The vocabulary of power has always had a problem

My team. My people. My hire. He works for me. She leads the team in the function I own.

Possessive pronouns that sound like pride but function like claim over another human being. The language of stewardship that slides, almost imperceptibly, into the language of control. Most leaders never say it the way it was allegedly said in that room. But many of them feel it. And the people beneath them spend years learning to read the difference between a leader who 'holds power' and one who believes they are 'the power'.

That distinction felt in every performance review, every corridor conversation, every moment of public praise or public humiliation is what workplace culture is actually made of.

‍The questions this moment is asking

- How does a leader arrive at the belief that they own another person? What does the organisation around them have to look like for that belief to form, to survive, and to eventually be said out loud ?

- Who knew? Who saw the smaller versions of  the dismissal, the diminishment, the casual exercise of power without accountability, and said nothing? And what did their silence cost the other people in that organization ?

- What does it mean that this happened in one of the world's most scrutinised, most regulated, most publicly visible financial institutions? If it can happen there, at that level where else is it also happening that no one is reporting ?

- And the question nobody wants to ask directly: does the gender of the person who said it change how we feel about it? If a male senior executive had said this to a female junior employee, would the cultural response look the same? What does our answer to that question reveal about how we still think about power, gender, and who is allowed to wield each?

What ownership language actually costs

When a leader claims ownership over a person, even implicitly or in softened vocabulary of everyday management, does something happen to that person emotionally at the receiving end ?

They stop being a professional with agency and become a variable in someone else's equation. Their performance, their visibility, their career trajectory, all of it now runs through the goodwill of the person who believes they hold the title deed.

This is not an edge case. It is the inside architecture of most hierarchical workplaces. The JPMorgan incident is not remarkable because it happened. It is remarkable because someone said it that directly and because there were witnesses who did not look away.

The cultural failure this points to

Organisations do not produce this kind of language accidentally. They produce it through years of rewarding results over conduct, of promoting people whose interpersonal behaviour was excused because their numbers were good, of building cultures where speaking up costs more than staying silent.

They produce it by treating accountability as something that applies to output and rarely to the behaviour of the person demanding it.

And they produce it by failing to ask, at every level of leadership development, a question that should be foundational: what kind of power do we want our leaders to believe they hold over the people who work for them?