When Right Makes You Vulnerable

Picture this: You’re on a Zoom call during the pandemic. Your team just survived a massive layoff at a financial company. Nobody knows where design requests will come from anymore. The executive who’s supposed to lead your newly reorganized team keeps taking calls from his realtor, because he’s shopping for a beach house.

Most of your team can’t afford to buy a first home. You’re all terrified about losing health insurance in the middle of a pandemic and you’ve seen a lot of colleagues just get laid off. And this guy is literally muting everyone to discuss which property has the best beach access.

When I finally said “respectfully…please be present” during one of those calls, my hands were shaking. Within a week, I was fired. The company insisted it had nothing to do with my “behavior.” Sure.

Here’s what I couldn’t see at the time: I wasn’t fired for being difficult. I was fired for being convenient.

Organizations bring people like us in when they’re experiencing pain from their dysfunction. They hire problem-solvers with implicit promises that we can help fix things. Then, when problems persist—because one person without authority can’t fix systemic dysfunction—we become the explanation for why things aren’t improving. Our firing isn’t about incompatibility. It’s about demonstrating action without requiring actual change.

The cruel irony is that they hired over a dozen designers and problem-solvers specifically for our ability to see what’s broken and imagine better solutions. Then they spent months trying to force us to stop doing exactly that. They wanted the credibility of having “user experience experts” on staff without the discomfort of actually listening to what we observed about their user experience. The same behaviors that got us hired—asking uncomfortable questions, challenging assumptions, advocating for users over internal politics—became the reasons we had to go.

The setup is elegant in its cruelty. You’re given responsibility without authority, which means you can be blamed for failures you couldn’t prevent. You become visible around problems because you keep trying to solve them. When improvements threaten existing power structures, you become threatening. And because you care enough to try, you’re likely to internalize the blame when you’re let go.

I spent months believing my firing was about fit. It took me much longer to understand I’d been cast as the scapegoat. These organizations had systemic problems that leadership couldn’t or wouldn’t address. My firing protected them from accountability by providing someone to blame for problems they had created and couldn’t solve.

Here’s what makes scapegoating so confusing: everyone else knew what was happening. On my last day at that financial company, my team held a “Mary Appreciation Day.” The other designers told stories about what they learned from me. One designer mentioned spitting out his coffee when I DM-ed him that frazzled llama GIF during one of Mr. Beach House’s realtor calls. They all knew the leadership dysfunction was intolerable. They’d been texting me “oh shit” messages while the executive was yelling at me for speaking up. But I was the one who got fired, and they understood why—speaking truth to power gets you eliminated, not promoted.

I don’t know what happened after I left. Maybe they found better leadership. Maybe the problems magically resolved themselves. But I do know this: I wasn’t given the authority to fix systemic dysfunction, yet I was held responsible when it persisted. That’s the scapegoat pattern: you get blamed for problems you never had the power to solve.

So how do you recognize when you’re being set up? Watch for responsibility without authority and being held accountable for outcomes you can’t control. Notice if your efforts to help get reframed as the problem itself. Pay attention when you’re given projects that can’t possibly succeed due to insufficient resources or executive support, but full accountability when they fail.

And here’s the hardest part: being right doesn’t protect you. Sometimes it makes you more vulnerable. When you’re the person who keeps pointing out problems that leadership can’t or won’t solve, you’re not demonstrating value. You’re threatening the comfortable fiction that everything is fine.

If you’ve been fired after trying to fix unfixable problems please understand that you’re not a failure. You were just more useful as an explanation than as a solution. Recognizing that distinction doesn’t undo the damage: financial panic, the resume gaps, the shame of explaining it again and again on resumes and in interviews. But it might help you stop carrying blame that was never yours to carry. Being released from that burden is worth something, even when the cost has been steep.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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