WHEN THE TRUTH-TELLERS BECOME THE PROBLEM

When seeing clearly makes you the enemy

*Pronouns have been changed to protect the… people. No one’s guilty. No one’s innocent. We’re all just human.*

“What is she talking about?” was my first thought. I couldn’t believe she’d said the words, and I couldn’t understand how they made sense to anyone in the room, including her.

“I think you’re taking the easy way out because keeping him is too hard,” she said. “Letting him go is the easy way out.”

Not “Letting him go is the right thing to do.” Not “Keeping him here is asking everyone in the company to have to deal with the consequences.” No, we were taking the easy way out. Because telling your boss she’s wrong and needs to do what everyone else in the room knows is the right thing is “taking the easy way out.” Sure.

My boss wanted to avoid a difficult conversation with a family member more than anything else because having it meant turning her own world inside out. This is why you don’t hire family, folks.

In that moment, my boss lost all credibility in my view. I didn’t see a leader. I saw someone scrambling to protect a family member and themselves. No one said anything because it was pointless. It had all been said before, more than once. This was the fourth conversation about this, and if she hadn’t heard it before, she certainly wasn’t going to hear it now. THAT was the hard thing. To sit there and have to listen to our boss accuse us of “taking the easy way out” because we knew the only way to protect a hundred other people was to let this one person go.

Getting through that messy, uncomfortable situation showed me that a leader can decide on a conclusion before anyone else ever weighs in. And when a leader’s emotional investment in that conclusion is stronger than their commitment to honesty and reality, the people in the room who see objectively don’t just lose the argument. They get redefined as the problem for seeing clearly.

I understood the focus had shifted from what’s true to protecting someone else’s decision about what’s true. That’s….. complicated. Because in that moment, you experience it happening and also suddenly recognize that you’ve been the cause of it happening in the past. I realized I’ve been both those people at different points in my career. It feels gross.

I swear he looks like he’s ordering takeout. Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Which brings me to Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex (sorry). I know everyone thinks it’s a story about killing your father and marrying your mother because Freud ruined it for everybody. Yes, those are the circumstances in the play; but they’re not what happens in it and it’s not what the play is about.

It’s really about a leader who is so confident in his own intelligence and ability to see clearly that when he hears a truth that doesn’t fit with his reality, his response is to attack and accuse. Oedipus is so certain he’s right, it doesn’t occur to him he’s the cause of the suffering around him until it’s too late.

When I read the argument between Oedipus and Tiresias, I was surprised by how quickly Oedipus becomes angry. It’s almost immediate. My experience happened over weeks and I wonder now if a quick turn to anger wouldn’t have been more merciful. It definitely would have been faster.

Oedipus constructed a reality that fit the only conclusion his intense mind and emotional state could handle. A trusted advisor becomes a conspirator. A valued colleague becomes the enemy. It’s the only reality that fits.

And that’s what happens when a leader refuses to even consider accepting what they don’t want to face. They turn the truth-teller into the enemy. They have to because their version of reality depends on it.

So instead the truth tellers stop talking, or they only present information that doesn’t disturb the leader’s peace, hiding anything that does. Or they leave.

If they stay, the leader doesn’t notice the information they’re getting isn’t real because they still only see what they want to see. Decisions start getting made in a reality that everyone except the leader knows is warped, and those decisions steer the company straight into disaster. All because one person was unable to accept an honest assessment of a situation.

If you’ve been the truth-teller who was attacked, I’m sorry. Being in that position is like holding a banana while being duct-taped to a hangry gorilla. You know you can’t stay there and something somewhere has to give but all the choices suck.

If you recognize yourself as that leader, the next time someone in the room says something that makes you uncomfortable or doubt their motives, what will you do instead?