Let me start with a question I hear more often than leaders think:
“Where can I talk?”
Now, that’s not a logistics question. That’s not about conference rooms or office hours. That’s a deeper question. That’s somebody saying, “I don’t feel safe saying what I really think.”
And when people don’t feel safe, they don’t just stay quiet… they disengage.
Here’s what I’ve learned after years in this work: silence in an organization is never neutral. Silence is data.
When your team goes quiet in meetings, when folks nod but don’t add, when feedback feels rehearsed—that’s not alignment. That’s self-protection.
And let me say this plainly: you cannot build a high-performing team on top of unspoken truth.
So what do you do?
You go first.
You create space by modeling space. You say things like:
- “I might be missing something – what am I not seeing?”
- “If you disagree, I need to hear it.”
- “This is a room where we can talk straight.”
And then, this is the hard part you don’t punish honesty when it shows up.
Because the moment people feel that honesty costs them something… they go right back to silence.
Real inclusion isn’t about who’s in the room. It’s about who feels safe enough to speak once they get there.
Write you soon.