Silencing Signal: Creating an Echo Chamber for Platitudes and Apathy
Firing the stressed won't remove stressors. It'll kill your company.
Growth requires understanding, true, robust understanding. Understanding requires perspective & data, meaningful signals and contextual cues that help you grasp not just the what, but the why.
Organizations that seek to grow must understand their full truth, the good and the unflattering alike. Yes, there is a requisite amount of optimism for any growth aspirations, but there must also be an equal amount of realism. We can’t reach the mountaintop if we don’t understand the mountain.
We also can’t create a positive culture if we don’t understand the forces affecting our people and care enough to create change. It is easy to treat those raising the alarms as the cause of the fire, but that is rarely the case.
So, when a story recently broke that a company chose to fire all of its employees who expressed that they were stressed, too many of us were not surprised. Of course they did. It is far easier to remove the voices that warn of problems than to solve the issues themselves. It is far easier to silence the signal than to act on it.
Organizations like that die.
Silencing the signal creates an echo chamber for platitudes and apathy. Survivors learn to make peace at the expense of progress, to preserve their paycheck over improving the ecosystem. In the process, the organization will atrophy. The best talent will leave or no longer over-perform. Toxic survivalistic instincts will flourish. Problems will continually be swept under the rug until the entire operation trips over itself.
If you are a senior leader who can’t handle uncomfortable truths, here’s one more: you will never reach whatever milestone you’re seeking until you stop focusing on feeling good about yourself and start focusing on doing good for others. Reality and truth will always catch up, even if you refuse to listen.