When Feedback Feels Like a Threat

The episode

I invited Sarah Noll Wilson onto the podcast because she talks about the stuff most leadership conversations avoid. She’s an executive coach, a keynote speaker, and the author of Don’t Feed the Elephants — a book about what organizations collectively agree not to see. She came on to talk about retaliation in the workplace. What we ended up mapping, without calling it that at the time, was the assumption underneath retaliation: that challenge equals attack.

What I heard

Sarah opened with something that stopped me: most retaliation isn’t calculated. It’s automatic. Someone’s ego gets pushed. They feel a loss of control. And the response — the withdrawal, the exclusion, the policy suddenly enforced with unusual precision — isn’t a plan. It’s protection.

That reframe matters. We spend a lot of time asking whether retaliation is legal, whether it can be proven, whether it was intentional. Those are the wrong questions if you’re trying to understand how it forms. The better question is: what assumption is operating underneath the reaction?

In most of the stories Sarah shared — and I added a few of my own — the assumption was the same: this person challenged me, therefore they are a threat. The feedback, the disagreement, the complaint, the question that didn’t go away — all of it collapsed into the same category. Threat. And threats get managed.

What’s interesting is that the person doing the retaliating rarely experiences it as retaliation. They experience it as restoring order. As having a legitimate concern about performance. As doing what needed to be done. The assumption is so embedded they can’t see it operating. That’s what unexamined assumptions do.

Nola: “Sometimes they’re gaslighting themselves and gaslighting other people instead of being courageous enough to go, ‘Yeah, I was really upset when they disagreed with me publicly in front of my boss, and so I did do this.’”

Sarah: “Yeah, exactly — and then they play dumb and say, ‘That’s not what happened,’ or ‘That’s not what it was intended.’ I think you’re reading into it. And then it becomes this corporate gaslighting.”

Where the AGA shows up

I hadn’t built the Assumption-Ground Audit yet when I recorded this episode. But listening back now, I can hear the methodology in everything we discussed.

An AGA asks: what do you have to believe for this decision to make sense? Applied to retaliation, the answer surfaces fast. You have to believe that being challenged and being threatened are the same thing. You have to believe that the person who raised the concern is the problem, not the condition that made them raise it. You have to believe that restoring your own comfort is a legitimate organizational outcome.

None of those beliefs are examined before the action. They’re assumed. And because they’re assumed, they compound. The policy gets applied unevenly. The promotion doesn’t come through. The meeting invite stops arriving. Each of these feels like a separate decision. It isn’t. It’s one assumption playing out across multiple surfaces.

Sarah put it cleanly: the organizations where retaliation is most common are the ones where leaders have never been asked to investigate their own reactions. Not punished for them — investigated. The question isn’t did you retaliate? It’s what were you protecting, and did you know you were protecting it?

That’s an AGA question. And most organizations never ask it.

What I've carried forward

Two things from this conversation lodged in me.

The first is Sarah’s point about the fawn response — the way people on the receiving end of retaliation start to doubt themselves. Did that really happen? Am I reading too much into it? Could I have handled it differently? The assumption that challenge equals threat runs in both directions. The person being retaliated against starts to assume the retaliation is evidence of their own failure. That’s not a coincidence. It’s how unexamined power works.

The second is something I said in the conversation that I’ve since used in my own work: the best retaliation is done through policy. Not dramatic. Not obvious. Just a rule, applied selectively, by someone who knows exactly what they’re doing. Policy as a weapon is almost impossible to prove and very easy to deny. The assumption underneath it — I have the authority to determine who gets the benefit of the doubt — never has to be stated aloud.

Sarah: “The people who are best at retaliation — is using policy. Policy as a battleground basically… there was a policy that if you’re at a certain dollar value, the manager actually had veto power about whether you actually get that reward or recognition. So that’s where policy and a sequence of policies can actually be used in a method that’s retaliatory.”

Sarah and I had this conversation before any of the litigation that’s now making this visible. Mobley v. Workday — filed February 2023, certified as a collective action May 2025, opt-in window closed March 2026 — is the AI-amplified version of exactly what we were describing. Derek Mobley applied to more than 100 jobs through Workday’s platform and was rejected every time. One rejection arrived at 1:50 a.m. — fifty-five minutes after he submitted the application at 12:55 a.m. No human shortlister was awake. The algorithm was the only decision-maker in the room. The applicant sees a rejection email. The hiring manager sees a ranked shortlist. Nobody sees the model.

Workday disclosed that 1.1 billion applications were rejected using its tools during the relevant period. That isn’t retaliation against one person. That’s one assumption, encoded once, applied everywhere. The assumption that the algorithm is neutral — that because no individual decided to exclude, no one is responsible for the exclusion — is the same assumption that makes policy-as-weapon so effective. AI didn’t create that logic. It removed the last friction that might have made it visible.

That’s the kind of assumption the AGA is designed to catch before it hardens into a system.

If you want to go deeper

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts →

If this conversation is landing for you — if you’re recognizing an assumption that’s been running in your organization without anyone naming it — that’s the work. The Assumption-Ground Audit is where that work starts.