies a truth rarely spoken aloud:

Some men cannot remain steady unless someone else is steady first.

In times of structural collapse, this dependency is exposed not as weakness but as a kind of emotional nakedness. Their instinct is not treachery but survival by affiliation. They follow the gravitational pull of whichever figure seems, in the moment, to know what comes next.

The affable lieutenant will never write a memoir.

He will never cast himself as hero or victim.

He will simply move quietly into the next office, the next structure, the next leader who appears to understand the architecture better than he does.

And perhaps that is his fate.

Every organisation contains such a man.

Every crisis reveals him.

And every dissolution leaves him wandering the hallway, key in hand, unsure which doors he is still permitted to open.

It is fashionable to speak of leadership as charisma, strategy, or the will to shape events.

But there is another form of leadership – one less flattering, more melancholic – revealed only when the lights flicker.

It is the leadership others project onto you when they need to believe someone, somewhere, still knows the way out.

In that sense, a faltering organisation is never merely a financial collapse.

It is a psychological one.

A place where ambition sharpens, pragmatism calcifies, and gentle men in doorways whisper apologies into the dark, hoping someone tells them they may stay.