You are working for someone who wants you gone, and you are trying to figure out how to get through it without becoming someone you would not recognize. You have read the advice about documenting and networking and keeping your head down, and it all helps, but what you really want is an example. You want to see someone who actually lived through this and came out the other side with his integrity, his reputation, and his future intact. I have found no better example anywhere than what David did right under King Saul, and I want to walk you through it the way I would across a table.
I have led people in police departments, in agencies, and in church, and I have served under leaders who wanted to see me fall. When I went looking for a way to think about those years, I kept coming back to 1 Samuel, because David’s situation was worse than anything most of us will face and his conduct was better than anything most of us manage. He served a boss who threw spears at him, and he ended up king. There is a pattern in how he did it, and the pattern still works.
He Stayed Excellent When Excellence Was the Problem
The trouble began with success. After David killed Goliath and the women sang that Saul had slain his thousands and David his ten thousands, Scripture says Saul eyed David from that day on. Most people in David’s position would have concluded that the safe move was to become smaller, to miss a few, to give the king less to envy. David did the opposite. 1 Samuel 18 says that he behaved himself wisely in all his ways, that Saul set him over the men of war, and that he went out and came in before the people with such success that all Israel and Judah loved him. His excellence was what Saul hated, and his excellence was also the only thing keeping him alive.
The application is direct. When your boss has turned on you, your performance is your protection, because it is the one thing his version of you cannot survive contact with. Shrinking will not calm him, and it will hand him the evidence he has been looking for. Do the work as well as you have ever done it, close it out in writing, and let it be seen by more than one set of eyes. David’s reputation with the people was built in public, one assignment at a time, and that reputation is what made Saul’s case against him impossible to sell.
He Refused to Retaliate When He Had Every Chance
Twice David held Saul’s life in his hands. In the cave at En Gedi in 1 Samuel 24, Saul came in alone and David’s men urged him to strike, telling him this was the day the Lord had promised. David cut the corner of Saul’s robe instead, and even that troubled his conscience, because he would not lift his hand against the Lord’s anointed. Later at Ziph in chapter 26, David walked into Saul’s camp at night, stood over him while he slept, and took his spear and water jug rather than his life. Both times David could have ended the problem in a moment, and both times he chose to let God handle Saul rather than handle Saul himself.
You will get your cave. There will be a moment when you have something on your boss, a mistake he made, a message he should not have sent, a chance to embarrass him in front of the people he fears. Your friends will tell you to take the shot. I am telling you what David’s conscience told him, which is that the moment you strike the man in the chair, you have become a rival for the chair and not a servant in the room, and everything that made you trustworthy is gone. Refuse it. Report what must be reported through proper channels, and leave the rest to the God who saw the whole thing.
He Kept His Allies Close and His Mouth Shut
David did not survive Saul alone. Jonathan, Saul’s own son, loved David, warned him, spoke up for him to his father, and made a covenant with him that David kept for the rest of his life. Michal, Saul’s daughter, let David down through a window when the assassins were at the door. The priest Ahimelech fed him. Samuel sheltered him. David had a network of people who knew his character firsthand, and when Saul’s version of David went out across the kingdom, those people did not believe it, because they had seen the man.
Build that now, before you need it. Keep your relationships with peers, with other leaders, and with people outside the organization warm through ordinary good work rather than through venting. Notice that David did not recruit Jonathan by running Saul down. Jonathan came to David because of who David was. The person who spends the hard season complaining about the boss ends up with sympathizers. The person who spends it doing good work and treating people well ends up with witnesses, and witnesses are what you will need.
He Left When Staying Would Have Killed Him
David did not leave at the first spear. He stayed through the spear, through the dangerous assignments, through being married into the family and then hunted by it. He left when Jonathan tested his father’s intent and confirmed that Saul had settled on killing him, and by then there was no more court to serve in. Leaving was not a failure of faith. It was the recognition that a man who has decided you must fall cannot be served from inside his reach, and that the calling on your life is worth more than proximity to a throne that has turned against you.
The lesson is a matter of timing and manner. Give the situation a real season and every honest effort, so that when you leave you know you left a hard place and not a hard week. Then leave the way David left, without a scene, without a speech, and without taking anything that was not yours. He went out with a few loyal men and built something in the wilderness, and the wilderness is where he became the leader Israel would follow. Some of you are going to look back on the job after this one as the place your real work started.
He Never Dishonored the Office
This is the part that is hardest to hear and most important to get right. David never spoke against Saul in public. He called him my lord the king to his face and my father from across the valley. When the Amalekite came to David claiming to have killed Saul, expecting a reward, David had him executed. And when Saul was dead, David wrote a lament for him and taught it to the people of Judah, honoring a man who had hunted him for years. David separated the man from the office, and he honored the office even when the man was unworthy of it, because he knew that one day the office would be his and the respect he had shown it would come back to him.
You do not have to pretend your boss is a good leader. You do have to decide that you will not tear down the chair he sits in, because someone will sit in it after him and it may be you. Speak of him carefully in the building and outside it. Correct the record where it must be corrected, with facts and through proper channels, and leave the rest alone. The organization is watching how you carry yourself under a bad leader, and the people who decide your future are the ones taking notes. David’s restraint under Saul is why Israel trusted him with Saul’s throne. Your restraint under your boss is how you earn the room after this one.
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 the disguised weapons an insecure boss reaches for and, chapter by chapter, what David did right against each one: 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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