I think about this more than I think about most of my wins.
Her name was AB. She led regional marketing programs for a high-growth tech company and she was, genuinely, one of the best marketers I've ever managed. Creative. Detail-oriented. Focused on impact. Collaborative. She was the first marketing hire in the region, a one-woman show for a long time, and she delivered. The kind of person who makes everyone around her better without seeming to try.
She deserved a promotion. I knew it. And I failed her.
What happened
I went to bat for her. I really did. I had the conversations, I made the case, I pushed. And then the answer came back: no. The explanation I was given was that the highest merit allocation was reserved for the top 0.01% of performers across the company.
I remember sitting with that and thinking: that's bullshit. Not just for AB. For me too, if I'm honest. I had never received that highest allocation either, despite what my team and I were delivering. And I'd quietly swallowed that answer. If I didn't qualify, I kept asking myself, then who the hell did?
But here's where I failed.
When I delivered the news to AB, instead of being honest and instead of saying "I think this is a bad call and it's out of my hands," I repeated the line I'd been handed. The 0.01% explanation. The same one I'd privately rejected as bullshit.
I just didn't have the confidence to admit to her that the policy was stupid.
What she did next
AB didn't just accept it. She pushed back. She asked for the criteria. She wanted to understand exactly what "top 0.01%" meant, what it looked like, how it was measured.
And I kept digging the hole deeper. Because I didn't have good answers. Because the real answer: "honestly, I think this is a bad policy and I'm sorry you're on the receiving end of it" was sitting right there, and I couldn't bring myself to say it.
She was a great employee asking legitimate questions. I was a leader delivering a line I didn't believe. I still think about that conversation five years later. The shame is real.
What changed
After that, I made a decision: I was done delivering answers I didn't believe.
I had always thought of myself as a transparent leader. I trusted my people early. I shared context. But when it came to performance, promotions, and the parts of the system that didn't make sense, I defaulted to the party line. Not because I thought it was safer. Because I didn't have the confidence to say out loud that the system was wrong.
What I started doing instead was saying what I actually thought. Not unprofessionally (I never spoke against the company) but I stopped pretending the crazy wasn't crazy. When something didn't make sense, I said so. When I thought a decision was wrong, I said that too. And if an answer was out of my hands, I said that and not a sanitised version of it dressed up as rationale.
It turns out that kind of honesty is what people actually want from their leaders. Not protection from the truth. Just someone who sees clearly and doesn't pretend otherwise. Fully leaning into that transparency was, genuinely, freeing. For me and for the people I was leading.
What I'd tell a new leader
You're going to be handed lines you don't believe. And there will be a moment where you have to decide: do you repeat the line, or do you say what you actually think? It's not a question of safety. It's a question of confidence. Do you trust yourself enough to say, out loud, that something is wrong, even when the answer is out of your hands and there's nothing you can do to fix it?
Most of the time, your people aren't asking you to fix it. They're asking you to see it. To not stand there and pretend the thing that's obviously broken isn't broken. That's the leader I try to be now. I got there the hard way.
Anne-Marie Goulet is the founder of Swim Club, a strategic practice for founders and marketing leaders who are done with the theatre. She spent 15 years inside Salesforce, Shopify, and WordPress Enterprise leading global marketing teams. Say hi at anne-marie@joinswimclub.com.
