When Silence Isn't Golden

In my last few months at Accenture, there was a specific incident when someone on my team didn't come to me.

They went over my head instead.

My first instinct was to feel undermined. Why hadn't they just spoken to me directly?

We worked closely. I was (by my own estimate) extremely easy to talk to. You could have asked me, and I'd have told you so myself. Surely if something wasn't working, they'd say so.

Except I already knew, if I was honest with myself, why they might not. People had told me before (carefully, the way you tell someone something they might not want to hear) that I could come across as intimidating.

I was intensely focused on results. Getting to the outcome, efficiently and well, was the thing I measured myself by. I assumed everyone around me experienced that focus the way I did: we were all about driving to get to an outcome. Right?

Of course I'd heard the feedback that I could be scary, but I brushed it off. It wasn't actually a blocker. In fact, it could be useful sometimes.

Then I came face-to-face with what it actually meant when someone went around me.

Once the sting of that wore off, a harder question replaced it:

what had I actually built, that made not telling me something directly feel like the safer option?

The honest answer wasn't just that I was intimidating in the abstract. It was more specific than that. I'd been busy, never really slowing down to engage on anything I didn't consider material to progress.

Moving fast through a full list.

Checking things off.

Present in most meetings and half-absent from all of them.

If there had been a line item on that list for "ask how everyone's actually doing," I probably would have ticked it and moved straight on to the next one.

Somewhere over those last few months, my interactions with people had narrowed down to tasks: status updates, deadlines, did-you-get-to-that. Add that to a reputation for intensity, and the maths wasn't complicated. If getting through to me already felt like a test of confidence, and getting through to me now meant competing with a checklist, why would anyone bring me the harder, messier thing that didn't fit into either?

So when something wasn't working, nobody brought it to me. They worked around me instead.

That's the part that still irks a bit.

It wasn't about my team lacking the courage to speak up. I'd made it clear - partly through the person I'd built a reputation for being, partly through a hundred small, unremarkable moments of being too rushed to really listen - that bringing something to me would cost more than it was worth. I hadn't built the kind of relationship where a hard conversation had anywhere to land.

This is the part of psychological safety leaders don't always want to hear: trust is rarely broken by one dramatic moment. Nobody has to shout at someone, dismiss them, or punish them for speaking up to teach a team that speaking up isn't worth it. A reputation for intensity does some of that work in the background, before anyone says a word. Being too busy to slow down does the rest. Enough of both, and people recalibrate what's safe to bring to you and what isn't. We're raised on the idea that silence is golden. In a leadership room, it's usually just expensive. The room doesn't go silent all at once. It just learns, gradually, that silence is easier.

And the evidence usually isn't silence itself, it's also what people do instead of speaking to you. They escalate. They route around you. They tell someone else first. Sometimes it's not even that active. They just stop bringing their best thinking, because they've already decided it won't go anywhere. If you're paying attention, that's its own type of information. It's your team telling you, in the only way that feels available to them, exactly how safe they currently feel.

Once I saw it that way, the fix wasn't a better meeting cadence or a new communication protocol. It was slower and less comfortable than that. I had to admit that somewhere along the way, relationships had become secondary to output, and that the people doing the work had become a means to the outcome.

That realisation is part of why I eventually left consulting for coaching. I still care about ambition and results, but what changed was putting relationship and psychological safety first, instead of only getting to them once the deadline was handled.

It's not a habit I've fully broken, if I'm honest. My friends still joke that I'll message with a question before I've said hello. I go straight for whatever I need, then do a hasty double-back to ask how everyone's actually doing. Old wiring dies hard. But at least I know it's there now, which means I catch myself before I hit send more often than I used to.

On the boards I chair now, I say this outright: I want you to disagree with me. I want you to speak up, because your opinion counts (and I genuinely mean it every time I say it). Some of that is good governance. Some of it is a way of making up, in the rooms I lead now, for all the people I didn't fully hear back then.

I still think about my teams at Accenture, and how it all pushed me towards the decisions I knew I needed to make. I'm also (apparently) still intimidating - a couple of people told me as much just this week. I try to tone it down these days, but I will always prefer being direct, and that sometimes gets lost in translation.

What I'm more interested in now is a simpler, harder question:

If something isn't working right now, who would actually tell me? And what does the honest answer say about the room I've built?