Whose stories are safe to share?

Last month, a reader wrote to me about a chapter in Lived (an eBook I wrote on using personal stories in professional settings). She had noticed something I walked straight past.

The failure stories in the book, she said, were told with a certain ease. The self-deprecation of someone who had already landed safely. Then she asked a question that was better than everything else I wrote in the book.

“Whose failures are safe to share publicly, and whose aren’t? As a woman in IT, disclosing failure to build trust carries a different risk than the book acknowledges.”

My first instinct was to defend the book. I’m glad I didn’t.

She is right.

I wrote those chapters from where I was standing. A man, in his own firm, telling stories where the mess was always recoverable. That is what made them safe enough to tell. I did not name it. I should have.

So this issue is about the thing I missed. Not how to tell a good story. Who gets to?

Tell us about a time you got something badly wrong.

A few years ago, I was running a session at a company offsite. The prompt was simple: tell us about a time you got something badly wrong.

A senior director went first. He described a product bet that cost the company a quarter of its revenue. He told it well. People laughed in the right places. When he finished, someone said, “That’s why we trust you with the big calls.” His failure had become evidence of his judgment.

An hour later, a younger analyst told a smaller version of the same story. A forecast she got wrong. A client who noticed before she did. The room went quiet in a different way. Afterward, her manager kindly pulled her aside to ask if she was “feeling supported.” She had told the truth, just as the director had. She walked out carrying something he never had to.

Nobody in that room was cruel. That is the part I keep returning to. The audience was not hostile. It was simply running two different programs, and neither person in the chairs had chosen which program ran on them.

Courage vs. Fragility

Here is another one. I know two people who each took time off work for their mental health.

One was a partner at a firm, in his fifties. When he came back, he spoke about it openly at a town hall and was praised for his courage. Within a month, “vulnerability” was a leadership value on a slide somewhere.

The other was three years into her career. She mentioned her time off once, to one colleague, in confidence. It reached her appraisal before she did. The word used was not courage. The word used was fragile.

Same act. Same honesty. The story did not change. The person telling it did, and so the story came to mean something else.

Leave the mess in.

I have watched this play out along almost every line you can draw through an office.

The new joiner who tells a candid story about dysfunction at her last company, hoping to sound like someone who has seen things. She is not heard as experienced. She is heard as a future flight risk, the person who will one day say the same thing about this place.

The man who mentions, lightly, that he was the first in his family to finish school. A colleague with the right surname can drop a line like that, and it reads as charm. He drops it and watches people quietly recalculate where to slot him.

The employee who admits in a review that he found a project overwhelming. If he is already trusted, this is self-awareness. If he is not, it is simply filed.

In each case, the storytelling advice we all repeat holds up perfectly. Be specific. Leave the mess in. Don’t rush to the tidy resolution. And in each case, the advice was written, mostly, by and for the people who could afford to follow it.

The mess is not the same for everyone.

This is what I got wrong in the book, said plainly.

I argued that the most credible stories are the ones that leave the mess in. I still believe that. What I missed is that the cost of leaving the mess in is not the same for everyone. A man in his own firm pays almost nothing for it. He is heard as candid. A woman in IT telling the identical story is often heard confirming a story someone was already telling about her before she opened her mouth.

That is not a storytelling problem. It is an audience problem. But here is the cruel arithmetic of it: the storyteller is the one who pays for the audience’s bias, not the audience.

So, when we tell people to be more vulnerable at work, we are quietly assuming the room will be kind to them. For some people, the room reliably is. For others, it has never once been. Telling both groups the same thing and calling it advice is not neutral. It only sounds neutral because the people writing the advice rarely had to test it on themselves.

I don’t have a clean answer to this.

I don’t have a clean answer to this. I don’t want to rush to the resolution and ruin the moment before it has finished saying what it came to say.

But I have stopped giving one piece of advice I used to give freely. I used to tell everyone to open with a personal failure. I don’t anymore. Now I ask a question first. Who is in your room, and what story were they telling about you before you arrived?

Because you are never only telling your story, you are editing theirs. Sometimes the brave thing is the messy disclosure. Sometimes the brave thing is refusing to hand a biased room more material to work with.

I have also started noticing whose stories get repeated after the meeting ends. That, more than who spoke, tells you whose voice the room is actually safe for.

And if you lead a team, the lever you hold is not to encourage more sharing. It is making the room safe enough that the analyst’s failure lands the way the director’s did. You cannot order people to be vulnerable. You can change what happens to them when they are.

The reader who wrote to me ended her note by saying she wasn’t sure I’d want to hear it. I did. It was the most useful thing anyone has sent me about the book.

So, I’ll ask you the way she asked me. If you have lived a version of this, a story that was safe for someone else to tell and not for you, or a moment you stayed quiet because you’d already done the math, I would genuinely like to hear it. Not for a future edition. Because I want to understand it better than I currently do.

Whose stories are safe to share in your workplace? And what does the answer tell you about the place?