What happened before I walked in?
It was my first job out of college. I was a young television news anchor, all the way across the country from where I grew up in Idaho. The news director who hired me left before I started, and the station spent my first couple of months searching for a new one.
His replacement showed up and went to work, and before long I started to see his behavior playing out in public. I was also getting reports from people outside the station. He was leveraging his position with the station well outside the newsroom. I'll leave it at that. Back then, TV news was the community's connecting point, and the anchors were celebrities around town. A TV station couldn't risk a poor public image, and it still can't. What was happening in public had become the station's problem.
I was anchoring the weeknight 11 o'clock newscast and reporting every day. I was new to the station, but not to the industry; I'd worked in radio and other small market TV stations for several years before that. I was very aware this could come across as a personality conflict, so I made sure I had rock solid, corroborated evidence before I asked for 30 minutes on the GM's calendar.
Why isn't having the evidence enough?
Because having the evidence and saying it out loud to the person running the place are two very different things. We can have our facts straight and our recommendation ready, and then we're sitting across from the person whose opinion matters most to our career.
The breath shortens. The pace speeds up. The sentence we prepared gets harder to deliver, and the inclination is to start softening it, adding explanations and racing to get through it. The message usually survives the pressure. It's our ability to deliver it that breaks, which is why more polishing of the sentence does nothing for the person trying to say it. Most communication training teaches what to say. The Presence Lab works on letting your nervous system say it.
Why does a newcomer find it easier to speak up?
I didn't know the answer at the time. I found it years later on this very podcast, back when it was called The Game Changers with Jason Jennings. In Episode 113, Jason asked me to imagine running a mutual fund. In which year does the manager turn in the best performance: year one, when you're new and don't know the stocks; year two, when you know the good and bad performers; or year five, when you're the expert? I said year one, and that was his answer.
Jason gave two reasons. A new manager wants to prove what they can do, so they're willing to take chances. And they have no earlier choices to defend, so when something underperforms, there's no emotional attachment holding them to it. That's Jason's claim from that 2017 conversation, not a study I've checked, but it described me in the GM's office. I wanted to prove what I could do, and I had no history at that station: no old battles, and no list of times I'd spoken up and been brushed off.
That raises the harder question for those of us with years of experience. How do we keep that courage once the history starts to pile up?
What does NASA's Starliner investigation show about speaking up?
Starliner is Boeing's crew capsule for NASA, the one two astronauts flew to the International Space Station in 2024. When NASA investigated that flight, part of the trail led back eight years, to an email.
According to the investigation report, in November 2016 a mission operations employee supporting the Starliner team identified a failure tolerance problem in the propulsion system and emailed Boeing's engineering leadership, "discussing the issue and potential resolutions." The employee resent it in May 2017. A third follow-up, in April 2021, read: "This has been languishing for some time now, and we really need to do something with it." Personnel told investigators that other work had been given higher priority.
The same report records a separate account of the working environment from someone who told investigators: "I stopped speaking up because I knew I would be dismissed." That's what the history sounds like.
That email isn't proof of what caused the problems on the 2024 flight. Propulsion problems on that flight did leave NASA weighing how to bring the crew home, and on August 24, 2024, the agency announced that Starliner would return without its crew. The astronauts came home months later on a SpaceX Dragon. When NASA released the investigation on February 19, 2026, it formally declared the flight a Type A mishap. In a note to NASA's workforce that day, Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote that the most troubling failure the investigation revealed "is not hardware. It is decision making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight."
That staffer brought potential resolutions, and the concern still sat for years. A solution all by itself is no guarantee anyone acts on it.
How do bosses judge the people who speak up?
Researchers have studied it. Steven Whiting and his colleagues ran three laboratory studies on how people evaluate employees who speak up with recommendations. They varied things about the speaker (expertise and trustworthiness), the message (including whether it recommended a solution, and whether it was framed positively or negatively) and the context (timing, and whether the group's norm was to speak up or keep quiet). At least one factor from each group affected how the speaker was evaluated, and most of those effects were indirect, working through liking, perceived prosocial motives, or how constructive the contribution seemed.
Here's how I put it: before a boss decides whether we're right, they decide whose side we're on.
What's the difference between a solution and an offer?
Here's what I said to the GM: "I know this puts you in a very difficult spot, since he's so new. I'm willing to step in as interim while you find the permanent person. Here's my plan for the newsroom for the next several months, until your permanent solution is found."
Listen to the order. The plan was the last thing I said. Before I got to it, I'd already answered the question every boss is quietly asking the person in front of them: whose side are you on?
- I named his bind before I named the problem. "I know this puts you in a very difficult spot."
- I put myself on the hook instead of handing him more work. "I'm willing to step in."
- I made it easy to say yes. Interim meant he could keep looking for the permanent person.
- Only then did I lay out the plan.
That's the difference. A solution is something we hand the boss to go do. An offer is something we're willing to do ourselves.
He basically took me up on the offer on the spot, and I felt like the dog who had caught the car. The interim role turned into a permanent one for several years, and I finished that part of my career at the station as the news director and main evening anchor. It was one of the best times of my life, and the friendships from it are still rich and personal today. The outcome isn't something I can promise anyone facing a hard conversation. The offer is something I can show you.
How do you keep your courage once the history piles up?
In a study published in 2003, Frances Milliken, Elizabeth Morrison and Patricia Hewlin interviewed 40 employees. Most described an occasion when they had a concern but did not raise it with a supervisor. The most frequently mentioned reason for staying silent was fear of being viewed or labeled negatively and, as a consequence, damaging valued relationships.
That's the history talking. Every time we've been brushed off, we walk into the next conversation a little more braced. Under that pressure, our attention drifts to how we're being judged, and we start adding words to protect ourselves. To the boss on the other side of the desk, protecting ourselves sounds a lot like being on our own side.
The new fund manager isn't braver than the rest of us. They just aren't carrying anything to defend. The work, when we have years in, is to walk in carrying the offer, not the history.
None of this holds up if our body has already decided the conversation is a fight. We can't out-script an activated nervous system. The goal is to stay available while the pressure is there, so we can still listen, think and deliver what we came to say, even while the conversation stays uncomfortable.
What can leaders do to hear the hard thing?
The people who report to us are running that same question every time they knock on our door: whose side are you on? Our job is to make the answer obvious long before they walk in. As an executive, I keep it top of mind that I want to keep the door open. I want the people who report to me to come in with confidence, expecting that I'm listening.
The mushroom syndrome. A CEO I've worked with knows that the people who answer to him sometimes hold back their clear, candid feedback. That's what I call the mushroom syndrome: the person at the top gets kept in a really nice corner office, but kept in the dark. He brought me in as a communication coach because he wanted honest, candid feedback and was having trouble getting his employees to give it. I suggested we include his employees in those sessions, so they could see him open, transparent and willing to be criticized in front of his direct reports. They'd also watch me give him that feedback, with the clear intent of helping him connect better and be better on camera and in front of a group. Once they saw it modeled, they would start doing it themselves.
What does it sound like to raise a risk and stay on the leader's side?
While I was prepping this episode, a LinkedIn video from Jaspreet Gill, MBA, a certified high performance coach, caught my eye. In the clip she shows three ways to respond to a leader's idea:
- Agree: "I think that could work. Let's try it and see what happens."
- Disagree: "I'm not sure I agree. I actually think we are missing a few things here. Can I offer a different perspective?"
- Bring a risk forward: "There's one risk I think we should consider before we move forward."
That last voice raised the risk and kept moving forward with the leader. That's the offer.