It's the Eye of the Tiger, it's the thrill....

The lights were dimmed and the eye of the tiger started pumping out of the speakers. The stage lights were on, corporate colours, naturally. The keynote speaker entered the room, skipping and jumping down the centre of the room, the 400 delegates turning to watch as he fist-bumped and high-fived the male senior leaders sat in the front row.

The music stopped as the CEO stood on the stage and made their introduction to the latest corporate fun day, shindig, time out of the office, and team building event. You know the drill. Get your top tiers into a civic centre room, get a speaker in, someone lively, exciting, expensive, give them a speech, video it all, do some group exercises, and then return to the office after lunch, safe in the knowledge that things would be different.

My first ever one of these, at the tender age of 21, fresh out of university, one might say a little green even, was a national conference. Fancy, a national conference, 1994, when there was a little bit of cash in the system, enough to buy a posh lunch, a nice pen, a lanyard, a folder, and a badge with your name on it. I know I sound like I was easily pleased. It’s because I was.

Fast forward a couple of years, in my first proper job, and these things, conferences, events became an annual occurrence, more often if they were free and local. Often with the same type of feel. Turn up, sign in, get your badge and pack, breakfast pastries if it was a good one, find your table, round obviously, or your seat, end of the row for a quick getaway, not too near the front, not too far away from the back. Listen to the speakers, eat the boiled sweets, drink the tepid, stewed tea, participate in the workshop, small talk over lunch, lively energiser to start the afternoon, and begin thinking about how quickly you can leave without being noticed.

So, by the time I was sat in the big room, with the 400 delegates, watching the fist-bumping and high fiving, it’s fair to say that not only was 20 years older and wiser, I was also 20 years into attending conferences, 20 years better at sifting through information and working out what was useful and actionable and what was pie in the sky. I may have also been a little harder to impress. A little more cynical. A little less interested in free pens, good lunches, and breakfast pastries and very much more interested in whether the public money spent on these events was, well, money well spent.?

So as the music stopped playing, I settled down to watch the keynote speaker, who had been briefed to give some key messages that the leaders of the organisation needed to hear and then transmit back to the people we worked with.

This time though, this time was different. The event, was like a hundred other events there had been before, but this time, I was tired of the charade, I had already seen through the bullcrap and decided that while I was there in body, I was most definitely not there in spirit. I’d had enough. Had enough of being in an organisation that pretended to be one thing but was most definitely another.

As I walked into the bathroom before leaving the event, one of the organisation’s senior leaders walked out of a cubicle. She smiled and said “did you enjoy that ?” and for the first time I took off the corporate mask and said exactly what came into my head “in all honesty, I thought it was bullshit. I’m sick of coming to these things, where we talk about accountability and respect but then go back to work and watch people behave badly, disrespectfully, and with no accountability at all. Where we say all the right things but go back to work and carry on as we were” I paused before I continued “shit, sorry, I probably shouldn’t have said that” to which she smiled and left the room.

I sat in the cubicle and slapped my forehead with my hand. How could I have been so stupid? She was bound to say something to my director, about me not being very corporate, and I would catch the flack for it afterward.

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. With a capital Sh.

I returned to the office, carried on with my job, played the part, did the things, but knew that it was the end. The beginning of the end. How can you lead in an organisation, be a leader of other people in an organisation, when the organisation isn’t something that you believe in anymore? I’m not sure how, to be honest as I don’t have any more of an answer to that now than I had then.

The whisper that started with that bullshit conference, got louder and louder and louder and eventually, it was history, firstly for me, then slowly for one person, after another. People left, either forced out or ran out, paid off, moved on, stepped away, realised that you can only be a bystander for so long before the thing you are ignoring and pretending doesn’t exist, comes and bites you on the ass.

The woman that I spoke the career-limiting truth to, the woman who I thought was going to finish me off. Well, I found out much later, that me speaking my truth was a turning point for her too. She hadn’t responded at the time in the bathroom, because the truth I spoke, was her truth too. She just couldn’t say it out loud.

So, here is a clarion call for truth, for speaking your truth, for sometimes letting go of the filters, taking off that mask, the need to be seen to be something or someone particular as not for the first time, I realise now that even though I didn’t get any noticeable response, the truth that I spoke then, had a ripple. A shockwave. An effect. I just didn’t know about it until much later.

Sometimes you may never get a visible response to something you say or do, you may never know your impact and you may never know how speaking your truth may help someone else to see, understand and speak theirs.

This is an invitation to do it anyway.?

If any of this resonates and you are left wondering how to speak your truth inside or outside an organisation then get in touch.