The Dangerous Leadership Lesson Boys Learn Early

I noticed something recently that stopped me.

In the Netflix series The Dinosaurs, all the male dinosaurs were bigger than the females.

Stronger. More dominant. More aggressive.

It looked completely normal.

Except for one problem.

We don’t actually know if that’s true.

The Story Beneath the Story

There’s a term for this: sexual dimorphism.

In some species, males and females are visibly different in size or form.

In others, they’re not.

With dinosaurs, the evidence is limited.

Which means a lot of what we see is interpretation.

And interpretation isn’t neutral.

What Boys Learn Without Being Taught

When you grow up seeing the same pattern over and over again, it doesn’t feel like a message.

It feels like reality.

Men are bigger. Men are stronger. Men take up space. Men lead.

You don’t question it.

You absorb it.

And by the time you enter school, work, or leadership, it’s already sitting in the background.

Unexamined.

How It Shows Up Later

Fast forward a few decades.

The same pattern starts to show up in more subtle ways: Who speaks first. Who gets interrupted. Who is assumed to be in charge. Who is seen as “naturally” authoritative.

None of this starts in the boardroom.

It starts much earlier.

The Leadership Lesson Hiding Inside It

If you learn early that leadership looks like size, dominance, and control, you carry that forward.

You start to associate leadership with: taking up more space being more certain being more forceful.

Even when the situation calls for something else.

Listening. Restraint. Adaptability.

And those skills are harder to access when they don’t match the model you grew up with.

The Part That’s Easy to Miss

This isn’t about blaming a TV show.

It’s about recognising how early the script gets written.

Because once something feels “natural,” it becomes hard to question.

Even when it no longer serves you.

Even when it gets in the way of better leadership.

What Needs to Change

The shift isn’t about removing confidence or strength.

It’s about expanding what leadership looks like.

So that: presence doesn’t equal dominance, authority doesn’t require volume, and strength includes the ability to step back

That shift doesn’t start in adulthood.

It starts in what we notice.

The Takeaway

The most dangerous leadership lessons are the ones we never realised we learned.

Because we don’t challenge them.

We build on top of them.

P.S. A lot of what I unpack in The Big F#cking Book on How to Be a Decent Guy traces back to these early assumptions, the quiet beliefs about power, control, and what it means to be a man. The work is noticing them before they quietly shape how you lead.