GO OFF Sessions

The first time I heard the term, I thought it was just another corporate buzzword.

A flavor-of-the-month idea cooked up in some boardroom with a glossy PowerPoint and a half-baked promise of “engagement.”

But then the owners of my company actually showed up. Not a representative. Not a filtered HR survey. The owners. The people who signed the checks. And they sat down in a room with the staff.

Anyone who wanted could attend.

And here’s where it got real:

It wasn’t a strategy session.

It wasn’t a town hall with pre-screened questions.

It was a chance to GO OFF.

You had a set time. You could yell. You could cry. You could call out management. You could lay it all on the table—the broken systems, the unfair schedules, the nonsense policies, the leaders who talked about culture but never lived it.

For those few minutes, it wasn’t about protecting your career. It wasn’t about packaging your words so they didn’t come back to haunt you. It was about honesty. Brutal Honesty, Encouraged by the leaders.

And then, when your time was up, the moderator (chosen from someone in attendance) would hold up a sign- A big white poster with bold black letters:

“What I think we should do to fix this is…”

That was the catch.

You couldn’t just vent. You had to own a piece of the solution.

And here’s the part that mattered most: at the end of every outburst, every complaint, every heated moment, the owners and management would simply thank the person for providing the feedback. Not in a perfunctory, check-the-box way. It came across as genuine. Caring. They listened, and then they acknowledged the courage it took to speak up.

That changed the tone.

I’ll be honest—I loved it.

Because here’s the truth: sometimes people just need to vent. Sometimes the pressure valve has to be released before the boiler explodes. Leaders forget that. They want clean feedback, polished and professional, wrapped up in words like “opportunity” and “development.”

But leadership isn’t always clean. Teams carry bruises. People carry resentment. And if you don’t give them a safe space to bleed some of that out, it’s going to come out sideways—through disengagement, gossip, or quiet quitting.

GO OFF sessions weren’t perfect. Some people abused the time, others shut down completely. And yes, a few leaders walked out stung, bruised, maybe even a little bitter (but honestly that was a very rare occurrence, generally a new leader who had not yet grown to see the value of the meeting.)

But you know what?

I’d rather deal with stung leaders than silenced teams.

Because when people spoke their truth—raw, unedited, unshined—it gave us a mirror. We saw where we were failing them. We saw the damage we were causing, sometimes without even knowing. And in that uncomfortable silence after the venting came the moment of choice:

Do we defend?

Or do we change?

That sign—“What I think we should do to fix this is…”—was brilliant. It forced us to move past blame and into ownership. Complaints became proposals. Anger became fuel. And every now and then, buried under the noise, came a spark of brilliance that reshaped the way we led.

The Damaged Leader in me knows this:

I’ve caused harm I never intended. I’ve been blind to the frustration sitting right in front of me. I’ve underestimated how much space people need to be heard.

But I also know this:

Leaders who are brave enough to listen to the shouting—without retaliating, without silencing—are leaders who earn trust that no title can command.

Maybe we don’t need a glossy new program.

Maybe we just need more rooms where people are allowed to GO OFF.