Monday, December 15, 2024
The “Ahhh” That Wasn’t Pity
I started the day thinking about Day 0 of this journey to solve workplace bullying, when I stood in front of that audience after Simon Squibb asked about my biggest pain point. When I mentioned I’d been made redundant, I heard this collective “ahhhhh” from the room.
At the time, I assumed it meant pity. Or worse—that they thought redundancy was something shameful, something that happens to people who’ve failed.
But here’s what I’m realizing a couple of weeks into this journey: redundancy was my release.
Yes, it was stressful. Yes, there were sleepless nights and there is financial anxiety and that peculiar grief that comes with losing your professional identity. But underneath all that? Liberation. The freedom to finally work on something I actually wanted to do. The permission to solve a problem that’s haunted me for years. Ultimately I would not have gone to that conference, or met these people, or spoken about it to others.
Maybe that “ahhh” wasn’t pity. Maybe it was recognition. Maybe some of those people understood that sometimes the thing that looks like a setback is actually a doorway opening. Or, maybe they were just remembering their experience, their journey or thinking how they would feel if it was them.
The Exit Others Need
Then something unexpected happened. A former colleague reached out—someone I worked with several years ago, before Covid. We caught up, and she reminded me of something I’d almost forgotten: I’d helped her negotiate her exit package so she could leave a toxic situation.
She thanked me.
I’d honestly forgotten the conversation. But hearing her describe how that support had mattered—how having someone in her corner during negotiations gave her confidence to actually leave—that meant a lot.
It reminded me of something uncomfortable: sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone is help them leave.
We talk a lot about building resilient cultures and intervention strategies—and we should. But we don’t talk enough about strategic exits. About helping high-performing, sensitive, conscientious people extract themselves from situations that are slowly destroying them.
Helping her negotiate wasn’t about giving up on fixing the culture. It was about recognizing that she didn’t owe that organization her mental health. That her leaving might create the data point—the exit interview, the vacancy, the loss of talent—that finally gets noticed by someone with power to change things.
Exits can be activism too.
Building Infrastructure While Building the Movement
On a lighter note—I’ve cracked something with Notion today that’s making this whole journey more manageable.
I’ve linked databases so my to-do list now runs seamlessly with my calendar and meeting notes. Actions from meetings flow straight into my task list. Everything lives in one interface. It sounds like a small thing, but when you’re trying to build a movement whilst simultaneously learning how to run a business, these little systems become lifelines.
It’s funny—solving workplace bullying requires building infrastructure for empathy (as I talked about on Day 6 (Day 6 – Building an Infrastructure to Solve Workplace Bullying with Empathy?!), but doing that work requires building infrastructure for productivity. The meta-infrastructure, if you will. Task management for the task of building a more humane workplace culture.
What I’m Learning
Sliding into Week 2, and here’s what’s becoming clear:
1. Liberation looks different for everyone. For me, it was redundancy. For my colleague, it was a negotiated exit. For others, it might be an internal transfer, or finding allies, or building the courage to report. We need to hold space for all of it.
2. The cycle repeats unless we intervene systemically. I helped one person leave. But someone new will fill that role, and if the culture hasn’t changed, they’ll face the same treatment. Individual exits matter, but they’re not solutions—they’re symptoms that should trigger organizational examination.
3. The work of solving this is both emotional and operational. You need the emotional intelligence to understand the psychology of bullying and the operational systems to actually track progress, build toolkits, and manage the work. It’s vulnerability and spreadsheets. Both matter.
Tomorrow
Tomorrow I’m going to explore what it means to find internal allies—the people already inside organizations who see the problem and want to be part of the solution. Because I’m increasingly convinced that this can’t come from external consultants swooping in. It has to be internal champions supported by external evidence.
If you’ve ever helped someone negotiate an exit, or been that person who needed help leaving, I’d love to hear about it. Comment, share, react. Let’s keep building this together.
Today’s Reflection Question: Have you ever stayed in a role longer than you should have because leaving felt like failure? What changed when you realized it wasn’t?
Responses