"Bite the Bullet"

“Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet,” a leader said to me.

Words innocent enough, we’ve all heard them a hundred times. Except he said it about working with a toxic executive and biting the bullet meant accepting narcissistic, childish behavior from a grown man with major influence in the company.

Some years ago I would have said, “Yes, of course.” If we want to get the work done, get the project going, we just need to take one for the team and engage with him in spite of his disrespectful, egotistic conduct. But now, when I hear “sometimes you just have to bite the bullet,” I think: but do we really? How much of what we treat as a given - “this is how corporate life works” and “these are the rules of working life”, is actually non-negotiable and set in stone? And how much of it is solidified simply by our inability to challenge the status quo, to stand up for what is right, to ask for more for ourselves?

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