A Letter to Corporate.

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Before we dive into my deep feelings about corporate please remember to clink the linky links to the ad so we can continue to keep our newsletter free :)

I am publishing this letter anonymously because the details are not the story. The names have been removed. The company has been removed. The teams have been removed. Not because they don't matter, but because they matter less than we think.

This is a letter that any of us could have written.

Many Black women could swap in their own organizations and still recognize themselves in this letter because this letter is not unique to me in any way.

For all the conversations we've had about diversity, inclusion, belonging, and psychological safety, too many workplaces remain places where people experience harm right out in the open.

We have become very good at talking about culture while avoiding conversations about power.

We celebrate resilience without asking why we need to be resilient in the first place. We tell employees to bring their whole selves to work but only if that whole version meets the expectations set by the organization.

This letter is not about one organization, because so many organizations would see themselves reflected here.

It is about a pattern that we are told to pretend doesn't exist.

You have been the monster under my bed since I met you.

Not because the work was hard. I have never been afraid of hard work. I poured my blood, sweat, tears, nights, weekends, and pieces of myself into making you better. I showed up with hope. With expertise. With the belief that if I worked hard enough, cared deeply enough, and gave enough of myself, I could help build something safer, healthier, and more human.

Instead, I learned to dread your name. My nervous system learned to be on high alert.

I learned to perform my humanity, instead of existing in it.

I learned what it feels like to wake up with anxiety already sitting on my chest. To rehearse conversations before they happened.

To second guess every email, every Slack message, every question. To carry work into my home, my body, my sleep, my gym sessions, my time at therapy.

It followed me everywhere like a dark cloud over my life.

You became the thing I feared.

The monster under my bed isn't scary because it's loud, it's scary because it's always there. It's scary because you never know when it will jump out and attack you, and still you perform. Convincing you that if you just work harder, write better, become smaller, become quieter, become easier to manage, maybe you'll finally be safe.

But the house always wins. No amount of labor can earn safety in systems that were never designed to provide it.

The hardest part is that I wanted to love you, I thought I did love you. I wanted to believe in your values. I wanted the version of you that I truly believed I could build.

I wanted to believe that care and performance could coexist.

But every day, I was reminded that fear had become your operating system, your life blood.

No workplace should haunt people like this.

No job should make people cry in their homes.

No employee should have to trade their dignity for a paycheck.

And no one, especially not Black women, should have to bleed themselves dry trying to earn humanity from institutions that should have offered it freely in the first place.

You were the monster under my bed, but I was simply a data point to you.

I have been the executive in the room, the consultant hired to fix culture, the keynote speaker invited to speak on leadership, and the author whose work organizations share publicly while struggling to embody it privately. I have spent years helping leaders create better workplaces, which means I have also spent years observing what happens when they fail to do so.

What I have learned is that toxic workplaces rarely describe themselves as toxic.

They describe themselves as fast-paced. High-performing. Results-oriented. Excellence-driven.

But beneath many of those labels is something far less aspirational: fear.

Fear of making mistakes. Fear of asking questions. Fear of disagreeing. Fear of being publicly corrected. Fear of being humiliated. Fear of being perceived as not smart enough, fast enough, polished enough, or enough at all.

Fear of being too fat, too Black, too queer, too damn alive.

So many organizations mistake fear for productivity. They confuse micromanagement with rigor, urgency with impact, and perfectionism with excellence.

Fear does not create high performance. It sucks the creativity, the innovation and life right out of your organization. It creates self-protection. Employees stop taking risks. They stop asking questions. They stop innovating, and eventually they start planning their exits.

As a Black woman, work has often required a second job, managing perception. You put on your phone voice, you straighten your hair, you laugh at the right moments and never disagree.

And it still won't be enough.

You're too much but also still not enough.

You come to work to work, and on top of that you're burdened with the emotional labor of managing the perception people have of you. every morning you tuck your personality away and clock in as your representative.

You spend your days anticipating reactions, watching people's facial expressions, deciding how safe you are to exist in this space.

Will asking a question be interpreted as curiosity or incompetence?

Will direct feedback be interpreted as leadership or aggression?

Will confidence be rewarded or punished?

The answer often depends less on what is said and more on who is saying it.

You spend every day weighing the risks of how much it costs simply to exist in your own skin.

Many Black women know what it feels like to have competence questioned while simultaneously being expected to carry their entire teams. We are asked to educate, mentor, nurture, fix culture, absorb conflict, and perform emotional labor, often without recognition and certainly without protection.

Small mistakes become evidence of character flaws. You are only as good as your last best thing, but always judged on the first mistake you ever made/ Meanwhile, others are afforded grace, growth, and the assumption of positive intent. The standards shift constantly, but the burden remains remarkably consistent for the same people every time.

Representation without safety is not inclusion. It's not enough to hire us. Hiring without belonging is not equity, its a notch in the next Black woman's trauma belt.

People experience the outcomes of work physically. We lose weight. We gain weight. Our hair falls out.

Migraines.

Migraines.

Migraines.

Workplace culture does not live in values statements tucked away in handbooks that no one reads, it's in how people feel at 9pm on Sunday night. It lives in insomnia, in migraines, in panic attacks before meetings, in the exhaustion of spending more energy surviving work than actually doing it.

Our bodies feel it all, in the weight of the emotions, in the pit in my stomach and in the emotional scars each microagression leaves in its wake.

Work asks employees to be more resilient. Why are we still building workplaces people have to survive?

Work can be challenging. It can be demanding. It can ask a lot of us. I am not saying that work should be frictionless, but it shouldn't be the main topic in our therapy sessions. It should not require us to trade our dignity for a paycheck. It should not leave people questioning their intelligence, shrinking themselves to avoid criticism, or crying themselves to sleep at night.

If you are a leader reading this, I invite you to ask different questions. You get to choose to lead differently, but only if you want to. The choice is yours. What side of history do you intend to purchase real estate in?

Good leaders ask do not only ask if their teams are productive, but whether they feel safe. Not whether people are performing, but whether they are thriving. They ask not whether diverse talent is hired, but are they protected?

Ask who receives grace in your organization who is expected to perform their humanity to prove they are worthy of crumbs.

Who is allowed to be human?

If you are a Black woman reading this, I hope you know that your humanity is not an obstacle to overcome. You deserve work that does not ask you to shrink. You deserve leadership that does not wound. You deserve safety. You deserve to be here.

We all do.

Signed,

Madison Butler.