Let’s Talk About Burning Bridges
Even when you gotta make that angry post, keep these counsels in mind
Why She Didn’t Start the Fire
Here’s a cringey story my organizational research turned up. A supervisor asks a woman professional to lunch. She tells him she’s dating someone else. He pushes her to go anyway.
I’m gonna get drunk in my office, he says, if you don’t go out with me.
Just in time, a coworker intervenes—and, after the sleezeball leaves, asks, Why didn’t you stand up to him? The woman shrugs. And you know what she was thinking.
I don’t want to be a complainer.
I need a positive evaluation.
I don’t burn bridges.
Because you’d be thinking the same things, too. And so would I. They constitute the gray-haired wisdom of our professional times.
Why Nobody Else Used to Either
Where did this wisdom come from? Who first said, Don’t shut down your professional options? Gosh, folks were saying that even during the Great Resignation or the Big Quit or the Great Reshuffle or the Great Aspiration, or whatever you call it—even back in 2021-2023, when people were taking their job and shoving it by the millions—even then, trade journalists were saying, Bridge burning’s not the way to go.
See this blog for the usual reasons: “You never know when you’ll need that contact again.” “It’s unprofessional.” “It could come back to bite you.” “It’s not worth it.”
It reminds me of the camper instructions for encountering a bear. “Play dead?” Jim Gaffigan asks, “Who came up with that? Maybe the bears?”
Who said, never burn bridges? Maybe HR.
Why We Started Torching
Things caught fire in 2007 when Glassdoor opened. Suddenly, outgoing workers had a platform to announce what it was actually like to work in a company. Suddenly, a recruiter had a place to get the straight story on an organization’s culture so an innocent interviewee could log on and find the damning information.
That’s why people started saying that there’s a time for bridge-burnings:
Sometimes you gotta blow up the bridge to prevent other professionals from innocently seeking positions in a dangerous company.
Sometimes (as Liz Ryan notes) you burn the bridge so you won’t get desperate later and return to a job where the pay’s okay but the culture’s not.
Sometimes you don’t have to burn a bridge; it burns itself. I was talking with a friend recently who’d chosen to work for a real jackhole, knowing that he was a jackhole, but needing jackhole money for a year or two. Turns out, my friend didn’t need to report his jack-hole-ness. Everybody in town already knew it.
The point is bridge-burning can be good intel and help avert hundreds of hours of professional suffering.
How the Companies Responded
The problem is that companies might be toxic, but they’re not stupid. They have HR departments, same as any other company, and those departments surveil Glassdoor. Heck, they might even fund Glassdoor. (At the very least, there’s a close relationship between the two.) So when they ask the platform to remove a negative comment, it’s pretty hard to say no. And Glassdoor hasn’t always been forthcoming about how they decided to take down a negative review. To make matters worse, Glassdoor has started asking people to identify themselves in their profiles. Although the platform assures people that they’d never share the information, it’s hard to be confident. According to Albert Fox Cahn, quoted in Wired, “You can’t both be verified and anonymous. You can’t both be a social network and a confidential reporting space. You can do one of those well, or you can do both of them badly.”
Still, this newsletter does not provide a manual for overhauling HR in the United States. It’s not a guidebook for corporate revolutionaries. The Mode/Switch tries to name systemic inequities and locate structural fissures. But this newsletter is finally about keeping your own soul intact, whether or not the building or bridge is burning.
How to keep from scorching your soul
Humans don’t handle anonymous platforms well. These digital flashpoints invite our basest instincts. Instead of promoting reflection, they tempt reactivity—and revenge.
Hear me out: I’m not suggesting that indignation’s never right. The Mode/Switch has, in fact, made exactly the opposite point. The spiritual and religious traditions I come from have, as Rowan Williams points out, “a soft spot for anger.” Why? Because indignation’s “properly directly against injustice and suffering that could be changed in the world.”
Still, if you want to keep your soul intact, you don’t want to let anger singe you and blind you. The contemplative writer, Cassian, writes that anger “blinds the eyes of the heart with sombre disorders.”
Before you post that deliciously bitter post on that (maybe) anonymous platform, you might want to make a mode/switch from transparency to truthfulness. Transparency has no filter, no self-awareness, no mindfulness. Truthfulness has the tact of all three.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once described the human vocation in troubled times this way: “to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that it is the only thing we can carry as a ‘prize’ from the burning building.”
Those words may be too dire for the job you actually hold. Or held. I hope they are. But if they’re not, if your job really is up in flames: how do you do keep anger from scorching your soul, even as you leave the burning building?
Practice courage. It may be necessary for you to post a warning message about the toxic work culture you just left. For you, that may be the risk you’re called to, the act of courage your soul’s wellbeing requires. You’re not getting vengeance; you’re setting out on a braver life.
Practice conversation. It may also be necessary for you to find a small circle to listen to your indignant story and then say it back to you with compassion. It’s hard to tell your own story truthfully. You need people who can do that with you, and you probably won’t find them on Glassdoor.
How to Post Your Indignation Rightly
Here, finally, are a few diagnostic questions to keep in mind as you make your way down the path of wrathful posting:
Does your anger help you name the company’s wrong justly?
Does your anger enable you to help others see more clearly?
Does your anger help you find your way home?
Or does being mad online narrow your cognition, blind you to others, and make you anxious about your place? Listen to your joints and muscles. Notice the stress points as you craft the wrathful post. If the pressure mounts, if the intensity intensifies, you might just be (to mix two idioms) burning a bridge too far.
But look, you can do this! You can learn, especially in the company of the sages in your life, to recognize the vast difference between a hot anger that incapacitates and a cold, still anger that makes you strong enough to love others and the world you share.
