You spoke up. It was authentic,
so where did it go wrong?
Understanding the gap between expression and impact, and what political literacy has to do with it.
By Shirisha Nagendran · ICF PCC Executive Coach
A Note Before We Begin
I should say at the outset: I know this territory from the inside.
For much of my career I was known as someone who spoke her mind. In meetings, in town halls, directly to senior leaders who found the questions uncomfortable. Publicly, sometimes very publicly. People who have worked with me have always known me as someone who does not hesitate. That is true to who I am, and I do not regret it.
But it cost me things. And it took me years to learn how to speak in a way that landed rather than backfired, how to hold political literacy alongside the values I was not willing to give up, how to stay in the room and be heard rather than be managed around. I am still learning.
This guide comes from that experience. It is the thing I wish someone had handed me earlier.
Name What's Happening
Every generation that enters the workforce carries a set of beliefs about how things should work. The beliefs of younger millennials and Gen Z are, in many ways, admirable ones.
A genuine commitment to honesty. A resistance to pretence. A deep wish for workplaces to reflect the values they hold, and a lived awareness of enough institutional dishonesty (political, corporate, social) to have decided they will not participate in it.
So you speak up, and you mean it. You name what you see, refuse to dress discomfort in diplomatic language, call a bad idea a bad idea, and say out loud in a meeting what you have been saying in the group chat for weeks.
And then something happens that you did not expect.
You are not applauded for your honesty or thanked for your candour. Instead, you are labelled: difficult, not a team player, too emotional. You find yourself excluded from conversations, passed over, quietly managed around. And you are left with a bewildering question that nobody quite answers.
I said what was true. Why is everything worse?
If that question is familiar, this guide is for you. Not to tell you to stop speaking up. But to look honestly at what is happening in the gap between what you say and how it lands, because that gap is real, it has a pattern, and understanding it is the beginning of being heard.
The Authenticity Trap
Why this keeps happening
Before looking at what happens in the room, it is worth understanding why this pattern is so consistent across this generation. You did not arrive at it by accident. It is the predictable output of a particular set of cultural inputs, and understanding those inputs is part of understanding yourself.
Authenticity became the highest value
Research from NYU Stern found that up to 85% of Gen Z rank "voice" (self-expression) or "eudaimonia" (inner balance) in their top five personal values. Only 2% shared the values employers most prioritise: achievement, learning, performance. The gap between those two lists has consequences.
Values mismatchSocial media trained you to broadcast, not negotiate
A post, a reel, a take: these are one-to-many. You speak, others react. The workplace is a two-way, multi-directional system. The skills that earn visibility online do not reliably translate into influence in a professional context, and nobody quite explains this during the transition.
One-to-many vs two-wayInstitutions lost trust, but workplaces weren't replaced
Justified scepticism toward institutions hardened into I owe no deference to this system. But influence does not work without some understanding of the system you want to change from within. The ambition is present. The map of how influence actually works is often missing.
Scepticism without navigation"Psychological safety" was heard as a permission slip
Amy Edmondson defined psychological safety as a shared team-level belief, not an individual guarantee. It creates permission for disagreement, not protection from its consequences. A leader disagreeing with you is not removing your safety. That is safety in action.
Team-level, not individualThe brain does not wait for permission
When we experience dismissal or threat, the brain's threat-detection systems activate faster than conscious thought, what Goleman called an "amygdala hijack." The impulse to respond when flooded is the impulse most likely to cause lasting damage to credibility and relationships.
Regulate before you respondPsychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, in Don't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (HBR Press, 2025), draws on decades of evidence to argue that the most successful people are not those who rigidly stay true to themselves. They are the ones who adapt, evolve, and pay careful attention to how they are perceived.
What You Think You're Communicating
And what's actually landing
This is the part of the guide that asks something of you: a different kind of honesty, the kind that is useful rather than merely performed. These observations are offered with care, because naming a pattern clearly is how you get free of it.
Erving Goffman argued that every communication involves both what we give (the impressions we consciously intend) and what we give off (the impressions others receive regardless of our intention). The gap between the two is precisely where authenticity backfires.
What you experience as honesty, the room often receives as something else entirely: a threat, a judgment, a discharge.
Hyperbole as Habit
"This is a disaster."
"Nobody cares about this."
"This always happens."
Hyperbole signals emphasis in casual conversation. In a professional context, it reads differently. It suggests you cannot distinguish between what is genuinely catastrophic and what is merely frustrating, and that distinction matters to the people whose trust you are trying to earn.
Research by TalentSmart found that only 36% of people can accurately label their own emotions in the moment. Your emotion deserves more precise language. And precise language is what creates influence.
Opinions Dressed as Facts
"The strategy isn't working."
"This project is mismanaged."
"Leadership doesn't understand what's happening on the ground."
These are interpretations (specific, arguable, and partial) delivered in the grammatical form of a verdict. When an opinion arrives without being signalled as one, the conversation closes down. There is no visible opening to disagree without appearing to dispute a fact.
Phrases like "In my view..." or "What I'm observing is..." do not weaken a point. They make it arguable, and therefore discussable.
Marshall Rosenberg placed this distinction at the centre of his framework. A true observation is what you can see, hear, taste, smell, or remember: sensory and specific, what a camera would record. Everything else is evaluation. My own grounding in NVC has been shaped by my teacher, Subha Parthasarathy, who places equal and rigorous emphasis on observation alongside needs. Most of us skip observation entirely. We arrive with verdicts and wonder why the conversation goes nowhere.
Consider the word toxic, the most widely used piece of workplace vocabulary in this generation, carrying almost no information. It could mean: they raised their voice when you made a mistake, in front of the team. It could mean: they have not responded to four consecutive emails over three weeks. It could mean: you were removed from a project without explanation. It could mean: they denied your request for time off without a reason.
Each of those is a different situation, calling for a different response. Toxic collapses all of them into a single verdict that nobody, including the person delivering it, can do anything useful with.
Expressing Without Accountability
Naming a problem is not the same as owning a stake in solving it. When every expression of dissatisfaction arrives unaccompanied by any sense of what you are willing to do, it reads as complaint rather than contribution. That reading accumulates.
Edmondson found that high-performing teams hold both high psychological safety and high accountability together. Expression without accountability sits in the "comfort zone": people voice concerns but do not take ownership of outcomes. It looks like engagement from the inside. From the outside, it often does not.
The Assumption That Expression Deserves Recognition
There is a belief (I had it too) that the act of speaking up is itself enough: that saying a hard thing in a meeting should be acknowledged, that calling out an issue deserves thanks, that emotional bravery is its own form of contribution.
Organisations do not run on that currency. They run on outputs, relationships, and credibility built across hundreds of small interactions. Expression is the beginning of a conversation, not its conclusion.
"You're Not Being Empathetic"
This pattern tends to appear after the backfire, once the frustration has nowhere left to go. Someone did not respond the way you hoped, and the label that arrives is: they are not being empathetic.
But empathy, in Rosenberg's framework, is not an action and not agreement. It is a quality of presence: the capacity to be fully with another person's experience without advising, fixing, or assuming you know what they need. It does not require mind-reading. It does not require guessing the right response from options you never disclosed.
When I was early in my career, I went to a manager and told her I had a chronic health condition. I explained what it involved. What I did not explain, and did not fully understand myself at the time, was what I actually wanted from her. She was empathetic. She listened. She adjusted. She stopped putting me on the more demanding projects. And I was confused and frustrated by that response. But the failure was not hers. I had given her my feelings and my context. I had not given her my request.
Rosenberg's four steps, Observation, Feeling, Need, Request, are not a sequence where the first three are mandatory and the last is optional. Without the Request, you are handing someone the beginning of a sentence and expecting them to write the rest correctly, from inside their own mind, not yours. More often than not, when we say "they were not empathetic," what we mean is: "they did not do what I needed, and I expected them to know what that was without me saying it."
The Diagnostic
When it backfired, what was going on?
Use this framework after something has gone wrong. Not to be hard on yourself, but to understand the mechanics of what happened, because understanding is the only way to do it differently. Each question is an invitation, not an indictment.
The Emotional State
Were you calm and considered, or flooded before you spoke? Heart racing, jaw tight, thoughts arriving faster than you could sort them? When the brain's threat-detection systems activate, rational processing is impaired, neurologically, not metaphorically. The room heard the state alongside the message, and responded to both.
Ask: Was I already triggered?The Communication Pattern
Reconstruct what came out without judgment. Hyperbole? Opinions stated as facts? Generalisations: "nobody," "always," "never"? A problem named without any indication of what you wanted to happen next? Good intentions combined with imprecise language tend to produce misread intentions.
Ask: Was this precise or shorthand?The Relational Context
Every person in a professional conversation has something to protect: a decision they made, a relationship they are managing, a pressure you cannot see. Goffman called this managing "face." When expression threatens someone's face without acknowledging it, the response is almost always defensive, regardless of whether the content was valid.
Ask: What was at stake for them?The Intention-Outcome Gap
The stated intention may be real, but it is rarely the only thing running. Underneath "I wanted to raise a concern," there are often other intentions: the wish to be seen as honest, the need for frustration to be acknowledged, anger that needed somewhere to go. The emotional intention tends to win the microphone.
Ask: Was this about impact or being heard?The Systemic Read
Power moves through relationships, track records, and informal alliances, not only job titles. Speaking without reading these dynamics means the consequences are usually borne by the person speaking rather than by the system they wanted to address. Was this the right moment, or simply the first available one?
Ask: Did I understand the room?This framework is not here to tell you that you were wrong to speak. It is here to help you understand why it landed the way it did, so that next time, the distance between your intention and your impact is smaller. The question worth sitting with is never: should I have stayed silent? It is: what would I need to change about how I showed up, so that what I wanted to say could actually be heard? That is a much more useful question. And it has answers.
Before You Speak
Know your intention and your outcome
The pause before speaking is where political literacy begins. Not a long pause, not an indefinite one, but a real one: long enough to ask two questions that both require honest answers rather than flattering ones.
What is my actual intention right now?
The surface intention might be: I want to name this problem so we can fix it. But beneath that, other intentions are usually running at the same time: the desire to be seen as someone who tells the truth, to signal non-complicity, to release a frustration that has been building.
All of them are recognisably human. But they are different intentions, and they call for different approaches. The instinct to bundle them all together and speak from the resulting pressure is what can produce the backfire.
What outcome do I actually want?
Do you want the situation to change? Your view to be taken seriously? A relationship to be preserved? A decision revisited? To be heard?
Each of these requires a different approach, and some may be in direct conflict in this particular moment. Naming that conflict honestly, before you speak, is the prerequisite for speaking in a way that might actually work.
Reading the Room
Power, timing, and mode
Context-reading is a skill that political literacy builds deliberately over time, and it begins with a simple question before you open your mouth: who is in this room, and what are they carrying?
Every person in a professional conversation has something at stake. The person defending a decision you think is wrong may not be defending bad work. They may be managing upward, absorbing pressure, or protecting a relationship whose dynamics are invisible to you. That does not make their position correct. But knowing it exists changes your approach. Power does not always show up on the org chart either. It moves through who has the ear of a decision-maker, who has built credibility over years, who controls the information that others depend on.
Choosing when to raise something is not the same as choosing whether to raise it. A concern voiced in the heat of a decision, when a manager is under pressure and others are watching, will almost always land worse than the same concern raised later, in a calmer context, one-to-one. The difference between those two moments is the difference between expressive discharge and strategic communication.
The mode of communication carries its own information, entirely separately from the words used. A message in a large meeting lands differently from the same message delivered one-to-one. Written communication strips tone and nuance in ways that are consistently underestimated: what reads as direct to the sender frequently reads as curt or aggressive to the recipient. Speaking upward, to people with more institutional power, means the cost of getting it wrong is not distributed equally, and extra care in how you frame things is a reasonable response to that asymmetry.
Saying the Hard Thing
In a way that can be heard
The goal is not to dilute what you want to say. It is to say it in a form that has a chance of landing, and of being responded to rather than defended against.
This framework draws on NVC. Its foundational insight is that separating what we observe from what we evaluate creates conditions for genuine dialogue rather than defensive exchange.
Observe
What you saw, heard, or remember happening. Specific. No verdict attached.
Example: "In the last three project reviews, the timelines I flagged weren't included in the final deck."
Interpret
Own your reading of it. Signal that this is your interpretation, not the established truth.
Example: "My sense is this is creating a gap between what the team is experiencing and what leadership is seeing."
Impact
What is the consequence: for the work, the team, the relationship?
Example: "It means issues are surfacing late, when they're harder to address."
Request
What do you actually want to happen? Be specific.
Example: "I'd like to discuss how we can make sure operational signals are part of the review process going forward."
It works because it moves from the particular to the systemic, without accusation, without hyperbole, and without making the other person wrong before the conversation has had a chance to begin.
Working with the Discomfort
RAIN
Sometimes the reason we speak before we are ready is that not speaking has become unbearable. The frustration, the sense of injustice, the helplessness: it has to go somewhere, and the meeting happening right now is where it goes.
RAIN is a mindfulness-based self-inquiry practice I use regularly with clients in coaching sessions. It is useful in two ways: when you are navigating the space between a strong emotional response and a high-stakes professional moment, and when you need to sit with a situation that has already affected you, to process what happened before it festers or drives the next reaction.
It does not ask you to suppress what you are experiencing. It asks you to be with it differently, long enough to choose what to do next rather than being chosen by it. The four steps are Recognise, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture.
RAIN does not tell you not to speak. It gives you the conditions under which you are the one deciding to speak, rather than your nervous system deciding for you.
The Long Game
Political literacy is not a one-time insight. It builds, slowly, through repeated experience of noticing the gap between intention and impact, and choosing to close it rather than defend against the discomfort of noticing it at all.
The people who navigate organisations well (those who are trusted, who carry influence, and who are still recognisably themselves) have usually learned, often the hard way, that expression and impact are not automatic synonyms. That something can be true and not yet ready to be said. That timing, framing, and relationship are not the enemies of honesty. They are the conditions under which honesty becomes useful to anyone other than the person speaking it.
What this guide is asking of you is not to become someone else. It is to become more deliberate about how the person you already are shows up, so that what matters to you has a real chance of mattering to others. That is growing up. And it is worth the effort.
Explore Other Guides
More from the Political Literacy series
Organisation Politics 101
If this guide opened a question about the broader dynamics at play in your organisation, this is the next step. The formal and informal power structures, the unspoken rules, the networks that actually drive decisions. Understanding how power moves through an organisation is the foundational skill that makes everything in this guide make more sense.
Read the guide →Stay in the Loop
If this guide was useful, the newsletter goes deeper. Practical thinking on leadership, political literacy, and the realities of working life, for senior and mid-career professionals.
Sources & Further Reading
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Don't Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead) (HBR Press, 2025). The research case against authenticity as a professional strategy.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). The foundational text on impression management: what we give versus what we give off.
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (1995). The amygdala hijack and the five components of emotional intelligence.
Amy Edmondson, psychological safety research (1999 onward). The team-level definition, safety versus accountability, and the most consequential misconceptions.
Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (1999). The four-component NVC model. Rosenberg's emphasis is on needs. Shirisha's practice in NVC has been shaped by her teacher Subha Parthasarathy, who places equal emphasis on observation alongside needs.
Michele McDonald and Tara Brach, the RAIN practice. Originated by McDonald; developed and widely taught by Brach in Radical Compassion (2019).
Leary and Kowalski (1990), impression management research. Much of self-presentation is unconscious and goal-driven.
TalentSmart research: only 36% of people can accurately label their own emotions in the moment.
Deloitte Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey (2025): 23,000 respondents.
NYU Stern / Suzy Welch research: 85% of Gen Z rank "voice" or "eudaimonia" in their top five values.