Silencing an Employee Was the Easy Choice — It Was Also the Wrong One
I once asked an employee to sign an NDA, and this is one of those moments in my career that I think about all the time.
At the time, I was the co-founder and CEO of a company — not Radical Candor, but an earlier venture. I believed that all the toxic behaviors I had seen in previous workplaces would not happen under my leadership. All the other BS that happened at terrible companies where I worked would not happen when I was in charge because I had good intentions. But, of course, it did happen.
There was an employee who felt she was experiencing a hostile work environment and intended to sue the company. I did not think any company where I was in charge would create a hostile work environment for anyone — most especially for a woman, given my own experiences.
Why I Regret Using an NDA: A Hard Lesson in Leadership
Rather than stopping and saying, “I should really look at what’s going wrong here at this company that I’ve started,” I dismissed her claims out of hand, paid her some amount of money, and made her sign an NDA. That was the advice my lawyer, who was also a woman, gave me. I am deeply ashamed to admit that, but it’s the truth.
To this day, I regret the way I responded. This woman was telling me something important, and I was refusing to listen. Instead, I was replicating the sort of bad-boss behavior that I’d been determined to avoid.
If I’d listened to her instead of shutting her down, I might have had the opportunity to reflect on some other leadership failures on my part.
If I had embraced my role as a leader from the start and listened to what she told me rather than paying her not to talk about it, I would have been an advocate for the women on my team rather than another leader who didn’t care enough about harassment to prevent it.
That would have taken some personal courage. If I had put in place an organizational design that gave this woman a way to report what had happened and my failure to respond, then I could have been held accountable.
The Cover-Up Is Worse Than the Crime
Power corrupts. Power had corrupted me. Power had corrupted the attorney. We were all doing the wrong thing. It’s tempting to silence people, especially if they’re saying something about you and your company that you would rather not be true.
I now know that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. If a company allows a cover-up to go on endlessly, it ultimately becomes a disaster — for employees, for leadership, and for the institution itself.
Books like She Said by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey and Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow have shown how NDAs enable repeat offenders. If an NDA is necessary, it should protect trade secrets — not silence victims of harassment, discrimination, or abuse.
If you want to build a culture rooted in trust, integrity, and fairness, the solution isn’t silencing employees — it’s listening to them and fixing what’s broken so they never have to get an attorney or write a book exposing your company’s bad behavior.
I’ll end this story by extending myself and other leaders a little grace. Leadership is hard, especially for leaders from historically marginalized groups. And overall, I think I was a pretty good leader — precisely because I was able to learn from some pretty big leadership failures. It’s worth repeating: we can’t do right if we won’t notice what we did wrong.
Learn more about ending NDAs and forced arbitration in chapter 7 of Radical Respect.
And, buy a copy of Careless People because this author is being silenced by an NDA and forced arbitration.
Radical Respect is a weekly newsletter I am publishing on LinkedIn to highlight some of the things that get in the way of creating a collaborative, respectful working environment. A healthy organization is not merely an absence of unpleasant symptoms. Creating a just working environment is about eliminating bad behavior and reinforcing collaborative, respectful behavior. Each week I’ll offer tips on how to do that so you can create a workplace where everyone feels supported and respected. Learn more in my new book Radical Respect, available wherever books are sold! You can also follow Radical Candor® and the Radical Candor Podcast more tips about building better relationships at work.
