Loud, Wrong + Somehow Still the Victim.

I get it wrong all of the time, we all do, that is where growth lives. All of our favorite people have made bad decisions, said the wrong thing, hurt someone's feelings or caused harm. That is part of the human experience. The danger doesn't lie in being wrong, it's the refusal to acknowledge that you ever are. Some people become so invested in being perceived as right that they'll do anything to avoid accountability.

One of the most dangerous people you'll ever work with isn't the person who makes mistakes. It's the person who refuses to acknowledge they ever do. . We’ve spent years online talking about poor leadership as though it is simply a communication problem, but what if I told you it was also an ego problem?

More specifically, it's what happens when confidence gets mistaken for competence and victimhood becomes a strategy for avoiding consequences. Being loud and wrong isn't just an annoying personality trait anymore. It's a leadership failure with real organizational costs.

I've spent more than fifteen years working in people operations, talent acquisition, and leadership development. I've watched executives confidently make hiring decisions rooted in bias instead of evidence. I've watched managers destroy high-performing teams because they valued being right more than learning. I've watched consultants and coaches build entire businesses on sweeping claims that immediately fell apart the moment someone asked them to prove what they were saying.

The issue has never been about getting it wrong. Every leader gets things wrong. The issue was that admitting they were wrong threatened the identity they had built around always having the answer. We are taught from a young age that “bosses know everything”, so when you are given a sliver of power it becomes a cape you put on for protection.  When that’s paired with the power dynamics of leadership, you have a recipe for harm.

That instinct doesn't just exist inside organizations anymore. The internet has turned certainty into a currency. Social media rewards confidence, not accuracy. It rewards speed over reflection, hot takes over thoughtful analysis, and outrage over curiosity.  The “fake it until you make it" mantra quietly evolved into "say it until enough people believe it."

When T. Tara Turk-Haynes and I recorded Crash Out With Me this week, she said something that hasn't left my brain: we've stopped checking and verifying. . Whew. If that isn't a perfect description of the internet right now, I don't know what is. We have become so obsessed with confidence that we've forgotten to ask the most basic question in the world: "How do you know?"

Listen to the episode here.

We’ve had to show our work since grade school, when way less important things hung in the balance, so why stop now?

Later in the conversation, we started talking about how to tell the difference between someone who's genuinely an expert and someone who's just really good at marketing themselves. Tara brought up the STAR interview method, and we should start using it on coaches, consultants, influencers, executives, and anyone else asking for our trust or our money.

Don't just tell me you're an expert, prove it to me.

If your entire business falls apart the second someone asks for specifics, you don't have expertise, you have branding.

That’s the thing about the grift, it only survives vague language. The moment someone asks for receipts, the conversation magically becomes about tone, bullying, or "negative energy" instead of whether the original claim was true.

Over the past few months, I experienced that dynamic firsthand. A popular "coach" and girl boss on LinkedIn publicly claimed that I had doxxed her. I didn't, obviously. My linkedin is public. When she engaged with me again, I asked the same question repeatedly: show me the evidence. Show me the screenshot. Show me the file. Show me literally anything that supports the accusation you made. Show your work, bestie. The evidence never came. What did come were threats of legal action and an immediate attempt to change the conversation. Suddenly we weren't discussing whether the accusation was true. Suddenly the conversation switched to her being bullied, cyberstalked and doxxed, as if she didn’t seek me out to comment on something I wrote. That shift is incredibly familiar to Black women because it has been happening to us for generations.

One of the most effective ways to avoid accountability is to make a Black woman look like the threat instead of answering the question she asked. The second a Black woman calls out the harm she has experienced, suddenly the narrative switches to “but she bullied me”, “she was mean”. “I’m going to sue”.

We've built systems that consistently prioritize protecting the emotional comfort of people with power over examining the harm experienced by people without it.

Black women deserve to be believed without having to jump through hoops to get there but we have built a culture where our credibility is constantly competing with someone else’s fragility. We bring our receipts, our timelines, our screenshots, our witnesses and our lived experiences, and people will still stare you dead in the face and say, “you’re lying”, suddenly the moment gets hijacked by the person who is suddenly now the victim. Black women don't lose credibility because we lack evidence. We lose it because too many people have been conditioned to mistake emotional performance for truth, and that has been costing Black women our careers, our safety, and our lives for generations.

It is not new that white tears and fragility have carried more weight than the credibility of Black women. Those tears have justified exclusion, punishment, violence, and the destruction of careers for centuries. That history didn't disappear because the conversation moved from a courtroom to a conference room or from an office meeting to a LinkedIn thread. Not every emotional response is manipulative, and not every tear is weaponized. But intent isn't the only thing that matters, outcomes matter, impact matters. If the predictable outcome is that accountability disappears while the Black woman finds herself defending her tone instead of the facts she presented, the system is functioning exactly as it was designed.

The internet loves to treat misinformation like a harmless personality flaw. It’s bigger than that. A loud grift doesn't stay online. It becomes hiring advice that costs someone an interview. It becomes leadership guidance that shapes who gets promoted and who gets pushed out. It becomes policy recommendations that executives adopt because the person delivering them sounds confident enough to be believed. It becomes people who believe in magic solutions out of desperation and dump their savings into a coach who only ever wanted their money, not their success.

Every time someone with a platform values certainty over truth, someone else pays the price for that performance.

The coaching and consulting industry has a particularly uncomfortable relationship with this. There are incredible practitioners doing deeply evidence-based work, and there are people selling certainty they haven't earned. The problem with a grift isn't simply that someone makes money they didn't deserve, it’s that every client who trusts bad information makes decisions with real human consequences/ The ripple effects always extend beyond the person cashing the invoice.

The stakes become even higher when the people being talked about are members of marginalized communities. Being loudly wrong about Black employees, disabled workers, LGBTQ+ professionals, immigrants, or any other historically excluded group isn't simply an intellectual disagreement, these narratives shape legislation, workplace policies, performance reviews, hiring decisions, and public opinion. They determine whose pain is believed, whose expertise is dismissed, and whose humanity gets debated instead of protected.

History is full of examples where misinformation about marginalized communities wasn't merely offensive. It was deadly. False narratives have justified segregation, denied people healthcare, fueled anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, criminalized immigrants, excused police violence, and reinforced workplace discrimination. Every one of those systems began with people confidently repeating ideas they either couldn't or wouldn't examine. When society repeatedly rewards confidence over evidence, marginalized communities become the testing ground for everyone else's certainty, and we pay with our livelihood and even our lives.

That's why I struggle when people dismiss misinformation as "just another opinion”, especially for creators with a platform. As someone with an okay-ish platform, I feel a deep responsibility to ensure I cause as little harm as possible (while taking no shit). People believe the things I say, so it’s important to me that I come with verifiable information, receipts and honesty.

Opinions don't exist in a vacuum. They influence decisions and decisions become systems. Systems determine who gets hired, who gets fired, who gets healthcare, who gets housing, who gets funding, and sometimes who gets to make it home safely.

The bigger the platform, the greater your responsibility to get it right.

That's also why accountability matters so much. Accountability isn't about humiliating people for being wrong. It's about interrupting harm before it scales. Healthy leaders change course when presented with new evidence because they understand that protecting people matters more than protecting their ego. Grifters can't afford to do that. Their authority depends on appearing infallible. If certainty is the product they're selling, admitting they're wrong threatens the business model itself.

When someone responds to accountability by making themselves the victim instead of addressing the facts, it doesn't just protect their ego, it protects the misinformation. It teaches everyone watching that image matters more than integrity and that asking for evidence is somehow more offensive than making an unsupported accusation. That's an incredibly dangerous lesson, especially when the people paying the highest price are those who have historically had the least power to challenge the narrative in the first place.

I've watched this happen inside organizations. I've watched Black women raise legitimate concerns only to find themselves becoming the subject of the investigation instead of the issue they raised. I’ve watched Black women get exited from their organizations for raising complaints of racism. Leaders will spend more energy repairing someone's bruised ego than repairing the harm they caused. Many organizations reward confidence while dismissing competence because confidence is easier to recognize from a distance. It happens in boardrooms, investigations, performance reviews, and now across every social media platform.

I've watched it happen to me.

Many people's allyship only extends as far as their innocence. They're happy to stand next to Black women when someone else is the problem. They are the first to profit from conversations about equity, inclusion, and justice. They love to use our experiences as evidence in keynote presentations, conferences, and marketing campaigns. They build businesses positioning themselves as safe people. But the moment they're the one being questioned, self-preservation takes over, and like a rat backed into a corner, they will do whatever they need to get out.

Accountability suddenly becomes harassment. Requests for evidence become bullying. Harm becomes a misunderstanding. The conversation shifts from what happened to how uncomfortable they feel being asked about it. Looking at someone’s public open profile becomes stalking.

And even when she was called out, she doubled down. She told people she had blocked me and that I was "stalking" her. Small problem with that story: you can't stalk someone who hasn't blocked you. I was never blocked. Not once. Apparently we're just making up supporting plot twists now because the original plot wasn't holding together, and as always, I come with receipts.

I don’t believe allyship is the warm, fluffy moments. It’s not tested when you’re applauding Black women. It's tested when you're accountable to us. How do you respond to us when you’re being called out. Allyship is about how people experience you. It's tested when your first instinct is to listen instead of defend yourself. It's tested when someone tells you that your actions caused harm and you become more interested in understanding the impact than protecting the image you've built of yourself. Anyone can claim to value justice when justice costs them nothing.

The real test begins when accountability has a price.

The strongest leaders I've ever worked with were never obsessed with being right. They were obsessed with getting it right. Those are two fundamentally different leadership philosophies. One is driven by ego, and the other by curiosity. One creates cultures where employees stay silent because questioning leadership feels dangerous. The other creates environments where ideas can be challenged, assumptions can be tested, and everyone benefits from better decisions. Psychological safety has never been about protecting people from discomfort. It's about creating enough trust that discomfort can lead to learning instead of retaliation.

The same standard should apply to every coach, consultant, executive, influencer, and thought leader asking for your attention or your money. If someone is selling expertise, they owe you more than certainty. They owe you specificity. They owe you evidence. They should be able to explain why their approach works, who it has worked for, and what results they've actually produced.

Large audiences are not proof. Viral posts are not proof. Confidence has never been proof.

If asking someone for evidence immediately turns you into the villain, it’s time to ask why evidence feels like a threat.

Every workplace eventually decides what it rewards. It can reward confidence over competence.

To be fair, America has never exactly had a great track record of rewarding competence over confidence. You don't have to look very hard to find examples of people who climbed into positions of enormous influence because they were charismatic, loud, and absolutely convinced they were right. Gestures broadly at...well...everything. Politics might be the most obvious example, but it isn't the only one. We elect it. We promote it. We platform it. We celebrate certainty as leadership even when the evidence is screaming otherwise.

The workplace didn't invent this problem; it inherited it. How many start up leaders do I know who found their position through nepotism rather than experience? The limit does not exist. Turns out it's a lot easier to believe you're the smartest person in the room when no one ever made you earn the chair. Merit has a funny way of making people humble while entitlement usually does the opposite.

Organizations are made up of people who have been conditioned to equate confidence with capability, so it's no surprise that the loudest voice in the meeting often gets mistaken for the smartest one. The irony, of course, is that the most competent leaders I've ever worked with are rarely the ones pretending to have all the answers, they're the ones asking better questions, listening to and inviting pushback, changing their minds when new information appears, and making the room bigger, not smaller.

Confidence gets you attention, competence earns trust and only one of those survives accountability.

I don't expect leaders to know everything, I expect them to stop pretending they do. I don't expect coaches, consultants, executives, or influencers to be perfect, I expect them to care more about the people who trust them than the image they've built around always being right.

My mom was right when she said “honesty is the best policy”.

If protecting your reputation comes at the cost of those affected by your actions and words, you’re not a leader, you’re just another grifter hoping to make money on the desperation of the vulnerable.

The next time someone responds to "Can you prove it?" by making themselves the victim, remember: that's an answer too.

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