Three Strikes and I’m Out

The business world can be a painful place, full of people who are trying to win at your expense. Whether it’s someone after your job, someone who is jealous of or intimidated by you, or someone who just doesn’t like you, people can be terrible.

When I was working at TechGiant, I was constantly getting shut down in meetings and work-related conversations. My opinion was not wanted. My words were not important. My knowledge was insufficient. Around the time I learned to dissociate from the situation (see the Ant Story), I told myself — no more! I will not allow others to cause me to feel stupid and unwanted.

I developed a three-tries policy. If I was shut down three times, I stopped contributing. If, in the span of a half-hour conversation, my words are so unappreciated that I can be shut down, talked over, stomped on, or excluded three times, clearly the people in that conversation do not value my contribution; so, in the interest of self-preservation, I need to stop setting myself up for failure and pain by withholding my contribution. If you shut me down three times, I’m done.

I keep mental count — it’s not difficult, since it usually evokes an emotion to be shut down by someone else (anger, insecurity, pain). Once they hit three, I have to force myself to disengage. I sit back, put my thoughts on paper instead of saying them aloud, keeping a sort of sarcastic tirade going with my pen instead of my mouth. All the things my brain is shouting at me to say, I write instead. This serves two functions — not only does it relieve the pressing need I have to speak up and prevent them from shooting themselves in the foot, but it also helps put even more distance between the conversation and me. I need this distance, because I am the type of person who wants to be helpful — and it is challenging for me to overcome this instinct and not help.

Sometimes that’s not enough and I still want to break my self-imposed vow of silence. In these cases, I let my frustration out a little — I will allow myself to shake my head a bit or frown and cross my arms when they’re talking. This can be seen as passive-aggressive, and it is definitely leaking my emotions, but for me it’s more important to prevent myself from allowing them to shut me down again than to keep myself completely unreadable. If any is looking at me and sees these gestures, they can call me out — “Do you have something to say?” they will demand in a tone that indicates nothing I say is of any importance to them. Depending on how terrible the people are and how much I value my job, I will do one of two things:

1. Among terrible people where the prospect of losing my job is low or does not concern me: I put on a big smile (which isn’t that difficult, because the situation is so absurd) and am very honest, “I have many things to say, but nothing you would consider important. Please, continue.”
2. Among generally good people where I want to keep my job and salvage my relationships: I apologize, tell a white lie (“my thoughts drifted onto something else”), and am more careful about blanking my emotions for the rest of the meeting.

But what if they’re going down a really bad path? If I hear things I know are blatantly incorrect or will absolutely result in failure, I feel an ethical obligation to bring them up. For the remainder of the meeting, I will observe all the participants to gauge whose thoughts or concerns align most closely with my own, who seems receptive to the things I had said, or who sits quietly and passively (like me) and does not gain negative attention. I am looking for the person I can approach outside the meeting, one-on-one — the person who is most likely to hear to what I have to say. When I approach them, I say something like this:

I didn’t say this in the meeting because no one was listening, but I believe you are invested in the success of this project, just as I am: the solution we talked about is going to fail. Here’s where, here’s why…. Here’s what we need to do instead, in order to be successful… I’m counting on you to communicate this to the necessary people and to keep my name out of it. This is what we need to do, but if they know it’s coming from me, they will do the opposite.

TechGiant was a terrible place that hated women, so I needed the last two sentences — I needed the person I was talking to to present these thoughts as their own, not mine, in order to ensure they were given a fair hearing. Depending on the level of dysfunction in the environment, I sometimes don’t need to include these statements or need to make them stronger.

Pulling someone aside and funneling my ideas through them serves a few functions. First, it gets my ideas out into the world of the team without the stigma of me applied to them — meaning, the rest of the team is more willing to give them a fair shake. Second, it creates a bond between my proxy and me — my proxy is voicing my concerns. He has seen them be discounted in the meeting. He has seen the (often violent) reaction to them. And yet when he says the same things, he sees that the concerns are heeded, that he is listened to. He is acutely aware of the discrepancy between my experience in the team and his. Afterwards, invariably, I experience more kindness and empathy from this person. Several of them have noticed when I shut down, given me brief glances of sympathy, and then tried to champion my concerns in future meetings once I gave up.

The biggest challenges for me in implementing this self-moderation policy were:

1. Preventing myself from contributing — it’s really, really difficult for me to listen to people happily going down the wrong path when I have information that can help get them on the right track. I have to do a lot of rationalization to keep myself from speaking up.
2. Allowing the team or person to fail when I had information that could ensure their success.
3. Ensuring my chosen representative took credit for my ideas. At the point where I’m speaking through a second-party, I am only doing this because I cannot not care about what is happening. I must be willing to forfeit any positive recognition that may come from preventing this failure, and I must be able to talk my representative into taking that credit. Usually people will feel guilty about this — they will want to tell people that it was my idea.

The Downside

Three-Strikes-and-I’m-Out saved my sanity at TechGiant. It was challenging, but the method was so successful at protecting me from the vitriol of my coworkers that I internalized the process and it became automatic.

Now that I’m in a more open, empathetic company, that instinct is causing problems. When I am shut down in meetings, it is not with the same intent as was exhibited at TechGiant. Now, generally, the words that silence me were unintentional, poorly chosen, unthinking — mistakes. Nevertheless, my internal counter ticks up. I don’t even hear the counting anymore, I often don’t notice that they’ve struck three until after the meeting is over and I realize that I disengaged from the conversation at some point. Because the negative interactions are so relatively minor, they don’t even register and I have to actively think back to find them.

At TechGiant, I did not care if the meeting attendees knew I was voluntarily not contributing. If they noticed and inquired, I took the opportunity to remind them that they didn’t have any interest in my words. I was most interested in shielding myself from a room of sharks so that I could come out whole.

Now, when people notice I’m not contributing, I worry about what signals I am sending off. Am I still broadcasting the sit-back-and-laugh-because-you’re-all-absurd vibe? Am I coming off as petulant? Am I perceived as touchy or “sensitive” (that terrible word which has come to mean emotionally-unstable or a euphemism for “difficult”)? In this environment, where I am considered part of the team and valued, that is the last thing I want to do. On Thursday, someone approached me after a meeting and expressed concern: “You started the meeting with a lot of enthusiasm but you ended it subdued. Did something happen?” How could I say, Yes, but it was stupid and minor and my brain has a protection circuit that no longer applies and I don’t know how to reroute it?