7 Tips for Speaking Truth to Power Without Blowing up Your Career

At the time, I believed speaking up would ruin my future. But my silence cost me more than I realized: my self-respect, my agency, and the chance to advocate for others. Worse, staying quiet didn’t protect me—I faced discrimination again.

Years later, during a panel on women in tech, venture capitalist Sarah Kunst changed my perspective. She and six other women had exposed Dave McClure’s sexual harassment, igniting an early #MeToo reckoning in Silicon Valley. Before our talk, I mentioned my mentor’s advice about avoiding career risks. I had planned to pass that same advice on to other women.

Kunst stopped me. “The problem with saying that,” she said, “is that people will listen to you. If you tell them speaking out will ruin their careers, they’ll stay silent, and nothing will change. Look at me. Is my career blown up?”

She was right. She had taken the risk and thrived, proving that speaking truth to power doesn’t have to end a career—it can reshape an industry.

Of course, speaking up isn’t always safe. But in hindsight, I see that my fear was greater than my actual risk. I had the power to act and chose not to. I wish I had.

So how can you challenge authority effectively—without jeopardizing your career? In this guide, I’ll share seven strategies to help you speak up with confidence, protect your professional future, and create real change.

How to Speak Truth to Power Without Ruining Your Career

When facing discrimination or harassment, it’s important to take thoughtful steps before deciding how to respond. Looking back, these are the steps I wish I had considered.

Step 1: Document What Happened

If you are experiencing or observing discrimination or harassment, especially if it’s from someone who is more powerful, you can document it every time it occurs—even

if you’re thinking you probably won’t take any of steps 4–7 above. Take a few minutes to jot down what’s happening. There are a couple of reasons to do this. One, it can help preempt gaslighting. Getting straight what is happening in your own head can be invaluable. Two, it will preserve options. If you later decide you want to take any of steps 4–7, your documentation will help.

Documentation doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. Whenever possible, note the time and place, what was said or done and by whom, and who was present. Don’t feel it has to be perfect—this is just a first step. You may never need to use this.

When documenting, think about which of the facts can be corroborated by others or by some sort of paper trail. For example, when I was presented with new clothing that my boss asked a colleague to purchase for me—super-tight jeans, a revealing shirt, uncomfortable ballet slipper shoes, and a blazer—the steps I took when documenting included: snapping a picture of the receipts for the new clothes and storing them in my personal Google Drive folder; keeping a picture of the canceled check I’d made out to the company to pay for the clothes in the same Google Drive folder. Also, after my boss bought me the clothes, I called my college roommate to discuss, so making a note of that was important.

Regarding a meeting with my boss I noted taking place on February 14 where he told me I was “not objectively likeable,” my husband heard the story and would no doubt remember it, as it ruined our Valentine’s Day dinner.

If someone is sending you offensive texts, emails, pictures, or videos, take screenshots of them and store them in a place you control. Don’t save all this information on a work computer. Any documents you keep on a work computer, even personal journal entries, belong to your employer. You can email them to a personal email account, save them on your own computer or a thumb drive if you have one, upload them to a Google Drive or Dropbox account (or whatever other technology you use and control). Just be sure that you don’t save any confidential or proprietary company information on a personal account, as this can be grounds for immediate termination.

If your work computer doesn’t permit any of those things, pull out your phone and start taking pictures. Send them to someone you trust to establish what’s called a contemporaneous record. For example, one of my mentors thought I should sue the company. He recommended that I send him an email each time these things happened, which I did. You can also establish a contemporaneous record by telling friends or trusted colleagues and then emailing confirmation of your conversation.

Step 2: Build Solidarity by Finding Allies

Harassment and discrimination can leave you feeling isolated. Yet if you are experiencing these things, you are far from alone. Finding a way to feel connected to others is key. Often just one person at work can make all the difference. But how can you find that one person who is going to help you? Here are three things you can do to build solidarity:

• Ask for information
• Ask for help
• Find a “difficulty anchor”

Ask for Information

A big part of building solidarity and finding support is sharing information. I once shared my offer letter with a former colleague who was also considering joining the company. We would be peers, but I was pretty sure that I’d learn he was being paid more than I was if I asked. I wanted to know, but I hesitated to look at his letter because I was sure it would piss me off. If I hadn’t, I might never have learned that I was, in fact, being offered a roughly comparable compensation package. That knowledge was enormously liberating. I was glad I asked and grateful to him for sharing.

If you have advantages that others don’t, if you’re getting paid more than others for reasons that are not fair, don’t just sit around feeling guilty. Use your advantages to fix the injustice. For example, when White actress Jessica Chastain learned that her Black costar Octavia Spencer customarily made far less than Jessica did, she famously suggested that they negotiate their next joint feature together—and they did.

If you complain to your boss, you may worry you risk having your salary lowered to your colleague’s rather than your colleague’s being raised to yours. Your boss may also get angry and defensive. It’s important to proceed cautiously, while still finding a way to intervene.

If talking directly to your boss feels like tilting at windmills, find out if there are collective efforts you can join. If you can get together with a large number of people in your organization or even your industry and share information, your risk of being singled out and punished goes way down, and your chance of having a big impact thanks to collective action goes way up. When you support movements for pay equity, fundamental progress can be made. At the very least, you can share information with your colleague and acknowledge that it’s not fair.

Ask for Help

A mentor gave me some invaluable advice early in my career. Asking for help, he explained, is very different from asking for a handout. Asking for help is like asking someone to invest in you. And it’s the gift that keeps giving. Once someone has helped you, the person has invested in your success and is likely to help again if you need it. You’re not indebted to the person who helped you. You just need to pay it forward.

Here is a simple calculus you can do to figure out the best way to ask for help. Look for something specific the person can do to help you. Don’t ask the person to have coffee or lunch with you—they are busy, and fifteen minutes can feel to them like a big ask. Look for things that are relatively easy for the other person to do but have a lot of value to you. A great ratio to keep in mind is low effort for the person / high value to you.

But don’t limit yourself. Often people will go to a lot of effort to help you. People can be incredibly generous.

You can ask a mentor for advice on a specific decision you are making. Think through in advance how to present the decision in the most efficient way. Don’t ask the person to do your thinking for you. “I could do A, or I could do B. Here are the pros and cons as I understand them. Is there another factor I should be considering?”

Find a “Difficulty Anchor”

Mekka Okereke, an engineering leader at Google, shared some excellent advice on how to build solidarity with someone more senior to make sure you get proper credit for your work. The key is to ask for help from someone in your organization who is highly respected, known to have high standards, but is also objective. Someone who’s known to be tough but fair. Explain what you’re working on and ask the person to meet occasionally to give you guidance on your projects and the specific roles you’re playing. This person will become your “difficulty anchor,” who will be able to testify in detail about your contribution.

If your peers dismiss your work, assuming that the problem you were solving was easy (it must be easy if you could do it!), your “difficulty anchor” can objectively disagree and explain why it was a hard problem. This sort of evidence is much more effective coming from your anchor than from you. This is a big ask, but many people who are established in their careers enjoy this kind of mentoring. If you can build that kind of solidarity, it can help you get credit for your work. That’s important because when bias means that people don’t give you credit, you get passed over for promotions and the like—you get discriminated against.

Step 3: Locate the Exit Nearest You

Whether you want to stay or go probably depends on what your exit options are. So locate the exit nearest you. It’s easy to feel stuck and never realize how many other job opportunities you might have. Sometimes we really are stuck in a bad situation. But often we are not as stuck as we feel.

If you look around and find several other jobs you could get, then suddenly the threat of being fired is not a big deal. You have a great BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement). If you look around and realize this job is your only option or your best bet, then that will help you decide how much risk you can take. Either way, it’s important to know your BATNA.

At times, you may realize that even though you can’t easily find another job, you have to go. All the work you’ve done above—documenting what’s happened, engaging the support of friends, reaching out for help—will, I hope, leave you feeling a sense of agency. And be skeptical of received wisdom about not quitting a job until you have another.

George, a person I care about deeply, once worked in a liquor store for a boss who was disrespectful to the point of harassment. Conventional wisdom was “Don’t quit until you get another job.” But it can also be hard to interview for a new job when you’re angry and demoralized in your current one. George quit and started driving for Lyft and made ends meet while recovering from the harassing boss. That isn’t possible for everyone, but don’t assume you’re stuck before giving it careful and creative thought.

Even if you can’t immediately find another job, if the exit nearest you is not yet visible, you still have freedom: freedom to choose how you respond. I recommend two very different kinds of books to read if you find yourself in this situation. For inspiration and perspective, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. And for practical advice, Bob Sutton’s The Asshole Survival Guide.

Step 4: Have a Direct Conversation

Being direct is often less risky than it feels. You do take a risk, but you can get an outsize reward for doing so. When Ruchi Sanghvi, the first female engineer at Facebook, was negotiating her compensation with Mark Zuckerberg after finding out she was paid less than her male peers, she said, “Please bring me up to par on . . . compensation. I don’t want to have this in the back of my mind while I’m working, nor do you. I only want to be thinking about building stuff!” Ruchi understood intuitively that she would not only be happier but also do better work if she knew she was being fairly paid in comparison with her peers. Receiving proper compensation gave her the freedom to do her best work.

I have mentored countless people frustrated by injustice in their workplace—by the lack of real efforts to recruit more diverse employees, by the visibly slower career growth for people from some demographic groups, by comments reflecting bias and prejudiced beliefs from senior leaders, and by other manifestations of harassment or discrimination. It’s clear to me that these folks are ready to bolt.

For many people, it simply boils down to their reluctance to have an awkward conversation. Your boss is insufficiently invested in you and doesn’t care enough to address that problem. Why set oneself up for further disappointment or even humiliation?

These sorts of direct confrontations are highly personal. You’ll have to make your own list of pros and cons, costs and benefits. Here’s one I made for myself.

 

Let’s go back to the “tight jeans” situation I documented earlier. You might think that, given this cost-benefit analysis, I would have escalated. And I did confront my boss directly after I had quit, and then I went back after a couple of years to try again. I don’t think I got through to him, unfortunately. I did not report him to HR or take legal action, though. I didn’t tell the story publicly (until now).

Why not? The next job I took came with an enormous compensation package, and I decided the ROI just wasn’t there for me. Did I want to take on enormous legal bills and the emotional cost of fighting this thing, or just walk away and take a new job that offered enormous financial upside? In terms of dollars and cents, it was an easy decision. However, in terms of making the world a better, more just place, I’m not sure that I made the right call.

Navigating treacherous waters is difficult. These are complicated decisions, and I certainly don’t have all the answers. I’m not sure I did the right thing, so I’m certainly not trying to tell you what you should do. The best I can offer is to share my thinking as honestly as I know how. I hope that my story helps you feel less alone and my frameworks give you a way to make sense of the things that are happening to you.

Step 5: Report the Issue to HR

People are often cynical about reporting to HR. That is because there are too many instances when reporting an incident to HR actually winds up getting you, not the culprit, punished. This happens mostly when HR reports to the culprit. So, proceed with caution if you decide to take this step.

There are a number of important reasons to report any discrimination or harassment you experience to HR. First of all, HR can be helpful. When HR resolves the issue, you are spared the time and hassle of having to find a new job or take another action. I have been lucky and have had strong relationships with most of the HR partners I’ve worked with. Throughout my career, they’ve given me excellent advice and helped me grow professionally. Given my fascination with creating business environments in which colleagues thrive and business prospers, I find HR the most intellectually interesting function at any company. That said, there are sometimes nightmare scenarios in which HR is in the pocket of the very person who’s causing you harm. That’s happened to me, too. But it is certainly not always the case.

Even in the event HR is not helpful—if HR seems more inclined to protect the person discriminating against or harassing you—it’s still important to have reported the incident. For one thing, it is a form of evidence. If you wind up suing your company or going public with your story, creating a record of your complaint and how it was handled or not handled is an essential first step. If your issue is not resolved, that record will be crucial if you decide to take further action.

Finally, reporting to HR may help others even if it doesn’t help you. One of the things I felt worst about when I walked away from the job with the tight-jeans boss was that other women at the company experienced similarly bizarre, gendered behavior from him. Had I reported my issues before I left, it would have been harder for the company to soft-pedal future complaints. And it wouldn’t have taken that much effort on my part—especially after I’d gotten another job and was leaving anyway.

Perhaps the lowest-risk way to report to HR is in your exit interview. This is a good moment to tell the people at the company exactly why you are leaving. Sure, you don’t want to burn bridges. But this is a moment in which you can share some observations that you were hesitant to share while you were still at the company. This is an opportunity to state the facts of what happened, to describe the harassment or discrimination you experienced. It is also an opportunity to help the person you’re talking to understand why the work environment was the cause of your departure. You can point out that you have no intention of suing but that you would like things to be better for those you are leaving behind. Doing so may enormously help the employees who are systemically disadvantaged at the company.

One risk of giving an honest exit interview is that you may be asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Do not allow yourself to be pressured to sign anything you don’t want to sign. Be careful with exit documents and releases. I know several people who were so eager to leave they signed and then felt muzzled for years. Remember, you are always free to walk out any door. You do not have to sign anything.

Step 6: Take Legal Action

Obviously, significant risks are associated with taking legal action, not least the time and emotional energy it can consume. I don’t have any data behind this assertion, but it seems to me that getting an outsize payment is about as likely as winning the lottery.

But making a conscious decision about whether you want to sue, and seeking advice from multiple employment lawyers, does not have to be all-consuming. These conversations can help you zero in on how best to protect yourself, what you might want out of a lawsuit, and whether you’re likely to get it. Hiring a lawyer can feel daunting, and it’s not uncommon to feel intimidated by lawyers. But a good lawyer can be the dogged ally you wish you’d had all along—full of practical advice, emotional support, and horizon-expanding wisdom.

Oftentimes people dealing with workplace abuse issues find consulting with a knowledgeable, compassionate attorney gives them an invaluable plan of action. Numerous legal organizations are out there with resources to help you. Remember, you are about to hire someone to work for you. You are the boss, not the other way around. The lawyer will give you advice, but you don’t have to take it. You get to decide whether you will act on the lawyer’s counsel or ignore it.

Don’t talk to just one lawyer, talk to several before deciding whom to hire. You don’t have to pay for that first conversation any more than an employer has to pay people to interview for a job. Don’t be afraid to ask hard, uncomfortable questions. Lawyers are used to that. Look for a lawyer who seems to respect your time and understand what’s important to you.

Many lawyers work on contingency, meaning they only get paid if they win a lawsuit or if there is a settlement. If they think that they can win the case, or if the case will be so high profile that it’s worth it to them to take it on, they will. Because such lawyers get paid a percentage of a settlement, which often requires that you sign an NDA, they may push you to accept the settlement-and-NDA route. Be aware that if you sign an NDA, it will prevent you from helping others at the company by speaking out. And some NDAs will prevent you from getting the help you need—they can be so restrictive that you’re forbidden from discussing what happened to you with anyone—even a therapist or a spouse. If you’re not going to be comfortable doing that, make your position clear and make sure that your attorney respects it. Also, if you don’t relish that kind of publicity, let the lawyer know.

Your endgame doesn’t have to be winning a suit. Consider Lilly Ledbetter, whose pay discrimination suit went all the way to the Supreme Court. She lost there on a legal technicality, but the case was so grossly unjust that Congress later passed legislation, called the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, to close the loophole. Ledbetter’s willingness to fight this fight created a more just world for millions of women. 

Step 7: Tell Your Story Publicly

Thanks to the #MeToo and #BLM movements, people who tell their stories today are likelier to be heard with compassion and solidarity than ever before in history. One of the things that makes me feel optimistic is the response that people have gotten when they’ve told their stories publicly, and the solidarity that these stories have built.

The #MeToo movement has offered many millions of people solidarity and support. It was born with a story, and it has unleashed millions more. It began when a 13-year-old girl told activist and community organizer Tarana Burke about being sexually assaulted. Burke, herself a victim of sexual violence, had been unable to respond to the girl’s story in the moment. Burke later wished she had simply been able to say, “Me, too.” She launched the phrase on MySpace in 2006 to help others find the strength both to tell their stories and also to listen to the stories of others. Thanks to Burke’s brilliant call and the response on social media, countless victims of sexual harassment and sexual violence have done exactly that.

While #MeToo has been praised for providing support for people who tell their stories, it has also been criticized for discounting the contributions of women of color. If you are White, your story is likelier to be picked up than if you are not, as we saw with Susan Fowler Rigetti at Uber and Françoise Brougher at Pinterest. Research demonstrates that these are trends, not anecdotes.

A special note for White women—including myself. No, it’s not your fault that your story is likely to get shared more often because of your race. But it is your responsibility as an upstander to be aware of the fact. When you tell your story, make sure you are at the same time offering solidarity to other people who are also experiencing discrimination and harassment, but who don’t have the same access that you might.

Conclusion

I hope that, no matter what your circumstances, these steps can support you when thinking through your options. I hope you have a better idea of how to document what is happening in a way that dispels gaslighting, to build solidarity, and to locate the exit nearest you. I hope you come away with a better understanding of the risks and benefits of reporting to HR, having a direct conversation with the person who harmed you, taking legal action, and telling your story. Remember, you are not alone.

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