"You're right, but they're never going to listen" 🙄

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio

I need to tell you something that's hard for me to say.

The people who hurt me most in my career weren't the obviously toxic managers or the executives making brutal decisions from a distance. The people who hurt me most were colleagues who agreed with me in private, then said nothing when it mattered.

I'm thinking of the colleagues who complained to me over lunches about how innovation was being stifled, how leadership's decisions made no sense, how the culture was destroying morale. But in meetings? Silence. When I tried to surface those same issues professionally, I stood alone.

I'm thinking of the product managers and engineers who watched me and other contractors get treated with open hostility every time we made recommendations — the very recommendations we'd been hired to make. They would tell me one on one, "You're right, but they're never going to listen."

Then why was I there? Why bother hiring us if you knew leadership would ignore us?

I'm thinking of the executive who always said he had my back. The day before I was fired, he stormed out of his office, looked right at me, then walked away without a word. I never heard from him again.

That's having my back?

I’m also thinking of my former colleague who asked me for years to find them a job at whatever company I was working at. When an opportunity arose and they took it, I heard nothing but grief from this person: how their commute was longer, how the boss was a jerk, you name it. This person was a designer on an Agile team that I was not allowed to commit more than four hours a week to. This person joined in a retrospective pile-on against me about how I wasn’t committing enough time to the project. Four hours a week is going to be four hours a week, no matter what they say.

These weren't bad people, for the most part. They were scared people, or tired people, or people who'd tried before and gotten burned. They'd decided it wasn't worth it anymore. Go along, get along, get that check.

I get it. I really do. I’ve been in that place and it’s not great.

But I thought I had allies. I thought when the moment came, someone would back me up. Instead, I stood alone, over and over, while people who knew I was right chose their own safety over solidarity. And then I got fired while they all remained.

If you've been the person standing alone in that meeting, saying the true thing while everyone else looked at their laptops — I want you to know you weren't wrong. You were just the only one willing to say it out loud. Sometimes I have been that person too, earlier in my career. I decided that it wasn’t worth preserving the status quo when my job was to change things. The more I stayed silent, the less creative my work would be.

If you've been that silent ally — if you've sympathized in private but stayed quiet in public — you can't change what you've already done. But you can make a different choice next time.

• The next time someone with less protection says something true but inconvenient, you could say, "That's worth discussing."
• The next time someone junior is being blamed for a systemic problem, you could say, "Wait, let's look at the conditions that led to this."
• The next time leadership announces an impossible timeline, you could say, "Before we commit, I'd like to hear from the people who'll actually do the work."

You don't have to be a hero. You don't have to risk everything. You just have to say one true thing out loud in a room where someone else desperately needs to not be the only one saying it.

Most of us have been both the person standing alone and the person who stayed quiet. I wrote about what that cost me in my book Bad Fit. But right now I just want to know — which one are you thinking about? Hit reply.

— Mary

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This newsletter is drawn from Bad Fit, my memoir-in-progress about being a creative professional in environments that weren't built for creative professionals.

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