The Sin I Committed at a Networking Reception

Last year I stayed silent. And I want to tell you it was complicated but it wasn't.

I was at a reception. Drink in hand, small talk, the usual. I was chatting with two people I'd just met. A man and a woman. The man made a joke, something about women vs. men.

The woman's face changed. Small, but I saw it. She was uncomfortable.

And I awkwardly tried to move the conversation along.

I could have been clear. The joke was inappropriate. Full stop. I didn't need a speech. I needed one sentence. Instead I let a few seconds pass, and then I changed the subject. Smooth. Painless. Cowardly.

I write books about this. I teach leaders how to speak up, how to role model inclusion. And there I was, at a party, doing the exact thing I get paid to warn people about.

I know the framework. The framework didn't save me.

For years I've taught the 7 Sins of Inclusive Leadership. Silence is one of them. Staying quiet when you should speak.

I could walk you through all seven. I'm not going to. You'd nod, you'd file it away, and nothing would change. That's the trap with frameworks. They make you feel informed. They rarely make you act.

Here's the thing about that night. I wasn't ignorant. I had the knowledge. I had the words. I had every tool I sell.

And I still chose the easy option.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Not that I didn't know better. That knowing better wasn't enough.

Why the easy option was easy

Here's what I've stopped believing. That the sin was mine alone.

Walk it back. Why was silence the easy option? Because speaking up had a cost and silence had none. I'd have made a stranger defensive. I'd have made the room awkward. I'd have been the guy who can't take a joke.

The room rewarded silence. It punished the alternative. So I did the rational thing.

Now scale that up. Put it inside an organisation.

A leader watches a colleague get talked over in a meeting. Says nothing. Cowardice? Or a workplace where interrupting the senior person gets you frozen out?

A manager takes quiet credit for a junior's idea. Ego? Or a promotion system that rewards individual visibility and ignores who actually did the work?

We call these personal failures. We send the person on a course. We fix the human and return them to the same building.

The sin is a symptom. The system is the disease.

The treadmill that's hard to name

I'll try to put a name to it. It implicates me because I'm part of the system.

Most inclusion training treats the sins as personal flaws. Fix the leader, fix the problem. It's a good business model. People keep needing fixing, because you keep sending them back into the conditions that broke them.

That's a treadmill. Run hard, go nowhere.

I've sold time on that treadmill. So have most people who do what I do. We get leaders better at inclusion in a classroom. Then they walk back into a system that still rewards the sin. Six months later the pattern is back, and someone books another workshop.

Training reduces the frequency. It does not remove the incentive. Only the organisation can do that. And the organisation is usually the one paying the trainer, which makes it the one question nobody in the room wants to ask.

Can inclusive leadership be taught? Yes. I've built a career on it.

But teaching it while the system rewards the opposite is like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a pool with the current cranked to 11. They learned. The water won.

What I actually owed that woman

So back to the reception. I know what you might be thinking. Easy fix. Just speak up next time.

That's the individual fix. It's real, and it matters, and I should have done it.

But here's the harder question, and it's the one I'd put to anyone who commissions training or runs a team. I had everything I needed to speak up and I still didn't. If knowledge plus skill plus a literal framework wasn't enough for me, what makes you think a half-day workshop will be enough for your people?

Maybe the work isn't getting them braver.

Maybe it's building the kind of room where speaking up costs nothing.

What it cost me, and what I'd want you to sit with, is that I had been trained for that exact moment by my own work. And the room still won.

P.S. I went looking for that man afterwards to say something. He'd left. The sentence I owed is still sitting in my mouth a year later. Some sins you don't get to fix. You just get to not repeat them.