Natalie Abou-Alwan: What Toxic Bosses Reveal About Leadership, and How to Fix It in Yourself

Natalie Abou-Alwan found out long after the fact. A woman in a large company where she worked had taken a personal dislike to her, and had quietly told a very important person in the business that Natalie lacked interpersonal skills. The colleague added that she would be working on those skills with her. She never mentioned any of this to Natalie, and she never worked with her on anything.

It is a small story, but anyone who has spent time in a large organisation will recognise it. Natalie calls it "negative propaganda", the drip of untruths into the pool of employees that slowly shapes how people are seen, and she says she watched it happen "time and time again", to men and women alike. Her explanation for why people behave this way is the thread that runs through her book, How to Navigate Your Career Like a Legend, and through her conversation with James Vincent on the ActionCOACH podcast. It comes down to one line: "Insecurity is loud. So the bigger you make yourself, the more insecure you probably are."

That idea cuts both ways, which is what makes it useful. It helps you understand the toxic boss in front of you. It also asks an uncomfortable question about the person in the mirror. Natalie's argument is that the fix for both starts in the same place: an honest look at yourself, and the humility to act on what you find.

Why Insecurity Is Loud and the Biggest Egos Are Often the Most Fragile

Natalie's career gives her plenty of material. An Oxford graduate, she has worked as general counsel across several businesses, including JPMorgan Chase and BP, and has been named a Rising Star on the Legal 500 Powerlist. Like most people who have climbed that far, she has worked with "the good, the bad and the ugly" of leaders. She is candid that she learned the most from the bad ones.

What the bad ones had in common, she says, was a lack of humility. "Where they go wrong is really when they start inflating themselves." What looks like ego from the outside is, in her experience, usually insecurity underneath. James put it back to her plainly, and she agreed: "That's the way I see it, and that's how I've seen it play out."

Her counterexample is an unexpected one for a corporate lawyer: Elvis Presley. "He was just naturally big. He naturally had an aura," she says, and yet the stories that keep surfacing about him are about how humble he was. Natalie admits she didn't set out to write a book about humility. Only when she read it back did she notice it was the common strand running through every legend she had chosen. Her definition of being a legend is simple: you don't think of yourself as bigger or better than anybody else, and you still inspire the people around you.

For business owners, this reframes a familiar problem. The manager who dominates every meeting, takes credit and talks other people down is rarely as secure as they look. Seeing that clearly won't make the behaviour acceptable. It will change how you respond to it.

How a Personal Boardroom Protects You From a Toxic Boss

Understanding a toxic boss is one thing. Surviving one is another, and Natalie is realistic about how hard that is, particularly early in a career. When she was training as a solicitor or one or two years qualified, she found it very difficult to confront a toxic leader. Telling a senior, politically connected boss what you think of them is, as she puts it, "career suicide".

What worked for her was building what she calls a personal boardroom. This is a group of trusted people who will give you honest, constructive challenge. She is clear that it should not be a room full of cheerleaders "who are just going to high-five you for everything you've done", because that isn't authentic and it isn't helpful.

Her boardroom included colleagues inside the company who knew both her and the boss, former bosses she respected, people she worked with every day, and family and friends who had known her for years and seen every side of her character. The question she brought to them was a simple one: am I like this?

The value lies in what happens next. If the people you trust tell you, "You're a little bit abrasive here," or "You could brush up on these skills," you have something real to work on. If they tell you the criticism is completely untrue, then, in Natalie's words, "at least you know where you stand, and you start seeing the game being played more clearly." Either way, it gives you the power not to take things so personally.

The colleague who spread the story about Natalie's interpersonal skills made a basic mistake. She never had the honest, two-way conversation that Natalie now sees as essential to good leadership. She also misjudged the room, not realising Natalie had a strong relationship with the person she had spoken to. The truth came out eventually. "You can be lying your way through a career," Natalie says, "but it's gonna get found out." As a lawyer, she is firmly on the side of the old advice James quoted back to her: when in doubt, tell the truth.

What to Do When the Insecure Leader Is You

The most valuable part of the conversation came when James turned the question around. Some listeners, he suggested, would be hearing this and realising that they are the insecure boss. What should they do?

Natalie's answer starts with acknowledging it, which she calls "the biggest and the most impactful step". That is harder than it sounds, because it is easy to stay busy and to treat other parts of life as proof of how great we are. Often it takes a difficult period, or a big mistake that humbles you, before you can look at it squarely and say, "I messed that up."

From there, the work is to ask better questions of yourself. "Why am I feeling insecure about this? Where has this come from? And now what can I do to take the power back?" Natalie talks about it in terms of power because, as she puts it, "insecurity is just draining power from you." She suggests talking to a psychologist or therapist if you're open to it. Above all, she suggests patience. It is not going to be fixed overnight. She compares it to training as an athlete: there will be harder days and easier days, and both are part of building resilience.

She applies the same honesty to her own weaker areas. Rather than papering over the cracks, she spends time getting to the heart of what she's not good at until she is "passable" and confident enough in the basics. It is an unglamorous standard, and a very practical one.

James added a point from his own experience. Earlier in his career, people had told him he came across as guarded, and he has come to see vulnerability as "a bit of an antidote". Natalie agreed, and went further. Being vulnerable tells your own brain that it is safe, and it lets you shed a lot of pent-up energy that isn't constructive. Only when you can be compassionate with yourself, respect yourself and value yourself, she argues, can you do the same for others. Toxic bosses who can't see those qualities in themselves "certainly cannot treat other people authentically", and any veneer they put on eventually crumbles.

James was candid about his own record too. "We've all been toxic bosses," he said. Even people who have never managed anyone have had moments of toxicity, often without realising it. Natalie agreed and offered the simplest repair available: when you have handled something badly under pressure, go back to the person and say so. "Look, I'm sorry. Actually, that came out wrong. What I meant to say was this."

Sponsorship: The Leadership Habit That Reveals a Secure Leader

If insecurity shows up as pushing others down, security shows up as lifting them. Natalie's favourite illustration comes from Hollywood. Marilyn Monroe, a rising star who had just hit the big time, loved the singer Ella Fitzgerald, who was finding it very hard to break into the mainstream white nightclubs of the time. Monroe went to the manager of the Mocambo Club and made him an offer. If he booked Fitzgerald, Monroe would sit at a front-row table for a set number of nights, and the press would follow. The manager said yes, and it kickstarted Fitzgerald's career.

Monroe, Natalie notes, had plenty of insecurities of her own and a difficult childhood. She recognised the struggle in someone else and helped because she knew what it was like to need that help. In corporate language, Natalie says, that is sponsorship and advocacy.

The opposite is something Natalie has also written about. Her first LinkedIn article, about women who don't help women in the workplace, drew tens of thousands of views and is included in the book. It hit a nerve because, as she says, it is a phenomenon people are very uncomfortable talking about. James summed up the choice neatly: "Why be the queen bee when you can be Marilyn Monroe?"

Natalie's distinction between mentoring and sponsoring stopped James in his tracks. "Sponsoring is really where you tell other people how great somebody is," she explains. Mentoring is helping the person themselves come to the conclusion that they are pretty great. Both matter, and they often get confused. When James asked how we can all sponsor more, her first condition was belief: you have to genuinely believe in the person, and you can't be forced into it.

It also requires attention, which is in short supply when you're stressed and simply trying to get through the day, the week or the quarter. Natalie's advice is to look around the table. "That person wasn't the loudest voice, but actually the five words they spoke was the golden nugget that this whole decision is gonna hinge on." Her version of sponsorship is generous, with clear limits. You still have to do the hard work, she tells the people she backs. "I'm not gonna just push doors open and give you a seat, but I will pull the handle of the door and let you in, and then the rest is up to you."

When James described publicly crediting a colleague for a sharp contribution in a meeting, Natalie's reaction tied the whole argument together. Watching a leader do that, she said, she would think: "this guy definitely is not insecure."

Saying "I Don't Know" and Being Known for Knowing Your Stuff

Security also shows up in a willingness to admit what you don't know. Natalie spent many years on trading floors, which she describes as noisy, testosterone-fuelled and under constant pressure. In her first few days, more than 20 years ago, someone gave her the best advice she has ever received: "Traders smell fear." If you don't know the answer, tell them you don't know and that you'll find it. Bluff, and they will play rings around you.

"I am not a know-it-all lawyer," she says. That honesty built trust. Her job was to keep clients clear of illegal territory while still letting them do the deals they wanted to do. Because she rarely said no, they knew to listen when she did.

The same balance applies to career progression. Natalie once believed that working hard and keeping her head down would be enough to get promoted. "We know that doesn't happen in real life." She has also watched people spend their days at the water cooler talking to senior leaders and doing little work, and she calls that approach flimsy. Her answer is a combination of both: "You need to know your stuff, and you need to be known to know your stuff." That visibility feeds directly into the sponsorship and advocacy she sees as essential for anyone who wants to rise.

Check Your Ego at the Door and Always Take the Stairs

The first chapter of Natalie's book is titled "Check your ego at the door", the words Quincy Jones used when recording We Are the World. Nobody had ever asked her why it came first, until James did. It was deliberate, she explained. It sets the tone for everything that follows.

Chapter seven, "Always take the stairs", is about resilience. Life offers plenty of quick fixes after a hard week, and like any high, she says, they come with a massive low. The stairs are slower. You climb one step at a time, there are harder days and easier ones, and the hard days don't mean you're not progressing. The lift, by contrast, can get stuck, sometimes with a lot of negative people in it. And when you reach the top of the stairs, you can look down and see exactly how far you've come.

Natalie doesn't present herself as someone who has finished the climb. Asked for the hardest lesson she has had to learn, she said it was that you cannot control everything. She lost her father when she was 19; he was 49. She still tells herself, every day, that some things are beyond her control.

So her first action for listeners is a quiet one. Take the noise out. Find a moment to sit and see what comes up, whether that's stress at work or worry at home, and ask which parts of it you can actually control. It is the same honest look in the mirror that she recommends to the insecure leader, and it is where the work of becoming a legend, in her sense of the word, begins. "I'm learning this every day," she says, "and trying to remember this every day. I'm walking up those stairs with you every single day."

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