He made me call him “Sir.”

Then he hit Find → Replace on my name.

Fifteen years ago, I was newly promoted—my first real supervisory job.
We were juggling multiple shows at once, each with its own specs, codecs, and delivery quirks.

So I drafted a simple note for everyone’s desks:

“Please check with the post supervisor on your show before making changes.”

It wasn’t a power move. It was a safeguard—clarity that would keep people from wasting hours or breaking a pipeline.

The executive producer walked in, tore every copy off the desks, and told me to send him the file.
When it came back, he hadn’t changed a single instruction—just run Find and Replace on the title.
Every line that once said the post supervisor now said the Daniel.

That’s when I realized how fragile some hierarchies really are.

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The Mentor I Thought I Had

This wasn’t just any executive producer.
He was someone I admired—someone who had once taken me under his wing.
When I first got the job, I didn’t even call him by his first name. I called him Sir.

Not out of fear, but respect. Genuine respect.
I sandwiched every sentence like a soldier. “Yes, Sir.” “No, Sir.” “Absolutely, Sir.”

I didn’t grow up that way. I wasn’t raised in a “Yes, Sir” household.
But he carried himself like a mentor, and I followed his lead because I wanted to earn it.
He was sharp, decisive, magnetic—the kind of person who made you believe that excellence required obedience.
For a while, I believed it.

One afternoon, the owner of the company walked through the bullpen and stopped beside us.
People were everywhere—editors, assistants, producers.
She smiled at me and said to him,

“I can’t believe he calls you Sir.”

And then it happened.

It wasn’t just a grin—it was a glow.
He leaned back in that cheap bullpen TV chair everybody knows too well—the one from the back of the catalog, the one an intern can assemble with an Allen wrench in twenty minutes.
He rocked into it like it was a tufted leather executive throne, the kind where a fat CEO leans back with a cigar, half-laughing at his own invincibility.
That was the look—I have more money than you’ll ever have, kid.

He said, almost purring,

“I love it!”

No one laughed.
No one even looked.
They were too afraid.

And I saw it then: the whole performance of mentorship collapsing into something smaller, meaner, and deeply insecure.
He didn’t love being respected.
He loved being obeyed.

The Day Respect Was Deleted

When he hit Find and Replace on my name, it wasn’t about copy or formatting.
It was about power.

He turned a line about teamwork into a memo about control.
He needed every instruction to point to him, not the system.
Not the system we were trying to build.

In one keystroke, he replaced a process with a person—himself.

He printed it out, made copies, and handed them to me—because he didn’t want me changing it back.
I was staring at the paper, holding proof of how much he meant it.
He was a shithead enough to make me put those pages back on everyone’s desk.

It wasn’t a suit.
It was a cheap t-shirt and a baseball cap.
That’s what authority looked like that day—casual, petty, and absolutely certain it was in charge.

It wasn’t rage that hit me. It was recognition.
He wasn’t protecting the work; he was protecting the illusion that the work ran through him.
And for the first time, I saw what hierarchy really looked like up close:
fragility pretending to be control.

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When Ego Runs the Room

I stayed long enough to see where that fragility leads.

Assistants worked unpaid hours.
Credits vanished.
People were rewarded for staying quiet.
And when I tried to protect them, it became personal.

Then came the email.
It was long, deliberate, and designed to wound.
The first line read:

“I don’t like what went down here.”

From there, it unraveled into a lecture—paragraph after paragraph of condescension and control.
He didn’t just question what I did; he questioned that I had any right to do it at all.
It was hierarchy defending itself.

It’s not unique to television—it happens in any business where pressure and ego share the same room.
Television just exposes it faster.
When ego takes over, the damage happens in real time.
The deadlines don’t wait for anyone’s pride to cool off.

And the fire doesn’t stay in the room.
It spreads.
What starts as lost hours becomes lost trust, lost talent, and eventually, lost business.
That’s the part people miss: ego doesn’t just damage teams; it dismantles the system that keeps them working.

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Learning to Unlearn “Sir”

When I finally resigned, I started calling him by his first name.
It felt strange, unnatural—like trying to speak a new language after years of habit.
I had to force it.

The reflex to call him Sir was so deep that it caught in my throat.
It took months to stamp it out.
Any time I answered the phone or drafted an email—to anyone—I had to remind myself:
you don’t owe that deference anymore.

That’s the strange part about professional betrayal—
you don’t just lose a mentor; you lose the version of yourself that believed in them.

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What Real Leadership Looks Like

The best leaders I’ve met since all share one trait:
they hire people who are smarter than they are and give them room to prove it.

But more than that—they give them the space to speak,
and the confidence that nothing bad will come from telling the truth.

When people know you’re aligned on the same mission,
you don’t need control—only trust and shared purpose.

Because when people know you’re aligned on the same mission—
making the work better, faster, easier for everyone—
you don’t need control.
You just need trust and shared purpose.

That’s what Craig and I built instead—
systems that remove bottlenecks, reward judgment,
and let good ideas move without permission.

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The Lesson That Stayed

If your business depends on your ego, it’s already dying.
The only systems that last are the ones built on trust, not dominance.

He hit Find and Replace to make himself feel indispensable.
But what he really did was prove how replaceable that kind of authority always is.

Respect can’t be edited in.
You earn it—or you delete it by accident.