The Most Expensive Thing in Your Company Is the Thing Nobody Said - CEOWORLD magazine
Here are two questions worth asking before your next leadership meeting. How many of your company’s best ideas actually reached you last quarter? And if some of them did not, how would you ever know? Every organization carries an unseen running tally of things that were never said out loud. The product that shipped with […]
Here are two questions worth asking before your next leadership meeting. How many of your company’s best ideas actually reached you last quarter? And if some of them did not, how would you ever know?Every organization carries an unseen running tally of things that were never said out loud. The product that shipped with a flaw someone spotted early and decided not to raise. The market shift a regional manager saw coming and mentioned to no one. The cost-saving move that was obvious to the person closest to the work and invisible to everyone above them. The objection to a strategy that would have changed the outcome, swallowed in a meeting because the person who had it looked around and decided it was not worth the risk. None of that appears on a report. That is what makes it so expensive. You can measure what your people do. You cannot measure what they chose not to tell you. The gap between those two things is where a surprising amount of your company’s value quietly leaks out. The usual conversation about speaking up at work is pointed at the employee. Find your voice. Have the confidence to contribute. It is fine advice for an individual and the wrong conversation for a chief executive. The confidence of any one employee is not something you control. The culture that decides whether that confidence is worth the risk is entirely something you control. And right now, the odds are not good. In one study of a thousand U. S. employees, 46 percent admitted they withhold honest feedback at work. Nearly half of the people you are counting on to tell you the truth have decided, at least some of the time, to keep it to themselves. Here is what that silence actually costs, in three places you and your leadership team can put a number on each one of them. The best idea in the building stays in one person’s headInnovation rarely dies in a bold, dramatic no. It dies in a quiet decision not to bring something up. The manager who has a genuinely new idea and is not sure it is her place to raise it, will more often than not keep it to herself. You never see the pitch. You never get the chance to say yes. From your chair it looks exactly like a company that simply did not have the idea, when the truth is that you had it and never heard it. Your competitors are not always beating you with better people. Sometimes they are just running a building where the good idea gets said. Your team can see the wall comingYour people are closest to the work, which usually makes them the first to know when something will not work or will cost far more than anyone upstairs expects. When they tell you, you get to course correct while it is still cheap. When they stay quiet, you find out at launch, or in the quarterly numbers, or from a customer who is no longer yours. The most damaging version is the team that watched a problem grow, understood it completely, and said nothing, because the last person who raised a hard truth in that room got treated as the problem rather than the messenger. They had all learned what happens to the messenger, and they acted accordingly. Silence is usually the last step before someone leavesThere is a stage that comes before a resignation, and it is quiet. People who conclude that their voice changes nothing do not keep pushing. They stop offering. They do the job as written and update their resume. Gallup has put the cost of voluntary turnover to U. S. businesses at roughly one trillion dollars a year, and a great deal of that starts as disengagement long before anyone gives notice. Much of that disengagement begins on the day a good employee decides that speaking up is not worth the breath. By the time they walk out, you have already lost the version of them that used to bring you things. I know how narrow the margin can be, because I was once the person deciding whether to say it. I was twenty-nine and newly promoted when I could see that a thirty-million-dollar product line was heading for decline. The safe move was to wait a year and not challenge a business that size in my first months in the role. I said it anyway, and the relaunch became the most successful in the company’s history. What made that possible was not only me. I made the case, and the executive team was willing to let a new, young person challenge the current results and take the idea seriously. Put the same idea and the same person in a culture that treats challenge as insubordination, and it dies in the first meeting. The company loses the relaunch and never learns the growth that was possible. That is the hard part for us as leaders. The results we get are the only ones we ever see. We miss results, growth opportunities, or time because someone stayed quiet. The signs that you have a silence problem are not subtle once you decide to look for them. Meetings that end in fast agreement and no dissent. The same three people doing all the talking. Bad news that reaches you late and already softened for your comfort. A postmortem full of people who had a feeling but never said it. If that describes your leadership team, you are already paying for silence. You simply have not put a number on it. Robust dialogue is the sign we want to see. A meeting where people argue the idea, press on the numbers, and disagree with us to our faces is a meeting that is working. When that noise fades and everything turns smooth and agreeable, we should read it as a warning and not a relief. Encouraging that friction, and rewarding the people who bring it, is a real part of the job, because it is what keeps us from being confidently wrong. The fix is not a poster in the break room or a line about candor in the values deck. It is quieter and more personal than that. It is what you do in the ten seconds after someone tells you something you did not want to hear. It is whether the employee who was right and unpopular is remembered when promotions are decided. It is whether you go looking for the objection instead of waiting to see if it ever finds you. Your people are constantly reading the record of what happened to the last person who spoke up, and you are the one writing that record, in small moments you may not even notice. There are small, almost silly ways to make this real. One of my colleagues brings a stuffed toy moose into her meetings. Her rule is simple. If there is something you are thinking and not saying, put the moose on the table. It is her version of the elephant in the room, shrunk down to something a person can actually pick up. It sounds light, and that is exactly why it works. A leader who reaches for the moose first is telling the whole room that the hard thing is welcome here. Saying it is the job. You do not need a stuffed animal on your conference table. You need your own version of it, a standing signal that the objection is wanted now, while it is still an idea and not yet a postmortem. The most valuable idea in your company this year might be one that nobody has said out loud yet. Whether it ever reaches you comes down to what you have built, or failed to build, in every room you walk into. Written byDr. Kristine Sickels. Have you read?Zacharie Elmaleh on Leading Deux par Deux’s Global Growth. EU Targets Caribbean Citizenship-by-Investment Programs in Schengen Visa Crackdown. Alfred Patterson: Leading a Sixth-Generation Asphalt Paving Business. How CABA Design Created Chicory for Modern Outdoor Living. How Grenada Became the Eastern Caribbean CBI Leader Through ECCIRA.