The Assumed Room
I left a company once, partly because of how its leadership talked about politics. Not because I disagreed with every position - I didn’t. Because of the assumption that everyone in the room agreed.
All-hands meetings, quarterly updates. Somewhere between the roadmap and the team announcements, political opinions delivered like weather - just stated, not argued, as if acknowledging something everyone obviously felt. There’s a gap between “I believe this, and here’s why” and “obviously we all believe this.” The first acknowledges that someone might disagree. The second can’t imagine it. One invites a response. The other makes responding feel beside the point - socially costly, or just not worth it today.
The effect is quieter than people imagine. Nobody storms out of an all-hands. What happens is smaller - I stopped going to the optional events, started answering “yeah, crazy times” when politics came up at lunch, kept my head down and did good work and saved my real thoughts for people I trusted outside the building.
Before I left, I had a conversation with someone on my team who’d started being openly political at work - taking cues from leadership, reading the room the way it was designed to be read. I told him privately: be careful with that. You don’t know how everyone here actually thinks. This isn’t the place.
That was as brave as I got. One private conversation with one person. The assumed room had me trained - even my pushback was quiet, behind closed doors.
The political atmosphere wasn’t the only reason I left, but it was part of the texture - one of those things that makes a place feel less like yours over time.
I’ve thought about the pattern since, how assumed rooms stay assumed. The people who think differently don’t argue - they leave. And because they leave quietly, the room never notices the gap. The people who stay all agree, which confirms the assumption, which makes the next meeting feel even more like consensus. The room gets more assumed over time, not less, because everyone who might have complicated things has already walked out.
Nobody tracks this. Exit interviews don’t capture “I got tired of pretending to agree with leadership’s politics.” The departures are always mixed, the reasons always multiple, and the pattern invisible from inside. That might be the sharpest thing about political assumption versus political conviction - conviction invites a response, even disagreement. Assumption forecloses one. And the cost is measured in absence, which nobody remaining can see.
I don’t regret leaving. I do think about the fact that my bravest moment was a private conversation - telling one colleague to be careful, behind closed doors. The assumed room had me trained. Even my dissent was quiet.
That’s how these rooms work. Not by suppressing disagreement - by making it feel private, individual, not worth the cost. The people who think differently leave, and the room never notices, because absence doesn’t register the way agreement does.