Why gaslighting at work cuts deeper than passive aggression

Most founders know what to do when someone gets passive aggressive in a team setting. Address it. Model healthy boundaries. Clear the air. But gaslighting? That’s a different beast. It doesn’t just disrupt culture—it destabilizes the very systems that teams use to function.

The danger isn’t just emotional. It’s operational. Because when reality itself becomes contestable, your meetings become performance stages, your retros lose truth, and your systems stop being trusted. Early-stage teams, especially in Southeast Asia or Gulf incubators where hierarchy often overlaps with loyalty, are uniquely vulnerable.

Let’s decode the real threat.

Most founders set out to build something different. They avoid the bureaucratic mess of corporate life. They don’t want layers, politics, or silence. They want speed, ownership, and psychological safety. The early team motto is usually something like: “We trust each other. No drama.” But that ideal only works when the operating system underneath it is strong. When role clarity, escalation paths, and meeting design reinforce that ideal—not just slogans.

In reality, most early teams still run on relational equity. Founders often believe trust replaces process. That’s when things go wrong.

When someone’s passive aggressive at work, they tend to act out their resentment in indirect ways: delaying deliverables, ignoring messages, rolling eyes in meetings, or giving the infamous “fine” when things are clearly not fine. It’s frustrating. But at least it’s visible. Gaslighting is subtler—and far more corrosive. It looks like:

• A senior quietly contradicting a junior’s memory in front of others.
• Someone rewriting the facts of a previous conversation—without evidence.
• A team member consistently reframing disagreements as your misunderstanding.
• Someone reacting to feedback with: “That’s not what happened,” even when the rest of the team remembers it differently.

What gaslighting does is attack your epistemic foundation: your ability to trust what you know, saw, or heard. Once that’s compromised, the system becomes unanchored.

In a high-trust, fast-moving team, reality coherence is everything. You need people to:

• Surface blockers truthfully
• Make decisions based on shared understanding
• Give and receive feedback without fear
• Log outcomes and move on

Gaslighting fractures that loop. Over time:

• People stop raising issues—because it’s easier than defending their memory.
• Juniors defer too often—even when they’re right—because “maybe I got it wrong again.”
• Managers struggle to diagnose breakdowns, because different team members remember different truths.
• Documentation becomes weaponized instead of clarifying. People start screen-shotting Slack or taking call notes to defend future truths.

This doesn’t just slow things down. It erodes belief in the system. And when that happens, people start hedging their contributions—not out of laziness, but out of psychological exhaustion.

The problem with gaslighting is that it rarely shows up in retros or surveys. Passive aggression? That gets surfaced in anonymous feedback. But gaslighting feels like “maybe it’s just me.”

It hides in:

• Uneven power dynamics (e.g., a charismatic lead, a founder-favorite)
• Remote or hybrid communication gaps (e.g., “You didn’t hear it that way—I meant something else”)
• Cultural norms that prioritize harmony or face-saving over confrontation
• Poorly facilitated meetings where no one logs what decisions were made, by whom

Because gaslighting manipulates perception, not just behavior, the victim often retreats. And the gaslighter—intentionally or not—remains protected by ambiguity.

Founders often hesitate to address gaslighting because the person doing it is usually valuable. A high-output PM. A trusted early engineer. Someone who “just pushes hard.” But here’s what that founder lens often misses: Gaslighting isn’t just a bad interpersonal habit. It creates second-order chaos. When one person has the power to rewrite team memory, they effectively become the default authority—even without formal designation.

Over time:

• Others rely on them to clarify what happened.
• Their version of events gets normalized.
• The team’s ability to challenge ideas, assumptions, or direction quietly erodes.

This leads to founder over-indexing on loyalty (“They’ve been with us from day one”) instead of output coherence. And that’s where small fractures in team clarity become structural failure points.

There’s no silver bullet for gaslighting—but there are system design tools that reduce its power. Start with Shared Reality Checkpoints. These are small but structured rituals designed to anchor facts, decisions, and emotional cues in collective memory.

They might look like:

• Ending every meeting with: “Here’s what we just decided. Here’s who owns it. Here’s what’s next.”
• Allowing one round of correction before moving forward—but always recording what was said.
• Asking: “Is everyone seeing the same blocker here? Let’s name the facts, not the feelings, first.”

The goal is not to litigate every word. It’s to build a team habit where truth is not assumed—it’s clarified. When used consistently, this ritual protects your team’s cognitive integrity.

In teams without strong documentation, facilitation, or feedback hygiene, narratives dominate. And narrative favors power.

Gaslighting thrives in narrative-driven teams. The person who speaks first, longest, or most confidently gets to define what happened. That doesn’t just affect meetings. It impacts:

• Promotion decisions
• Performance reviews
• Project evaluations
• Team onboarding (new hires get inducted into one person’s version of events)

And once that narrative grip tightens, even founders lose visibility into what’s real.

A simple team diagnostic can help:

After a decision-heavy meeting, ask three people separately: “What just happened?”
If you get three versions—especially if one dominates and the others hesitate—you’ve got a reality coherence problem.

The deeper question for founders is:
“Who owns the story—and who believes they can’t challenge it?”

If your system can’t hold multiple truths before resolving into clarity, it isn’t safe. And if it isn’t safe, your team won’t scale.

Here’s the real tradeoff: gaslighting enables speed today—because one person “cuts through noise”—but destroys autonomy tomorrow. Passive aggression slows a team down. But gaslighting makes it unsafe to even try. The moment people stop trusting their judgment is the moment your delegation system breaks. Owners hesitate. Decisions stall. Teams default upward for validation.

And the cost isn’t just retention. It’s redundancy. You start hiring more people to do less—because trust has to be replaced by checkpoints, layers, and policing. That’s not scale. That’s rot.

If you’re serious about culture not being just “vibe,” but infrastructure, here are structural design levers to inoculate against gaslighting:

• Meeting hygiene: Always log key takeaways. Rotate notetakers. Allow clarifications—but timestamp decisions.
• Feedback scaffolding: Use structured formats like “Observation – Impact – Request.” Emotionally neutral but fact-grounded.
• Escalation paths: Make it clear who to go to when feedback fails or distortion appears. Never leave it ambiguous.
• Psych safety audit: Ask anonymously: “Is there someone on the team who makes you doubt your own perception?” Follow up with care.

These aren’t fluffy rituals. They’re guardrails that hold your team’s cognitive edges intact.

Gaslighting isn’t always malicious. Often, it’s survival behavior—by someone protecting ego, reputation, or perceived control. But systems don’t care about intent. They care about outcome. In early-stage teams, where culture and operating rhythm are still co-evolving, one person’s distortion can become everyone’s confusion. And confusion breeds hesitation. Which breeds friction. Which kills velocity.

Founders who see this early can intervene not with confrontation—but with design. Because the strongest cultures aren’t just safe. They’re stable. Not because people are perfect—but because systems catch what people distort.

The next time something feels off in a meeting—not aggressive, not toxic, just subtly wrong—pause. Ask:

“Did we all just experience the same thing?”
If the answer isn’t clear, don’t smooth it over. That’s not harmony. That’s danger.

Gaslighting at work isn’t a personality issue. It’s a system vulnerability. And the earlier you see it, the easier it is to fix. Because culture isn’t what you say. It’s what your people believe happened—when you’re not in the room. And when those beliefs diverge too often, you lose the very cohesion that makes early teams effective. Not because people lack skills, but because the system stopped holding shared truth. In that gap, assumptions grow. Power concentrates. Trust thins.

This is why real culture work is operational, not performative. It's not branding. It's about building systems that make reality verifiable—not optional. Design for clarity. Audit for coherence. Then culture becomes a stabilizer—not a slogan.