Your best employee has not disagreed with you in months. That might feel like alignment. It might also be the clearest warning sign in the room.
Good employees do not go quiet because they suddenly have nothing to contribute. They go quiet when experience teaches them that honesty creates more trouble than value. Sometimes the consequence is obvious. More often, it arrives through body language, defensiveness, dismissal, exclusion, or the label nobody wants attached to their name: “not a team player.”
In this episode of Leadership Sandbox™, Tammy J. Bond examines how leaders manufacture silence without ever raising their voice. You will learn the three behaviors that cause employees to stop speaking up, why healthy teams need respectful friction, and how a three-second pause can change the cost of candor.
You will also get the exact question to ask the high performer who has gone quiet. But fair warning: asking it is the easy part. The real leadership test is whether your face, body, and response prove that you can handle the answer.