In this blog, I reflect on the vital need for emotional resilience in the early stages of building a company, where chaos and conflict are natural parts of the process. I explain how the increasing normalization of grievance and victimhood—especially among younger professionals—undermines leadership, stifles collaboration, and poisons culture. I describe how startups demand teammates who can navigate disagreement with maturity, accept tough feedback without spiraling, and prioritize progress over personal hurt. I’ve come to value emotional durability over raw skill, because startups succeed not by avoiding conflict, but by moving through it with grace and grit.
In the early stages of a company, almost nothing is more important than who you bring into the room—and how they behave when things go wrong. Startups are chaotic by nature. Roles shift, plans break, tempers flare. There will be missed expectations, hard feedback, and tough interpersonal moments. These aren’t bugs in the system—they’re features of the early journey. Which is why I’ve come to believe that one of the most important traits in early team members is not intelligence, not even skill—but the ability to resolve conflict without collapsing into grievance.
And yet, increasingly, I see a different posture creeping into the workforce—especially among younger professionals who’ve been raised in highly accommodating environments. It’s the posture of victimhood: the belief that being slighted, offended, or made to feel “unsafe” in any way grants you moral authority and social leverage. This is not leadership. It’s a trap.
The Allure of Victimhood
Let’s be clear—real abuse, real harassment, and real misconduct must be called out and addressed. That’s not what I’m talking about here. What I’m seeing is something different: a reflexive tendency to interpret friction as harm, directness as disrespect, and any power imbalance as oppression. Some individuals are quick to reframe difficult but ordinary feedback as “toxic,” or misattribute disagreement as a personal attack. And once that interpretation locks in, they disengage—not by solving the problem, but by signaling that they’ve been wronged.
This “badge of grievance” has become a kind of social currency. Being offended now grants status. Airing your hurt feelings signals depth. Walking out becomes an act of strength, not avoidance. But inside a growing company, this outlook is poison.
Why Victimhood Is Corrosive in Leadership
Leadership requires resilience. It requires the ability to hear tough feedback without spiraling. It means working with people you might not like, staying calm when you’re challenged, and staying focused on the mission even when your ego takes a hit. When someone carries a victim-centric mindset into a leadership role, the damage compounds. Every conflict becomes a threat. Every disagreement becomes personal. And every decision becomes filtered through the lens of perceived injustice rather than shared outcomes.
Such leaders don’t build teams. They fracture them—through passive aggression, blame-shifting, or subtle politicizing. They create environments where speaking plainly becomes risky, because anything can be misread as offensive. Over time, your culture erodes—not because of bad intentions, but because no one knows where the real lines are anymore.
Real Leaders Don’t Nurse Grievances—They Resolve Them
In a recent situation at my company, a difficult piece of feedback triggered a resignation. Not because the feedback was violent or abusive, but because it was direct and public. Instead of approaching the conflict head-on, debriefing privately, or working through the tension with maturity, the team member chose to disengage entirely.
The message I took from that wasn’t about who was right or wrong in the moment. It was about capacity. Some people are ready to lead. Others are still looking for proof that they’ve been wronged. And in a startup—where you’re often fighting time, capital, and entropy—you cannot afford leaders who fixate on grievance instead of growth.
Hiring for Conflict Capacity, Not Conflict Avoidance
I no longer just interview for skills. I interview for emotional durability. I look for signs that someone can take a hit, disagree respectfully, and still show up the next day ready to collaborate. I ask how they’ve responded to tough bosses. What they’ve done when they felt excluded or misunderstood. I want to know how they behave under pressure—not how eloquently they can explain their boundaries.
Because in the end, we’re building something hard. And if we’re going to make it, we need people who are harder than their hurt feelings. Startups don’t need leaders who walk out when things get uncomfortable. They need people who lean in, reset, and keep building. The future belongs to those who can disagree without defecting. Because grievance might earn applause on social media—but it doesn’t ship product, close deals, or build trust.
Only resilience does that.
…