The Day Your Organization Went Quiet (S1E1)

Your organization may not be as healthy as it looks.

In this episode, Dr. Ashley Newcomb explores what happens when employees stop speaking up - not loudly, but quietly. Introducing the concept of the Silent Organization, this episode helps leaders recognize the subtle shifts that often go unnoticed until it’s too late, and why silence may be the most dangerous signal your organization is sending.

Topics: leadership, employee engagement, organizational culture, workplace communication, leadership development, organizational resilience

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the Resilient Organization. I'm Dr. Ashley Newcomb and I'm the founder of Inspired Coaching and Leadership. And if you've ever had the sense that something feels kind of off in your organization, but you can't quite name it and you can't quite put your finger on it, then you're not alone, but you are in the right place. This podcast is where we're going to put language to those moments and help you see what's really happening beneath the surface of your organization. In this first season, we're going to explore what happens when organizations go silent. That's when followers stop speaking up, followers disengage, and critical signals go unnoticed by organizational leadership because silence doesn't just affect communication. It actually weakens an organization's ability to respond, to adapt, and to remain resilient in those trying times. So out of the gate, I've used two terms that I would like to take a moment to give a little context to. Really just any kind of organization that not only survives potentially catastrophic events, but has the ability to use these catastrophic events towards growth and to thrive in the aftermath of some serious hardships. As for followers, well, I want you to leave the notion of mindless sheep at the door. Our followers are valuable members of your organization. They have more influence on the health of your business than you may realize. And we're going to get into the importance of followers and followership during future episodes. So when we start talking in terms of leaders and followers, just know that we're going to start tapping into the true depth of that relationship. Now let's get started with today's episode. During the course of my career, I've been very, very fortunate to work with a wide variety of professionals from all different types of backgrounds, all different types of experiences, credentials, all that good stuff that makes unique people, well, unique. In today's episode, we're going to talk about Dan. I met Dan in a coffee shop for one of our first meetings, and it was a heavy one. If you were to ask me today to describe Dan to you, or at least Dan's personality, I would tell you that he's just a rock solid guy. He has a great personality, a great outlook on life, he loves a good laugh, and he just really knows how to connect with people. But that first meeting, the first time that I really sat down to talk to him, he just exuded frustration and confusion and maybe even a little desperation. So I ordered a hot chocolate. Yes, it was a coffee shop, but I don't drink coffee. And I sat down with Dan and asked him to tell me his story before he told me his goals. He rubbed his forehead for a minute and then he started off by telling me that he didn't know where it all went sideways. Which is never really a good sign when you're working as a coach. So I gave him a little space and gave him a moment to collect himself before he continued. He told me a story about how he was always so proud of his organization. The numbers used to always come back over target, even when they seasily adjusted. And then COVID hit, and for a while he thought that maybe they were just struggling because they were trying to rebound from COVID, but that turned out to not be the case. So before we continue with Dan's story, let me give you a little bit of background about him. Dan was the kind of person that loved people. He was the kind of leader that people noticed, people instantly related to. Other leaders were jealous of Dan because of his ease at establishing rapport with his followers. Dan had an MBA from a prestigious university. He was exceptionally charismatic and he was very driven, driven in life in general. He was the kind of person that colleagues joked around that he could motivate a stick. So when he was promoted to senior director, it wasn't surprising, and even the people that were up against him for that promotion cheered for him and knew that he would be a great fit. He brought energy, he brought vision, he brought positive momentum, and for a long time, results just followed. And these results were very positive, very consistent, very hopeful. Then 2020 happened. Like many organizations, his company had to shut down during COVID and they transitioned to a fully remote environment once they reopened. They had to scramble to figure out the whole remote workforce situation, and they ended up going with a plan where the employer purchased company-owned laptops that they provided to their followers so their followers could work from home. And that part was effective to getting their workforce back up and running and revenue picked back up, but it picked back up slowly. But that part made sense. It was expected. What wasn't expected, though, was what started happening inside of the organization. Employees started becoming disengaged. Slowly, not dramatically, not all at once, but it was still noticeable. The request made for referrals to the employee assistance program increased. And the way that Dan described it to me was before this, he didn't even know they had an employee assistance program because there were so few requests that came through. They also noticed that the request for time off increased. And there were other supervisor concerns. Supervisors started complaining to Dan and other members of senior management that the followers weren't responding to emails. They weren't answering phone calls, and they weren't even answering their team's call. It was like they were showing up, but not really showing up. One employee even repeatedly logged in to virtual meetings wearing a house robe. Something was definitely off, but no one could quite name it. Dan noted here that one of the most concerning parts of it was that the followers within the organization acted like these disruptions were just par for the course. I mean, don't you always show up for a meeting wearing your house coat? And who doesn't love enjoying a bowl of cereal during their annual performance review? So the leadership of this organization did what many other organizations do. They moved quickly to address what they thought and believed with all their hearts and souls was a personnel issue. Senior leaders of the organization deliberated and they all came up with a two-pronged approach that they truly believed was going to resolve the issue. First, they launched an internal email campaign. The email campaign was designed to be motivational and encouraging and to really help employees, the followers within the organization, feel valued and connected to their work family. And then there was a second prong of approach. So here they really leaned into tangible evidence of not necessarily their followers' worth and value, but rather their employees' production. You see how I shifted there between follower and employee? Keep that tucked away in the back of your mind. So this organization implemented a keystroke tracking software where they began to virtually monitor employee productivity. They also created a new employee policy that required all followers within the organization to enable the email read receipts by default. So you were required to make sure that everybody knew when you read the emails and that you actually did read the emails. Well, at least you opened the email. A quick side note here that I want to make sure I point out to you is that the followers within the organization were aware of the email read receipt policy because that was a new policy that was sent out to everybody and they had to sign acknowledgments saying that they received this updated policy and they understood. However, they didn't know that they were being virtually tracked for productivity. They didn't know about the keystroke tracking software or the other monitoring software because the employer packaged this as a software update and rolled this out without telling their employees exactly what was in the update. So on one hand, they start this email campaign saying, hey, we care about you, we value you, we're family. And simultaneously they rolled out policy that ended up telling the followers, you know what? Hey, we're watching you, so don't mess up or we're going to figure it out. This is where leaders often don't realize what they're communicating to their followers. Because trust and surveillance don't and by nature cannot coexist well. Even when they're both introduced with good intentions, people are going to feel that tension. They're not going to be able to reconcile. Well, if you trust me, but you're watching me, do you really trust me? So back to Dan. Dan volunteered for the email campaign because it was in his wheelhouse. He leaned into one of his huge strengths, which is his ability to connect with and motivate people. He is great at building rapport and great at really helping people feel seen and heard. For his role in the email campaign, he worked closely with his human resource department and he even collaborated with his wife. So his wife just happens to be an English professor who was an English major and a psychology minor. So she helped him craft these messages that felt thoughtful and personal. He also opted to send these from his personal email account instead of the organization's generic email account because he felt like that gave it an extra personal touch. And at first this worked. People responded, they reached out to him directly to express their gratitude. They just genuinely felt seen and heard, and they felt cared about. And then something changed. The responses stopped, the emails went unopened, some were deleted without being read, or, well, for that matter, being opened. It was the same leader, the same approach, and the same message, but a completely different outcome. Well, I bet you, like Dan, are sitting there scratching your head and wondering what happened. Well, the truth of the matter is, remember that little side note from earlier that I told you that the followers didn't know that they were being tracked? Well, guess what? They found out. I did want to take a moment right here and kind of emphasize how the followers within the organization found out. So one of the employees was having, well, a disciplinary meeting. And during that meeting, the employee found out that the employer had been tracking productivity through the software rolled out to these laptops provided by the employer. As an organizational leader, you might be thinking to yourself, well, it's the employer's right to install any type of software owned to a laptop that the company owns for the purpose of tracking employee productivity. After all, most businesses that I know of are in the business of being businesses and require their employees to conduct business. And I'm not debating that. I'm not here to say what the employer rights versus employee rights should look like in this situation. What I'm saying is that there is a right way and a wrong way for your followers to figure it out that you're tracking their productivity in order for you to maintain a healthy and productive relationship with your follower. And that kind of infringes on psychological safety, which we'll discuss in another episode. So if you've ever led a team, you may have experienced a version of this where something that used to work suddenly stops working. There's no clear explanation, there's no major conflict, there's no obvious breakdown, there's just a shift. And you just can't find a reason or rhyme or rationale for that shift. So what Dan was experiencing and what many organizations in this situation experience is something that I call the quiet organization. It doesn't announce itself, it doesn't disrupt loudly, and that's because it's often missed. A quiet organization is when people just stop speaking up. They become disengaged but remain present. They comply, but they stop contributing. And from the outside, everything can still look functional, and organizational leaders might think, well, nothing's changed. There's just something wrong with my employees. But if you think that, then you're missing the root cause of the problem. One of the reasons why we miss this so often is because our usually high performers keep performing, but they don't perform at the level that they can perform. You've got to keep in mind that some of your followers within the organization, well, to be frank about it, their 60% looks better than some people's 100%. So when they cut back on their performance, and they're usually the first ones to cut back, we miss it because, well, they're still doing really good work. But instead of seeing your organization as their career, they start seeing it as a paycheck. So yes, they're showing up and yes, they're performing, but they're not contributing to the level that they have in the past. What we often miss in this scenario is that engagement isn't something that leaders can control directly. It's something that people choose to give or quietly begin withholding based on what they're experiencing inside of your organization. Silence is not the absence of problems, it's the absence of voice. And this matters more than most leaders realize because when people stop speaking, you lose those early warning signs, you lose honest feedback, and you lose the ability to see problems before they escalate into something that could possibly get out of hand and turn into something very serious very quickly. And by the time these little issues become visible to management, they're big issues and they're already costing you more than just money. Here's a little bit of a deeper insight into Dan's scenario. What's important here is that Dan didn't suddenly become ineffective. His messages didn't suddenly lose its quality. The only thing that really changed was the environment around him. And when the environment changes, followership behavior changes suit because you can't inspire voice in a system that discourages it. Now I want to take a moment and go into a deeper layer of what was actually happening inside Dan's organization, because I think it explains not just why the email campaign stopped working, but why the entire situation unraveled the way that it did. There's a distinction in organizational behavior between what we call the espoused values and enacted values. Your espoused values are the ones that you state, the ones on the wall, the ones that are in the handbook, the ones in the all-hands meeting where leadership talks about transparency and trust and how much the organization values its people. Those values are real and the people saying them usually mean them. But your enacted values, your enacted values are something different. They're the values that your followers actually see lived out day after day, and the decisions that are made, the policies that get implemented, and the moments where leadership's behavior either confirms or contradicts what the leader's words have actually promised. And here's the critical part. When there's a significant gap between what an organization says it values and what it actually does value, followers notice every single time. Faster than leadership expects. And that gap doesn't just create confusion, it creates an integrity issue. It damages psychological trust within an organization and it sends a message about how the system really works, what actually gets rewarded, and what actually gets ignored, and what behavior carries what kind of risk. See, Dan's organization said, we value you, we trust you, we're a family. And simultaneously, they implemented convert monitoring software and rolled it out as a routine update without disclosure. Those two messages cannot coexist in the mind of your followers. They won't try to reconcile them. They'll simply choose which one they believe and base all conceptions about that organization based on that belief from that moment moving forward. Their decision is going to be based on what they've experienced the most from organizational leadership every single time. That's not cynicism, that's wisdom, and it's exactly what Dan's followers did. The moment that gap became visible, the moment the enacted values showed up and contradicted the espoused ones, that trust was gone. That relationship was damaged. And without that trust, and without that relationship, Dan's warmth, his skill, and his genuine care for his people, none of that could reach them anymore. Because you can't inspire voice in a system that has taught your people that their voice isn't safe. Right about now, you might be saying to yourself, Oh wow, that's a bum deal for Dan, but how does this actually apply to me or to my organization? So let me give you a few things to think about because this is the moment that you and I are going to shift from theoretical to actual reality. And the truth is, this could be your reality. You may not notice the shift when it starts. Things don't break, they drift. Performance may still look acceptable to you because the early signs are subtle, but not dramatic. So if you're waiting for a clear problem, you're already late to the game. Responsiveness changes before performance does. You'll notice slower replies to emails, slower replies to messages, there's less urgency and follow-through. There's more checking the box behavior than going above and beyond the call of duty. People are still working, but something feels different. Something has changed in how they're engaging you and the organization. You'll actually start to hear less complaints, not more. There'll be fewer new ideas that are being shared, fewer questions being asked, and less pushback in meetings. People become complacent. And silence can look like agreement, but it often isn't. It's just a sign that they don't care enough to look out for the best interest of the organization anymore. Your strongest people, you know, those that can have a tendency to give you a headache, but you really value them way too much to get rid of them. Well, they're going to start feeling easier to manage. They don't challenge decisions, they don't ask for much, they just handle their work and handle the problems. That's not stability, it's early disengagement. Again, they've just decided that your organization isn't worth the extra emotional energy that it takes to be that type of motivated follower. You may also find yourself solving problems that you didn't see coming. Issues just seem to appear to come out of nowhere. And leaders feel surprised by outcomes of projects. There's a sense of, how did we miss this? The truth is you didn't miss it. Your system stopped surfacing it. And here's the one thing that I want you to sit with the longest. You may already be sending mixed signals that are shaping behavior and you don't even realize it. Think honestly about the last policy your organization rolled out, the last decision that was made about how your team is monitored, evaluated, and managed. What did the words say? What did the action communicate? Because your followers are not just hearing your words, they're reading your actions. And when those two don't line up, they will always trust what they see over what they're told. Your followers may already be reallocating their effort. They're still working, but they're deciding where to invest their energy and where not to. Remember, engagement isn't going to be lost all at once. It's going to be gradually withdrawn. If anything that I just said is kind of tickling at the back of your brain, it's worth paying attention to, trust me. Now I want to give you something practical because awareness without action is just uncomfortable. And if Any part of Dan's story landed a little close to home? Here are three things that you can do today, not to fix everything, but to begin moving in a different direction. First, find the gap between what you say and what you do. Take one organizational value, just one, and ask yourself honestly: what is the most recent decision that we made that either reinforced or contradicted this value? You're not looking for perfection, you're looking for awareness, because you cannot close a gap that you haven't acknowledged. Leaders who are willing to name the gap honestly are the ones who have the credibility to begin closing that gap. Second, find one place where you can return trust for trust. In Dan's organization, trust was broken covertly through a software update that employees didn't know anything about. You may not have done anything that dramatic, but think about whether there is anywhere in your organization right now where your people are being monitored, evaluated, or managed in a way that they haven't been told about clearly and directly. If there is, address it. Not defensively, not with a lengthy justification, but honestly. Again, I'm not trying to debate the rights of employers versus the rights of employees. I'm just noting that transparency, even when it's uncomfortable, is almost always received better than the alternative, which is discovery. And discovery, as Dan learned, is very hard to recover from. Third, create one moment this week where followers' voice visibly changes something in your organization. It doesn't have to be a major decision, it can be small, but find an opportunity, ask for input, genuinely receive it, and then do something with it. Tell a person that you did something with it, tell them why. That cycle, reinforcing voice, response, and acknowledgement is the most fundamental unit of organizational trust. And right now, in a lot of organizations, that cycle's broken. Starting to repair it takes one honest, visible moment at a time. These are not complex fixes, but they are intentional ones. And in an organization that has gone quiet, intentional, consistent, visibly acted on, that's exactly where you're going to begin re-establishing trust. And that's what we're going to do next, because science doesn't start at the organizational level. It starts with individuals, people who care, people who try, and then something shifts. So if this resonates with you and you're starting to recognize some of the patterns in your own organization, please know that you're not alone. I've created a short training called When Followers Go Quiet, Diagnosing Hidden Disengagement in Your Organization. I designed this training to help you put structure to what you're seeing and begin identifying what's really happening beneath the surface of your organization. And if you're not quite ready for that yet, I also have a simple resource that you can download called Five Signs Your Organization Has Gone Quiet. These resources, along with the description of the services I provide and much more information, are available at inspiredcoaching.net. Because the most dangerous moment in an organization isn't when people are loud. It's when they stop speaking and no one notices. That's where resilience truly begins to break down. But if you find yourself in that type of situation, know that there's hope. We can work through that problem together. This has been the Resilient Organization. Thank you for joining me for the day your organization went quiet. Join me next time for when we discuss when high performers stopped talking and the story of Jane.