(with guest Maggie Lansdale, Global VP of People at Cannondale)

An employee walks out the door and finally tells the truth: a director has been verbally abusive to junior staff for years. She never reported it while employed because she didn't trust the process, and now she won't put her name on it. HR has credible detail, a witness who won't go on record, and a director who's otherwise a top performer that leadership doesn't want to lose. Rebecca and Maggie dig into what happens next — and why the version of the story you're told first is rarely the whole story.

What you'll hear in this episode:

Why people save their honest feedback for the exit interview — and what that says about whether your process is actually trusted
How to weigh a "brilliant jerk's" revenue against the quiet cost of the talent walking out the door underneath them
Why the order you talk to people in (junior staff, peers, leadership, then the director) changes what you're able to find out
How to hear "verbal abuse" or "toxic workplace" without assuming you already know what happened — and why the words people reach for aren't always the legal definition
What to actually document when nothing rises to a formal complaint yet, so a pattern doesn't take two or three years to become undeniable
How cultural and communication differences change what abuse, feedback, or a manager's bluntness even looks like across a team

About Maggie Lansdale:
Maggie is Global VP of People at Cannondale, where she leads the people function across a global, multi-location team. With a career built inside HR teams of various sizes — from scrappy startups tracking everything in a Google Doc to global operations — she's spent years untangling exactly this kind of case: credible allegations, no formal complaint, and a leadership team reluctant to act. She's a go-to "HR buddy" for practitioners working through hard calls alone.

The Exit Interview That Exposes a Toxic Top Performer

HR Voices

The Exit Interview That Exposes a Toxic Top Performer