The Financial Times chose our founder Christina Wing’s book, Unspeakable: The Taboo Topics We Avoid and How to Talk About Them (Harvard Business Review Press), as its featured business book for October. In the piece, Isabel Berwick talked with Christina about why so many of us steer around topics like money, health, and succession at work, and what to do instead. Here are a few parts that stood out to us.
What makes a topic unspeakable
Berwick opened with how Christina defines an “unspeakable” subject in the book’s introduction: “They often involve power, identity, status, aging, ambition or family. They’re the topics children are trained to avoid and professionals are taught to tiptoe around. We know they matter. We just don’t know how to talk about them without risking discomfort, conflict or judgment.”
She doesn’t call herself an expert
Christina told the FT she isn’t “an expert in discussing taboo conversations,” but “somebody that’s worked hard at it for a long time.” As she explained, “It’s mainly because I felt really silenced in my entire childhood. I moved 13 times before ninth grade… and you’re skeptical of what to say when you’re in a new audience.”
The list keeps getting longer
Christina teaches at Harvard Business School, and she’s watched her students become more hesitant to speak up as politics have gotten more polarized and social media has raised the stakes. “In the ten years I’ve been teaching, the list of topics my students are afraid of grows every year.”
Health is the most taboo topic at work
Asked which workplace topic is the most taboo of all, Christina pointed to personal health, “anything from weight, all the way through medical conditions.” The book includes prompts and examples for these conversations, including how to handle time away and performance questions tied to fertility treatment, maternity leave, long-term illness, and caring for family.
Go beyond “take all the time you need”
When someone on a team is going through something difficult, a manager’s usual response is kind but vague: “Let me know how I can help. Take all the time you need.” Christina pushes for something more specific, like a temporary four-day week or working remotely, with a clear time frame both sides agree on. Putting a system in place, she told the FT, “moves this out of the realm of favors and turns it into a more formal and structural form of support.”
Berwick also pointed to a senior leader in the book who has an annual “capacity and life stage conversation” with each person on his team. He keeps it separate from performance reviews and opens with questions like “what constraints are you managing outside of work this year?”
She’s still working on it too
Our favorite part was Christina’s candor about her own family. Writing the book showed her “how many of these things I haven’t done well.” She’s talked with her three young adult children a lot about money, but says she didn’t start as soon as she should have, and she wishes she’d told them sooner what their responsibilities would be if something happened to her.
Why this matters to us
We see this in our work all the time. A family knows they need to talk about who will lead the business next, or what the next generation should understand about the family’s wealth, and the conversation keeps getting pushed to next quarter. Christina put it simply in the interview: “Whether you’re a rabbi, the coach of a sports team, or the CEO… you have to be able to talk about difficult things, in order to be a leader.”
Read the full article on FT.com (link below), and learn more about Unspeakable at christinawing.com/book.
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