Dolly Parton died on August 25, at 80, after what her publicist described as a brief battle with cancer. Until this week, she was one of my last living childhood heroes. I never met her. I don’t have a personal Dolly story: no concert, no letter back, no Imagination Library book that showed up in a mailbox with my kid’s name on it. What I have is thirty-plus years of watching a woman get judged for exactly how she looked, sounded, and where she came from, and refuse, every single time, to get smaller or quieter to make the judgment stop.

That’s not really a post about Dolly Parton. It’s a post about what a role model is actually for, and why being willing to live your own truth, loudly enough that other people can see it, is one of the more generous things a person can do for everyone standing near them.

What Does a Role Model Actually Give You?

We use “role model” loosely, mostly to mean someone impressive. It’s more specific than that: someone whose existence proves a way of being is survivable, that you can do the thing, look the way you look, come from where you come from, and still end up respected, successful, loved. A role model doesn’t hand you instructions. They hand you proof, and the proof is the gift.

That matters most for the differences nobody can see from across a room. Neurodivergence is often invisible unless you choose to reveal it, or it surfaces in a way you didn’t choose. So, for a lot of queer people, is who they love, or who they are, or both, until they decide to say so or something says it for them. Invisibility can feel like protection. It can just as easily be a cage: a life spent managing what other people would think if they knew the whole picture. A role model who refuses to hide anything, in public and on purpose, proves you can succeed in the face of that judgment and opposition, not just survive it quietly.

She Never Hid the Real Thing

Dolly chose to live big: rhinestones, wigs, a voice and a look she picked on purpose and never dialed back, no matter who found it too much. Makeup and plastic surgery were more of the same, tools for looking exactly how she wanted instead of how she was handed. She talked about both openly instead of pretending the look was effortless:

“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

“I’m not offended by dumb blonde jokes, because I know that I’m not dumb. I also know that I’m not blonde.”

Underneath the wig was a woman of exceptional intelligence and drive. She wrote more than 3,000 songs, and when Elvis Presley’s manager demanded half the publishing rights to “I Will Always Love You” in exchange for Elvis recording it, she turned him down on the spot, in tears, and kept every bit of ownership. It cost her the Elvis cover and made her one of the highest-earning songwriters in country music history a few years later, when Whitney Houston recorded the same song. Another way she was out of her time: a woman marketed as a punchline, running her own business decisions better than the people trying to talk her out of them.

She didn’t come from money or privilege, either. Her breakout song, “Coat of Many Colors,” tells the origin story straight: a child in real poverty, mocked at school for a coat her mother had sewn from rags. She never traded that story in for a smoother one, even once she could afford to.

She Refused to Be Boxed In

She had an epic disinterest in being put in anyone else’s box, and a habit of building honest relationships instead. In 1974, she left mentor Porter Wagoner’s television show against his wishes to build her own solo career, and instead of letting the split curdle into a public feud, wrote him “I Will Always Love You” as a direct goodbye. It became one of the most successful songs ever written, and it started as a plain act of telling someone the truth.

Some of her partnerships were pure, unplanned joy. She and Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin became real friends on the set of 9 to 5, not a studio-manufactured trio, and the film’s theme song came out of Dolly tapping her own acrylic nails to find a rhythm. Some were plain business, done on her own terms: in 1986, she partnered with Herschend Family Entertainment to turn a small Smoky Mountains park into Dollywood, rather than going it alone. And her longest partnership was the quietest: she married Carl Dean in 1966 and stayed married to him for nearly 60 years, until his death in 2025. He avoided the spotlight completely, and by her own team’s account, “his love, support and consistency built an unshakable foundation for her.” Neither of them needed the marriage to look a particular way to anyone watching, just to be real between the two of them.

I’ve been building a small art project for my home office: a wall of Old Hollywood women I think of as dissidents, non-conformists, disruptors, women who dressed, acted, and lived exactly as they wished despite the criticism and the career limits it cost them. I treasure every one of them. Dolly earns a place on that wall and then some, doing all of it in full public view and turning the disruption into an empire instead of letting it end her career.

Living Her Truth So Others Could Live Theirs

Long before it was safe or common for a country star from East Tennessee to do so, she talked openly about the gay and lesbian family members in her own life, employed transgender staff, and told anyone who asked exactly where she stood:

“Why wouldn’t I stand up for everybody, for all people?”

That’s not a slogan. It’s the same principle that built the rhinestones and the theme park, applied to people instead of to herself: you don’t get smaller or quieter to make someone else’s judgment easier to sit with. Her own visibility bought other people cover to be visible too, family members, fans, and kids growing up in places a lot like the one she grew up in, who needed proof that this was survivable more than they needed anyone’s advice.

She’s the direct inspiration of a whole lot of drag performers, and she knew it: “If I hadn’t been a woman, I’d have been a drag queen.” In 2023, she found out that Austin drag performer Brigitte Bandit had testified against anti-drag legislation at the Texas Capitol while holding a children’s book about Dolly, open to a line about her big hair and makeup: some people might’ve thought it was too much, but she liked it. Dolly sent her a rhinestoned guitar. The same refusal to be made smaller, handed straight to someone else who needed it that week.

Giving Without Keeping Score

She didn’t come from money, and once she had it, she kept sending it back to the place and the people it came from. Her Imagination Library has given away more than 330 million free books to children, started because her father never learned to read. When wildfires tore through her home county in 2016, her My People Fund gave displaced families $1,000 a month and eventually $12.5 million in relief to her neighbors. She put a million dollars behind Moderna’s vaccine research. On giving, she put it plainly:

“I just give from my heart. I never know what I’m going to do or why I’m gonna do it. I just see a need and if I can fill it, then I will.”

She said flatly that she didn’t do it for attention, even though the attention found her anyway. By more than one financial writer’s math, she’d have died a billionaire if she’d kept more of what she made instead of giving so much of it away. She focused on what she cared about, mostly literacy and her community, and stuck to it for decades, without needing anything handed back.

Where I’ve Made This Harder Than It Needed to Be

My difference is the invisible kind. Nobody can tell I’m neurodivergent by looking at me, which has meant plenty of years spent managing whether anyone found out, and editing which parts of my brain got to show up at work. I’ve written before about being told I wasn’t “leaderly” enough by someone who wanted a personality I didn’t have, and about the cost of trying to conform to that picture instead of trusting my own. What I don’t always say is how much of that cost lands on other people too. Every time I’ve smoothed myself into someone else’s version of acceptable, I’ve quietly told everyone watching that the smoothing is the price of admission. Every time I’ve let the real version show instead, even when it wasn’t the safe choice, I’ve told them the opposite.

That’s the part of authenticity that isn’t about self-expression at all. It’s a public good. Someone has to go first and prove the real version is survivable, or nobody after them gets to believe it.

So what’s the payoff for any of it, the neurodivergence I don’t hide, the therapy I recommend without embarrassment, the flexibility I build into my team’s workplace, the parts of my life and community I talk about instead of keeping generic? Here’s one. I’d said out loud, more than once, that supporting gender diversity mattered to me. An intern took that as permission to tell me they were non-binary, and that they’d been too afraid to wear clothes that didn’t match the gender everyone assumed they were. I told them to dress professionally in whatever gender suited them, and to send anyone with a problem about it straight to me. Their eyes filled with tears.

That’s the whole mechanism, in one exchange. I went first. They didn’t have to anymore.

Crux

A role model doesn’t tell you who to be. They prove, just by existing in full view, that a particular way of being real can be respected instead of punished. Dolly Parton lived big and looked and sounded exactly how she wanted, refused to be boxed into anyone else’s category and built honest partnerships instead, and gave quietly to the people and causes she actually cared about without asking for anything back. None of it was performance. All of it was proof, for everyone watching who had a difference of their own to hide or a truth of their own to live, that the real version is survivable. Living your truth loudly isn’t vanity. It’s the only way anyone else gets that proof.

Not long ago, I was in a conversation about blame-free post-mortems. I mentioned that this is exactly what agile retros are for, same practice, different name, and got a quick correction:

“That’s for development.”

That’s the whole myth in one sentence. Somewhere along the way, “agile” got quietly redefined as something that belongs to engineering, instead of what it actually is: a quality, adaptive, lightweight, responsive, that a whole pile of toolkits (Agile, Lean, Kanban, systems thinking, design thinking, innovation practices, whatever your team ends up calling its own version) are all reaching for from different directions.

I’ve been aware of agile for ops for years, and I’ve used agile ceremonies, stand-ups, retros, card walls, short-term repeated planning cycles, to work through real issues across the orgs I’ve run, in teams that had never touched a line of code. The ceremony doesn’t care what industry you’re in. Evan Leybourn, co-founder of the Business Agility Institute, put it plainly:

“Despite emerging in the technology domain, there is nothing exclusively tech about Agile.”

That gap, between what “agile” is supposed to mean and what one offhand comment assumed it meant, is the whole subject of this post: what agility actually is, what it actually requires, and why it doesn’t stop mattering just because an organization gets big.

What Lowercase agile Actually Means

Strip away the frameworks and “agile” is just a word, and a useful one: adaptive, lightweight, facile. Able to change direction without a committee. Able to respond to new information instead of defending the plan you made before you had it. It’s a property a person, a team, or a whole company can have, the same way you’d say someone is agile on their feet. It has nothing to do with sprints.

What Capital-A Agile Actually Is

Agile, the proper noun, is a specific historical thing, for anyone who’s heard the term at work and never gotten a straight definition. In February 2001, a small group of software people met at a ski lodge in Snowbird, Utah, looking for common ground across several rival methodologies. What came out of that weekend was the Agile Manifesto, a values statement, not a methodology:

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan.”

Scrum, SAFe, and a small industry of certifications and consultants grew out of those four lines. Worth saying plainly: the values themselves aren’t perfect either, seventeen people from one industry wrote a statement, not scripture.

That’s the trap. The values were the point. The frameworks were just one way, among many, of trying to live them out.

Agile Doesn’t Own Adaptability

Agile isn’t even the oldest toolkit making this argument. Kanban and Lean both trace back to Toyota’s factory floor in the 1940s, decades before Snowbird, built on the same instinct: build only what’s needed, let the people doing the work fix what’s broken. Systems thinking and design thinking got there from completely different directions too, out of research labs and design studios, long before anyone was running a sprint.

Agile, Lean, Kanban, systems thinking, design thinking, and the broader pile of innovation practices are separate answers to the same question, not one family tree with Agile at the root. Which means the honest takeaway was never “go be more Agile.” Use whatever toolkit, from that pile or from somewhere else entirely, actually produces agility wherever you’re standing.

Where It Goes Wrong

Somewhere between 2001 and now, a lot of organizations bought the frameworks and skipped the values. This has a name: cargo cult Agile, running every ceremony without any of the adaptability the ritual was supposed to produce. You end up with a company that has stand-ups, retros, and story points, and still can’t change a decision once it’s been made, still treats “the plan” as more sacred than the customer standing in front of it.

Consultant Allan Kelly frames the fix as a shift in what you’re actually optimizing for:

“It might seem like a small semantic change to go from ‘agile’ to ‘agility’ but it is a change from ‘doing agile’ to ‘having agility.’ It is a move from ‘means’ to the ‘end.'”

The frameworks are a means. Agility is the end. You can hit the first without ever getting the second, and a lot of organizations have.

The Ceremony Was Never Really About the Code

Back to that comment: “that’s for development.” Take the blame-free post-mortem it was aimed at: a team gathers after something went wrong, separates the event from the people involved, asks what the process or system allowed to happen, and changes something so it’s less likely next time. That’s a retro, run rigorously, no finger-pointing. The name changes depending on who’s in the room. The mechanism doesn’t.

In my own ops experience, it’s never been just one ceremony:

• Stand-ups catch a breakdown between departments while it’s still small.
• Retros handle the moments that need the fuller blame-free treatment.
• Card walls give a shared view of what’s actually in flight, instead of what’s in someone’s inbox.
• Short-term, repeated planning cycles replace a single annual plan nobody revisits until it’s already wrong.

Different tools, same underlying case: any team that regularly surfaces problems out loud, makes work visible, and re-plans on a cadence short enough to respond to reality is doing agile for ops, whether or not anyone’s ever heard the word sprint.

This Isn’t a Software Problem, or a Small-Company Problem

None of this was ever supposed to stay inside engineering, and it doesn’t stop mattering once a company gets big. Stephen Denning’s The Age of Agile makes the same case for companies across sectors: small self-managing teams, coordination instead of a chain of approvals, leadership that facilitates instead of commands. I’ve made that leadership case myself, in my post on leadership agility: a leader who never builds adaptive capacity into their team just creates a brittle organization with one flexible person at the top.

McKinsey’s research backs it up at real scale: highly successful agile transformations saw roughly 30 percent gains in efficiency, engagement, and performance, and were three times more likely to land in the top quartile of their peers. Their playbook for HR, finance, and legal makes the same case one level down. None of it’s uniform, though: routine, low-uncertainty work benefits from being standardized, not made agile. Agility is a capability you build where the environment is genuinely uncertain, at whatever scale that shows up.

I’ve been on both sides of this trap myself, building processes, calling them agile, and watching them calcify into the exact heavyweight ritual the manifesto was written against.

What Agility Actually Requires

Strip away the frameworks entirely and what’s left is a practical test, four things I look for regardless of industry, team size, or whether anyone in the building has ever heard of a sprint:

1. People and results driven. The measure of whether something is working is the outcome and the humans producing it, not whether the process was followed correctly. Process is a means to a result, not a result in itself.
2. Purpose-aware. Every process, every ceremony, every sign-off should be able to answer a simple question: why does this exist. Knowing your why has to come before you build anything, because it’s the only thing that tells you when to stop building.
3. Minimum necessary process. More process is not more rigor. It’s drag. The right amount is the smallest amount that actually gets the result and protects what genuinely needs protecting. Minimum necessary isn’t a fixed number, either: a five-person team and a five-thousand-person company don’t need the same minimum, because real complexity multiplies real needs.
4. Avoiding theater. A step that exists for compliance, for a genuine sanity check, for making sure the right feedback actually gets gathered before a decision, is meaningful, and meaningful process is never waste, no matter how much of it there is. A step that exists so people feel like something official happened, with no compliance need behind it, no real check, no feedback it’s actually incorporating, is theater. If it’s not meaningful, it’s wasteful, no matter how small. The test was never big versus small. It’s real versus theater.

Points three and four together are the whole answer to “why does agility matter even at scale.” Scale doesn’t retire the test. It changes what passes it. At size, more people, more interdependency, more real money on the line, real compliance needs, real sanity checks, and real feedback loops genuinely multiply, which is point three. But every one of those steps still has to earn its place, which is point four, and that discipline doesn’t get to retire just because the org got big. What doesn’t change is the habit of asking, of every single step: is this real, and is it serving people, purpose, and results, or is it just weight the organization has gotten used to carrying. An organization that keeps asking that as it grows stays adaptive at scale. One that stops asking it just accumulates ceremony, and calls the accumulation maturity.

On Good and Bad Feedback

A supervisor once told me:

“You’re not leaderly.”

That was it. No example, no behavior to change, no coaching on what “leaderly” would even look like coming from me. Another time, a different supervisor told me:

“I don’t want you to do this because I tell you to, I want you to want to.”

Again: no room to bring my own experience, logic, or opinion into it. Just a demand that I arrive at her conclusion and feel good about it.

Both of those knocked me sideways at the time. It took years, and an awesome therapist (seriously, do not underestimate what a good one can do for you), before I understood what had actually happened in each of those rooms. The first supervisor had a narrow, specific picture of what a leader looks like, and I didn’t match it, so the problem became my personality rather than anything I’d actually done. The second wanted compliance dressed up as buy-in: not “here’s why I think this is the right call,” but “agree with me, and mean it.” Neither one was giving me feedback. They were giving me a mandate for who I should be, and calling it coaching.

Why This Is Harder If You’re Neurodivergent

If you’re neurodivergent, there’s a good chance some of this lands differently for you too, and it’s worth knowing the name for it: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, or RSD. Psychiatrist Dr. William Dodson, who popularized the term, describes it as close to the only emotional pattern found specifically in ADHD: extreme emotional pain triggered by perceived rejection, criticism, or disappointing someone, real or imagined. In his words:

“The pain is so primitive and overwhelming that people struggle to find any words to describe it.”

Cleveland Clinic puts it more clinically: the ADHD brain may not regulate pain-like activity the way other brains do, which is part of why rejection can hit disproportionately hard, and adults living with it are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and loneliness on top of it.

Worth saying plainly: RSD isn’t an officially recognized diagnosis, and the research base is still thin (see this Psychology Today piece on what the actual evidence does and doesn’t support). I’m also not going to pretend it’s a full explanation for everything on this topic. I think it’s a mistake to reach for a diagnosis every time something is simply hard. But whatever you call it, the pattern is real for a lot of ADHD brains: perceived criticism, even mild, even well-intentioned, can register less like “here’s some input” and more like a five-alarm fire. Your body reacts before your brain has a chance to sort the signal from the noise. If you want more on this, ADDitude and CHADD both have solid, plain-language explainers, and CHADD in particular is a longstanding nonprofit clearinghouse for ADHD research and resources.

But it is a real factor in why this specific skill, telling apart meaningful feedback from toxic or unvaluable commentary, is genuinely harder for a lot of us. When everything arrives feeling like an emergency, “is this true and useful” and “is this just going to hurt” get tangled together fast.

Turns Out, It’s Not Just Me

It may (or may not) surprise you to learn that women get a much heavier dose of personality-based and manner-based feedback than men do, and there’s real data behind that, not just my own two data points.

Linguist Kieran Snyder analyzed 248 tech performance reviews and found that critical feedback showed up in 87.9% of women’s reviews, compared to 58.9% of men’s. The bigger gap was in what kind of criticism showed up: personality-based critique appeared in 71 of the 94 critical reviews women received, and in just 2 of the 83 critical reviews men received. The word “abrasive” alone was used seventeen times to describe thirteen different women. It never appeared once in a man’s review.

That was 2014. It hasn’t gotten better. A 2024 Textio study, also led by Snyder, found that 88% of high-performing women received personality-based feedback in their reviews, compared to 12% of high-performing men. High-performing women were also 76% more likely to receive negative feedback overall than high-achieving men, who received it only 2% of the time. Ten years and a different data set later, Snyder’s read on why hadn’t moved either:

“Men are mostly receiving feedback about their work… when you look at women, the positive observations are not generally about the work. They’re about the woman’s demeanor, personality, or disposition.”

Harvard Business Review found something similar looking specifically at developmental feedback: women were 1.4 times more likely than men to get critical feedback that was subjective rather than tied to a concrete outcome, the kind of thing that reads less like “here’s what happened” and more like “here’s how I feel about you” (Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, HBR). Separately, researchers Elena Doldor, Madeleine Wyatt, and Jo Silvester ran a computerized analysis of over a thousand pieces of workplace feedback and found feedback to women skewed toward how she communicates rather than what she’s building, treated her confidence (or lack of it) as a fixed trait rather than something coachable, and was, in the researchers’ own words, “less actionable and less effective” than what men in comparable roles received.

I don’t share this to excuse every time I’ve bristled at a critique. Plenty of the feedback I’ve gotten over the years was fair and I needed to hear it, personality-shaped or not. But it does mean I no longer treat “this stings and I can’t point to what I’d do differently” as proof that I did something wrong. Sometimes it’s proof that someone ran out of an actual thing to say and reached for a version of me instead. “Not leaderly” wasn’t a fluke. It was a pattern with a name and a body of research behind it, and I was just one more data point in it.

The Problem With Just Filtering It All Out

Here’s the trick, though: the answer can’t be to stop listening. If we want to be learning humans, we have to ingest feedback in order to improve. Some of it is going to be uncomfortable and still be correct. Some of it is going to point at a real gap, a real blind spot, a real thing we could do better, and our job is to hear that even when it stings. Shutting the whole channel down because some of what comes through it is garbage means shutting out the parts that would actually help you grow.

So the actual skill isn’t “let feedback in” or “keep feedback out.” It’s sorting.

What Good Feedback Actually Looks Like

Looking back at both of those supervisors, I can now name what was missing, because I’ve since had feedback that did have it:

• It’s about a behavior or a decision, not a personality.
• It’s specific enough that I could picture doing something differently.
• It leaves room for my own experience, logic, and judgment to be part of the conversation, not obstacles to overcome.
• It would still make sense to me even after the sting wore off.

What Bad Feedback Actually Looks Like

And the version that isn’t feedback at all, no matter how it’s dressed up:

• It targets who you are rather than what you did.
• It can’t be turned into an action, because there isn’t one. “Not leaderly” isn’t a to-do list.
• It asks you to override your own reasoning and just fall in line.
• It’s really about the other person’s comfort, preference, or narrow definition of “right,” not about your growth.

Who It Has to Come From

Content isn’t the only filter, though. Source matters just as much, maybe more. So before I even get to whether a piece of feedback is specific or actionable, I check it against four things:

1. It comes from someone I respect. Not someone I’m supposed to respect because of a title, tenure, or position. I’ve written before about the difference between the respect society tells you to hand out by default and the respect people actually earn through integrity, authenticity, and skill or knowledge applied and shared. Feedback inherits whatever kind of respect its source has. A title doesn’t buy credibility with me. Character does.
2. It comes from someone with a valid point of reference or experience. That doesn’t mean they have to agree with me, or have lived my exact experience. It means they have real standing to speak on the topic, even when what they say is hard to hear. Someone reasoning from inside relevant experience is worth listening to even when I don’t like the conclusion. Someone with no real basis for the opinion isn’t.
3. It comes from someone who supports me, or is at least neutral. I strictly limit how much weight I give feedback from people who have shown, over time, that they’re trying to damage me personally or professionally. Those people exist. It’s fine to see them clearly for what they are. Sometimes you can’t remove them from your environment, but you’re not obligated to treat what they say as truth once experience has already taught you otherwise.
4. It comes from someone who demonstrates wisdom, insight, or qualities I actually want to develop. If I wouldn’t want to become more like this person in some specific, nameable way, their opinion of who I should be carries a lot less weight.

Run a piece of feedback through those four before you even ask whether it’s specific or actionable, and most of it sorts itself fast.

And once something sorts into bad, disingenuous, or damaging and unconstructive: reject it. Don’t keep turning it over hoping to find value that isn’t there. Give it one brief, honest scan for a glaring truth buried inside. If you find one, keep it. If you don’t, jettison the rest. No lingering debate required.

Good Feedback Still Isn’t a Command

Here’s the flip side, though: passing the filter above doesn’t mean you owe someone the exact behavior they were picturing when they gave you the feedback. Good feedback has to be examined and considered. That part isn’t optional. But worthy of consideration and worthy of producing the specific result or behavior the other person wants, or demonstrated themselves, are two different things. You still have to do the work of figuring out where it fits for you: in your own style, at your own scale, in your own words. Taking feedback seriously means engaging honestly with what’s true in it. It doesn’t mean becoming a copy of whoever gave it to you. That’s the same trap as “not leaderly,” just wearing a nicer outfit.

This stuff is hard. It isn’t easy. Sorting through what to keep, what to reject, and what to keep but reshape into your own version, all at once, while your own brain may be actively lying to you about how much danger you’re in, is real work. It doesn’t get easier because you’ve named the categories. It just gets slightly more possible.

What Sorting Actually Looks Like

Here’s the most recent test of all this. In my last role, I got feedback that I had interacted in a way that “may not have been appropriate.” That was close to the whole sentence. I had to press, more than once, to get an actual example, a specific situation, and something resembling coaching.

Once I had it, I did the actual work: I grounded myself in my own values and reviewed my own behavior as honestly as I could. I came out the other side with three separate conclusions, and they weren’t all the same kind of conclusion.

1. There was one instance where I genuinely could have communicated better. I was running on brain chemical depletion (ADHD, overwork, and working while sick will do that to you), and something that should have gotten a beat of pause and an explanation came out sounding flip instead. That one was fair. That one was mine to own.
2. Some people don’t like direct communication. I can be aware of that and adjust my language depending on who I’m talking to. But I’m not going to stop communicating directly, and I don’t really want to. It’s one of the things that makes me effective.
3. Some people don’t like being held accountable, or being told plainly that something they did wasn’t correct. I can temper how I deliver that. I’m not going to stop saying it clearly, because if I do, I can’t fulfill my role.

Only the first one was actually feedback. The other two were preference, dressed up as feedback.

Praised for It, Then Punished for It

I’ve hit a version of this at several points in my career: I get praised for accomplishing things other people can’t, and then criticized for the exact qualities that made it possible. This isn’t just an Amy thing. It’s well documented, especially for high-performing women, and especially for those of us who are also neurodivergent.

Researchers Frank Flynn and Cameron Anderson ran a study, later popularized as the “Heidi and Howard” case, in which they gave people an identical account of a successful entrepreneur and changed only the name. Howard was rated likeable, someone people wanted to work for. Heidi, same résumé, same accomplishments, was rated selfish and someone people were less interested in hiring or working with. The competence didn’t move. The likeability did, purely on gender.

Leadership consultant Jennifer McCollum tells a version of this from her own career: after she won major results for a client through assertive, competitive tactics, a colleague described her as:

“A cupcake with a razor blade inside.”

Effective and unsettling, in the same breath, for the same behavior a man would likely have just been called effective for.

And for those of us who are also neurodivergent, there’s an additional layer. Researcher Dr. Damian Milton named this the double empathy problem: when autistic or otherwise neurodivergent people communicate directly and literally, the friction isn’t a deficit on our end, it’s a mismatch of styles that neurotypical listeners often read as rude or inappropriate simply because it’s unfamiliar to them. Direct isn’t the same as wrong. It just isn’t always what the room expects.

Put together: the qualities that get you praised for being effective are frequently the same ones that get you quietly punished for being difficult. That’s not a contradiction you’re supposed to resolve by shrinking. Eventually I concluded that my personal style and that particular environment weren’t well aligned, and I chose to go find a role where they were.

I’ve Gotten This Wrong Too, in Both Directions

In fairness, I haven’t always sorted this correctly, and I’ve failed in both directions, not just one.

There have been plenty of times I worked hard to extract value from feedback I should have just thrown away: sat with it, tried to find the fair kernel in it, gave it more of my energy and self-doubt than it had earned. And especially earlier in my career, there were times that went the other way: I was too attached to my own ego, or my own way of doing something, to actually let good feedback in and change based on it. Neither failure mode is the “safe” one. Over-ingesting bad feedback and refusing to ingest good feedback both cost me, just differently.

If You Can’t See the Difference Yet

Everything above assumes you can tell good from bad once you actually look for it. Some days, especially early on, you won’t be able to. If that’s you: talk to a coach, a therapist, or a mentor who can help you see what good feedback actually looks like, from the outside, when you can’t quite trust your own read on it yet. I mentioned it earlier and I meant it: an awesome therapist changed how I do this. There’s no shame in needing a second set of eyes for something this hard to sort out alone.

Crux

Not everything that hurts is wrong, and not everything that hurts is true. The work is telling those apart, and the test isn’t how much it stung going down. It’s whether, once the sting fades, there’s something specific and actionable left standing, something you could actually do something with. If there isn’t, that’s not feedback you failed to accept. That’s someone else’s discomfort, handed to you and mislabeled. And sometimes, once you’ve actually sorted it, the honest conclusion isn’t a personal action item at all. It’s that you and the room you’re in don’t fit, and it’s time to go find one that does.