Why Your Team’s Silence Is the Problem
Happy Wednesday. Last week I asked you to think about how your team experiences you. This week, I want to push that further into territory that’s harder to sit with.
When was the last time someone on your team told you something you genuinely didn’t want to hear? Not a logistical disagreement. Something about you. Something real.
A client asked her team for honest feedback last quarter. She did everything right—anonymous survey, open-ended questions, promised no consequences. She got back twelve responses that essentially said the same thing: ‘Keep doing what you’re doing.’ She showed me the results, relieved. ‘See? Things are good.’ I remember thinking that’s the moment when it all goes wrong, but I didn’t say it.
Two months later, her best engineer left. Exit interview reason: ‘I didn’t feel like my concerns were heard.’ The same engineer who’d filled out that anonymous survey saying everything was fine. She called me after he was gone, and her voice was different. It wasn’t shock anymore. It was the sound of someone realizing she’d been reading the feedback she wanted to read.
Here’s what most leaders don’t understand about the feedback vacuum. It’s not that people are lying to you. It’s that they’ve done the math. The risk of being honest with someone who controls their career rarely feels worth it. So they tell you what’s safe. And you mistake safe for true. They’re protecting themselves. Or sometimes they’re protecting you, which is worse because it sounds like respect.
The silence around you isn’t peace. It’s the sound of people deciding what you can handle. And the patterns that silence protects are the ones that cost you the most, precisely because no one inside your organization has the safety or the distance to name them.
If you’re recognizing a pattern that goes deeper than one conversation can address, that’s the kind of work I do with leaders one-on-one. Not advice. Pattern recognition applied over time. Reply to this email if you want to talk about what that could look like.
This week’s read: Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows why your team’s silence isn’t about them. It’s about what they’ve learned is safe to say around you. If the opening hit home, this book will show you the structural reasons behind it.
If every piece of feedback you receive sounds positive, that’s not a sign that things are good. It’s a sign that people don’t feel safe being honest. And that’s on you to fix.