There's someone on the senior leadership team I struggle to work with. He's abrasive, and sure of himself in a way that doesn't leave much room in a call for anyone else's version of events. He seems to want to dominate a room, or a screen, whichever way we're having the conversation. I'm not built that way. I don't like friction. I avoid confrontation when I can, and when I can't, I go quiet instead.
A while back I tried to change a process he'd put in place. I had reasons. I still think I had reasons. But on the call he got irate, and then he got shouty, and somewhere in the middle of that my reasons stopped feeling like reasons and started feeling like something I'd need to apologise for. I shrank. I nodded along. I wanted the call to be over more than I wanted to be right, which isn't the same as not caring about being right, it's just what happens when someone raises their voice at you and you've never liked raising yours back.
It stayed with me for ages afterwards. Longer than it should have, if I'm honest about the size of the thing. It made me want to resign, which is quite the over-reaction for one difficult call, and I knew it was an over-reaction even while I was having it. It took the best part of a month before I could be on a call with him without some part of me bracing for it to happen again.
In the weeks after, I did what I usually do, which is turn it into a verdict on me rather than on the conversation. I'm not C-level material. I fold easy. I'd fucked up by trying to fix a process I should have just left alone, because clearly if I were senior enough, strong enough, whatever the word is, I'd have held my ground instead of nodding along like it was easier to agree than to be shouted at. I noticed I'd gone straight to flight again, looking for the exit before I'd even tried to fight my corner. Pussy, basically, is the word I used on myself.
In the moment, his certainty made my reasons feel invalid. But certainty doing that to you isn't the same as your reasons actually being wrong. Being shouted down doesn't mean you lost the argument. It means the argument got interrupted by volume before anyone found out who was right.
That's the part I can't get past, because it means I still don't know if I was right about the process. Not in a satisfying, "turns out I was correct all along" way. I mean I genuinely don't know, because the conversation never got far enough to test it. It didn't end in him explaining why the process should stay as it was and me being wrong. It ended in him being loud and me going quiet, which settled the call but settled nothing about the actual question. Confidence isn't the same thing as correctness. A man can be completely sure of himself and still be wrong, and the only way you'd find out is if the conversation survived long enough for someone to check. Ours didn't survive. It got hijacked by tone before it got anywhere near the substance.
I think I knew this somewhere and still spent a month treating his certainty as the result of the argument rather than as a tactic that happened to work on someone like me. He's sure of himself in every call I've been in with him, whether he's right or not, because that's just how he shows up. I'm the one who treats volume as evidence. He raises his voice, and some part of me quietly updates my own confidence downward, as if loudness were data.
I don't have a tidy way to close this out, because the honest version doesn't resolve. I still think I had a case for changing that process. I still don't know if I was right. I still folded on the call and still spent a month half-convinced that folding proves something true about what I'm capable of at this level. What's changed is narrower than that. I don't think being shouted down and being wrong are the same event any more, even when they happen in the same minute, even when my body reacts to them as if they were.
Maybe other people let this kind of thing affect them the same way. I don't know. I only know what it did to me, and that a month later I was still running it back, trying to work out which part of what happened was actually about the process, and which part was just about who could out-volume who on a call neither of us will remember the content of in a year.