You have done the hard part already. You stayed. You kept your standards up while he lowered his. You prayed for him, you kept your record, you refused to retaliate, and you gave it longer than most people would have. And now you are sitting with a question that feels like a betrayal of everything you have endured, which is whether leaving is the right decision after all, and whether the leader you have been waiting on is ever going to become the leader you hoped he was.
I have led people in police departments, in agencies, and in church, and I have served under leaders who did change and under leaders who never would. I have also stayed too long more than once. I want to give you an honest way to tell the difference, because the people who carry the deepest wounds from a bad boss are usually the faithful ones who kept waiting for a repentance that was never coming, and I would rather you decide this with your eyes open than have it decided for you.
Saul Was Given Every Chance
The reason I use Saul as the pattern for this kind of leader is that Scripture shows him being offered a way back again and again, and shows him refusing it. In 1 Samuel 24, David spared Saul’s life in the cave at En Gedi and then called out to him from a distance to show him the piece of his robe. Saul wept. He said David was more righteous than he was, and he acknowledged out loud that David would be king. Then he went home, and before long he was hunting David again. In chapter 26 the same thing happened at Ziph, where David took Saul’s spear and water jug from beside his head and spared him a second time. Saul confessed again, said he had played the fool, and blessed David. And nothing changed.
That is what I need you to see. Saul had moments of clarity. He had tears and confessions and even a blessing. What he never had was a change of direction that lasted longer than the emotion that produced it. I have come to call this the spirit of Saul, and its most painful feature is that it gives you just enough hope to keep you in place. If your boss has had the good conversation with you more than once, the one where he seems to understand and things get better for a few weeks before they slide back, you are not watching a man in the process of changing. You are watching a man in the process of confessing, and those are not the same thing.
The Marks of a Leader Who Will Not Change
The first mark is a repeating cycle. Pressure, confrontation, remorse, a brief improvement, and then the return of the pressure, usually a little harder than before. If you can predict the cycle, it has become his character rather than his mood. The second mark is that the remorse is always about consequences to him and never about harm to you. He is sorry he was caught, sorry someone above him noticed, sorry the team is unhappy. He is not sorry for what it cost you, because in his mind you are still the problem.
The third mark is that no one around him is willing or able to hold him accountable. Saul’s court knew what he was. His servants carried out his orders, and even Jonathan, who loved David, could only warn him and not restrain his father. If your boss’s boss knows and has decided to live with it, and if HR has become a place where complaints go to be filed rather than acted on, the structure that might have forced change has already declined to. The fourth mark is that the good stretches are getting shorter and the bad ones are getting longer. Draw it on paper if you have to. When the line is trending down over a year, you have your answer.
When Leaving Is the Right Decision
Leaving is the right decision when you have done what integrity required and it has not been enough. Ask yourself four plain questions and answer them without softening. Have I raised the issue with him directly and respectfully at least once? Have I kept my own conduct clean throughout, so that I am not leaving to escape a mess of my own making? Have I given it a real season, long enough that a person who wanted to change could have shown it? And is the cost now landing on my health, my family, or my faith, in ways that no paycheck justifies? If the answers are yes, yes, yes, and yes, you are no longer enduring. You are absorbing, and the difference matters to God as much as it matters to you.
David did not leave Saul’s court at the first spear. He left when Jonathan confirmed that Saul had settled on killing him, and by then David had served faithfully for years, had spared himself no duty, and had every witness in the kingdom to his conduct. There is a stubborn idea among faithful people that staying is always the holier choice. It is not. Staying under a leader who has hardened himself against you, when you have no mandate to and no protection from it, is a slow surrender of the gifts God gave you to a man who will never use them well. David honored Saul by refusing to harm him. He did not honor Saul by handing him the rest of his life.
How to Leave the Way David Left
Decide first, and then take your time. Once you know you are leaving, the pressure changes shape, because you are no longer waiting on him and you can afford to be patient about the exit. Update your resume that week. Quietly reactivate your network through normal professional contact rather than announcements. Put money aside if you can, because the freedom to leave well is often the freedom to survive three months without a paycheck. Keep your performance at full strength until your last day, so the record you leave behind belongs to you and not to his version of you.
When the time comes, leave cleanly. Give proper notice, hand off your work with care, thank the people who deserve thanks, and say nothing about him that you would not say to his face in front of his boss. You will be tempted to set the record straight on your way out, and I am asking you not to. David never once spoke against Saul in public, and when Saul died David wrote a lament for him. That restraint is why the kingdom trusted David when it was finally his. Your next organization will hear how you talk about the last one, and the person who leaves a bad boss without bitterness walks into the next room with a reputation money cannot buy.
Go Deeper
I wrote a whole book about the leader who turns on the person he should be most proud of, following Saul and David from the day the singing started to the day David finally walked away. It covers how to endure well, how to know when endurance has become surrender, and how to leave with your integrity intact: The Spirit of Saul.
Commissioner William Epps is an author and security leadership consultant with a background in law enforcement, fire service, private security, and federal government. His books are published through E.P.P.S. Method Publishing Co.
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