What Happens When Employees Stop Speaking Up

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0:27David Rice: When people stay quiet in your organization, you're not just losing contributions. You're losing the ideas, the problem-solving, and the market intelligence that never made it into the room. My guest today calls this the silence tax, and most organizations are paying it without knowing. On today's show, I'm talking with Seema Bansali from Evolve EQ Strategies about why silence isn't an individual confidence problem. It's a systemic one. We've spent years telling people to speak up, lean in, be more confident. What we haven't done is look at the environment that made silence the safer choice in the first place.

1:03David Rice: Seema went from government to the corporate world. And when she did, she went quiet for two weeks. As someone who'd been in the room was president of the United States. And eventually she asked herself, why do they hire me if not to use my voice? And that's the question organizations need to ask too. Because voice is part of what you hired. If you're not accessing it, you're not getting what you paid for. The fix isn't telling people to be braver. It's treating communication as an operational capability, putting metrics behind it, tying it to performance, and making it as real for the business as AI adoption or sales numbers.

1:37David Rice: So today we're covering what the silence tax actually costs and how to see it, why speak up advice has missed the real problem, how to build an open voice culture rather than just asking for one, and why communication needs to move from soft skill to core leadership capability. I'm David Rice. This is People Managing People. And if your organization is leaving voices out of the room, this conversation shows you what's walking out the door with them. Let's get into it. All right, Seema, welcome to the show. It's good to have you. Thanks, David. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. You've coined the phrase the silence tax, and I think that's a powerful way to frame this conversation is we usually think about people staying quiet as sort of like an individual confidence issue.

2:19And you're arguing that it's actually, the organizations actually pay a price

2:24David Rice: for that silence. I'm curious, you know, like what are they losing that they often don't realize when people don't feel emboldened to speak up? I think that the major issue is exactly what you said. People think of it as an individual problem. But when you look at how organizations operate, There's meetings for a reason. Conversations happen for a reason. When you're leaving voices out of the conversation, you're leaving out ideas, problem solving, anticipating the needs of your market, right? So you're dropping innovation and market share before you even know it's there. And I think that's a huge problem for organizations.

3:04I mean, there's lots of research on this, lots of stories that folks have told. You know, I'll share with you one story. Like when I worked at Henry Shine, we had this women's leadership network. And what we did was we actually interviewed some of our customers who were dentists and physicians. And we were talking to them. And one of them said, you know, the hand pieces you guys give us, like they're really heavy for my hands. And then the other women in the roundtable, the other female dentists, like they all like, yes. You know, they were, you know, kind of, I agree. And nobody had ever flagged that before.

3:39Just that voice wasn't in that room. So nobody had ever thought of it. And we were able to then take that back to our product teams and say, hey, here's something we need to think about. And it's small moments like that when you don't have the right voices in the room, when people aren't having the, you know, they're not talking that you don't get those innovative ideas. You don't understand what's going on in parts of your market. And so organizations, particularly now when competition is so fierce, organizations are really losing out on what could be the next great idea.

4:12David Rice: Yeah, I think like as a leader, you can only make a decision with the information that you have at the table. And I think we think of it as like a lack of contribution when people stay quiet. But I think really how we've got to think about it is it's a lack of you're missing out on information. That's the key thing here. I wonder whether organizations sort of underestimate how expensive self-censorship becomes, especially now at this time when we have these tools and everybody's using them differently. Two people in the same job will use AI completely differently. And as they're not talking to each other and learning from each other, that silence becomes pretty expensive.

4:49David Rice: We may be able to automate something that would save us a bunch of time and create openings to do new things. and that silence, it's difficult to sort of measure how much that costs, I think. But there's this sort of idea that like, you know, it's definitely a shared cost. Yeah, no, it is. You know, I mean, there's a reason that the numbers on employee engagement are important and people track them. Because when employees are engaged and they're able to communicate with one another, profits go up. It's pretty clear. I mean, it's not even, there's no speculation on it. It's a really clear line.

5:23And so I think organizations, you know, to your point, you don't know what you don't know. And so then you miss those opportunities to understand what people are doing. And it costs you.

5:34David Rice: There's a bunch of research out there that says, you know, employees whose opinions account at work, they're significantly more engaged. And then that leads to different cultural issues or, you know, retention issues when it's not happening. And it makes me just think, you know, like organizations, you have a talent pipeline, but there's also like the idea pipeline that comes about as part of this. And if you stop contributing, it just dries up. And I've been in rooms where it's like, we're facing this problem. we've got like a little task force together and everybody looks at each other and nobody feels emboldened to be the first one to go well you know what i think like this uh we just sort of stare at each other it's just like a hundred percent yeah this isn't helpful say yeah yeah you get everybody in the room and nobody wants to be the first one because the culture doesn't allow it right because the first one out is gonna something's gonna happen you're not you know you're not emboldened to speak and i will say when i i jumped from government to corporate i was quiet for the first two weeks that I was there.

6:33I mean, I'd been in the room with like presidents of the United States. So it wasn't like I was intimidated by a lot, but something initially about sort of corporate culture itself sort of had me quiet. And then I had to ask myself, why am I here? Why hire me? If I don't use my voice and I'm just a functionary, what's the point of me being here? And that was the moment where I sort of changed. But it took me time to recognize that like, my voice is a part of my product. And I don't know that organizations really understand that that's part of what they're hiring when they hire a person. You want to make sure that you're using that and accessing that.

7:12David Rice: Yeah, it's interesting you said there you've been in these other rooms and you didn't feel intimidated. It's like because for years, like the advice to women has largely been some version of like speak up, lean in, be more confident. Right. And like that's all well and good on, you know, in words, practice when you're in the moment and you're around other human beings. is different. You know, but on that idea of like being more confident, you said that that never fully explained what you were seeing. And I'm curious, you know, why do you think we've misunderstood the problem for so long? When I thought about it, I really had to look at it and think about the individual versus the system.

7:47And I think just working in government for so long, systems were something that I was used to looking at. There's this sort of concept in the law called res ipsa loquitur, which basically means simply that, but for something going wrong, this thing wouldn't have happened. So something went wrong, some negligence, something went wrong in order for this to happen. And when I look at women and where they are in the workplace, they should be 50 % of leadership. They should be speaking up just as much as men, right? If nothing went wrong, if nothing was a problem, you would see it couldn't be that all the women were not doing the right things.

8:26I just, it didn't make sense to me. And then I was at a science fair with my kids and I don't think I told you the story, but I was at a science fair with my kids and my daughter was like mouthing the words to herself. She knew the answers, but she refused to answer them. And all the girls were doing the same thing. And there was no penalty for getting the answer wrong. And the boys were like slamming down on the buzzer. They were like, you know, answering all these questions. They had a reckless abandon. I mean, I'm telling you, my son answered the question about oceans with the word Jupiter.

8:59And I was like, this is not even in the realm of possibility, but he did it anyway. And what happens was because there was no penalty, the boys were just running away with it because they just kept going and going. And the girls were not hitting the buzzer unless they knew 100 % that they had the right answer. I saw them. I saw them all saying it to themselves, writing it down. they had those answers. And so it made me think something is broader than the individual girl, the individual woman. There's something bigger going on here. And so when I look at that from a systems point of view, I thought, okay, this is not about individual confidence.

9:37Yeah. Having worked in some fields that are, you know, kind of lean more heavily towards females

9:42David Rice: being the predominant people around, you know, like take marketing, for example. One thing I just noticed in that experience was how much the environment impacts and what it teaches you, right? It's a fundamentally different leadership question when you look at it like that. And there's a lot of research out there. I think I saw one from HBR or something that has shown that confidence and competence are often conflated when it comes to leadership evaluations. And women frequently receive different feedback than men for similar behaviors. I've seen this in action, right? Things that I was rewarded for, they were not.

10:17David Rice: And so it feels like we've spent sort of years coaching individuals to survive in the environment and the systems that are in place, instead of just like rethinking the system itself or rethinking the environment, because that's a lot harder. Yeah, it's a lot harder to rethink and redesign a system. But you know, that HBR article and what you've seen empirically is really, it's really true. and they've learned this. So this is the sort of neuroscience part of this, which is the brain's really good at survival. I mean, that's its whole job is to get us to survive. And so if it knows you're going to be punished for doing something like being the first one to speak up in a meeting or, you know, if women are going to be labeled a certain way, it is going to fight you on doing that thing.

11:02It's not about confidence. Your brain has wired in those consequences and it is not going to allow you to take that risk. You've got to actually sort of change it for yourself and change the systems that tell women, hey, if you speak up, you're in trouble. Or if you're the first one to speak up in a room, people are going to say stuff to you. That's really an important factor in this. So confidence training is not going to do it because you have to really not just help women, but help the environment change so that women don't get those messages anymore. Girls aren't mouthing answers to themselves anymore because they don't feel the penalty of having the wrong answer.

11:39David Rice: It's interesting too, because it can feel like a little bit of an uphill battle because it's like you're battling against society. It's like this is the world. But I think that you can create micro environments where this is possible. And that's really where I think it has the biggest impact is on that team level. Because how much stuff that gets said, let's just take a town hall, for example. How much stuff that gets said that isn't from the CEO actually gets remembered or is really impactful. If we're honest, not a lot, right? A lot of these things tend to be kind of like for show almost. But on the team level, that's where that impacts our role.

12:19David Rice: That impacts our ability to make a difference in the workplace. And then if you can create it there, then you can start to see it other places and it'll sort of perpetuate. But I feel like that's got to be the breeding ground for it. Yeah, I think managers have an enormous amount of influence that I'm not sure, you know, they don't always feel that way because they're, especially in the middle, you're getting leadership telling you what to do. Your team is asking you a bunch of things, but they have an enormous influence on the culture of an organization. It's built one person at a time. So I think there's this feeling like if I do this, it's not going to make a difference, but it does.

12:55And so what I talk to certain managers about is like, look at the culture of your speaking culture, just for your team. What does it look like? How have you set up the meetings? Do you have repeat people speaking over and over again and you're not inculcating new voices? It happens. You know, we index towards people we know that sound like us or look like us. That's just human nature. But you can really design this in a way that allows you to have a much more open voice culture. and it also, you know, you can look at the algorithm of your speaking culture in your own part of the organization. Whose quotes are you using over and over again?

13:33You know,

13:33David Rice: it's such a simple, small thing. And I'll tell you, I'll never forget. I presented to the board diversity and inclusion when that was still a thing back in, I think it was 2019 actually. I presented to the board of directors and we had a slideshow and, you know, we did all the research And I used a quote, and I think the quote was from like Aristotle. And one of the board members came up to me afterwards and she was like, it was a great presentation. I question why you would use Aristotle in the diversity and inclusion presentation. Had you no other women, no people of color, there was nobody else you could have used.

14:12And so I'm, you know, it was a good learning lesson for me. I was like, oh my God, I hadn't even thought of it. And so when I started doing other writing presentations for our CEO or putting up quotes for my own team, I started thinking about what voices did I not put up even in those moments? Who was I using for inspiration that could be different and speak to different parts of our team? Those were things that I hadn't even looked at before. So that was an important moment for me. Embarrassing, but important. I think it's something that team members can, you know, team leaders can do.

14:43David Rice: One of the things I find fascinating about sort of the approach that you've taken is because through neuroscience rather than personality or anything like that, right, you argue that what looks like hesitation is often learned responses to perceived social risk. And that's kind of what we're talking about with the sort of environmental factors. I'm curious, though, how does that understanding, because you mentioned the power that managers have, how does that understanding change the way managers should respond when they see this? I think they should think about what's the social risk that they're creating within their part of the organization.

15:17And what I mean by that is how are they responding to people's voices? Do they hear some more than others? Do they cut people off? What's the feedback they're giving? I mean, that's a really good tell. Are you giving feedback to some people who speak up saying, bravo, you did a great job and others saying, hey, you're monopolizing the conversation? How are you talking about communication? Who are you saying it to? Those are really important ways to track what kind of culture you're creating within your part of the org. So I think if you assess the risk of speaking up for yourself or speaking up in your team, it will really help you to see what your employees might be taking, what your team might be taking back from the way that you work.

16:03And then you can design it deliberately. I think a lot of times it's just not deliberate. it. It's not like people are intentionally doing this. I want to be really clear. I don't think any of this is really intentional. It's just sort of subconscious. Hey, here's the way it's always been and we're just going to go along. There's a million things for me to think about and I'm not sure I'm tracking on this. But if you really want to have that open voice culture, you need to be intentional about creating it and understanding the culture you have now is one of the things you can do. You can even ask your team, by the way.

16:31The other thing I really like is anonymous as surveys for the team. Do you feel safe speaking up? Or, you know, safety is kind of a hard word. So what are the biggest challenges in speaking up? That might be a better way to do it, right? So you can ask your team outright, what are they feeling? What are they sensing? How are they managing it?

16:48David Rice: You care about your team, but caring and actually knowing how they're doing are two different things. Most managers find out someone is burned out or checked out when it's already too late. The conversation that might have changed things never happened. Team Pulse gives leaders a simple weekly check-in that takes less than five minutes and surfaces what your team won't say out loud yet. No guessing, no surprises, just real insight every week. Try it free for 30 days at teampulse.us. It's natural, right? Like, if you feel like there's going to be a social consequence, you're just going to self-evident.

17:25David Rice: It's a survival. There's decades of research on psychological safety that shows that people speak up more when they believe mistakes and dissent aren't necessarily going to be punished. It has nothing to do with confidence in a lot of ways. And I think that's good because we've got to kind of reframe courage. It's courageous to speak up, but I've also been amongst people who are never afraid to speak up but also don't say anything. Oh, that's so good. Yes. And then there's this perceived value about that person. But I'm like, he doesn't actually offer anything, though, of real value. Why is that considered value?

18:04David Rice: It's all vanity. I don't think courage should be down to something that is essentially a personality trait. It's something you've got to encourage or suppress from everybody, no matter what their personality traits are. And I think the way that they choose to communicate and the way that their traits are will then inherently have value because they'll bring a different perspective and a different way of saying it. I do think courage is a little overrated in this. I mean, part of it is the reason I said, because this is neuroscience. There's no courage that overcomes neuroscience. That's not a thing.

18:35You know, you have to decide. But you're right. There are people who speak up, they get rewarded for speaking up, and they really never contribute anything meaningful. And here I want to give a little shout out to the introverts out there because there are plenty of introverts who have a lot to say, who have really important ideas, but you don't hear from them because you've created a culture where the person who speaks up fast and most wins. And that doesn't actually lead you to your best results. It's an easy default system, but it doesn't lead you to the best results. So that again is why I say designing it really matters because you can then access people by saying, you know, I'm an extrovert by nature.

19:13And I had introverts on my team. And one of them,

19:16David Rice: I was like, hey, you know what, why don't you present on the two o 'clock today? And I thought I was doing them such a like big solid because I was like, you'll be out there and visible. And I'm going to give this junior team member visibility. And she was like, two o 'clock today, it's like 11. I'm not ready for this. I don't, you know, she had like a whole panic attack. and she said, this is not how introverts speak up. And I was like, oh, I didn't know that. That was really good learning for me to say, I had to design this. If I truly wanted to give her visibility, I needed to give her more time and put her in a slot where she was ready and prepared and able to answer the questions that were coming her way.

19:57That was a really important moment for me where I saw that my instinct and my system design was not really inclusive of everybody. And I think a lot of us do that. We just don't realize we're doing it.

20:08David Rice: Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. As organizations make bigger investments in AI, we're constantly hearing that things like human judgment, creativity, diverse perspectives, right? All these things become more valuable. If that's true, though, there's bound to be sort of a cost associated with that not happening. So I'm curious what happens when some of those perspectives never make it into the room in the first place. Yeah, AI is such an interesting topic when it comes to voice. You know, one of the things I really worry about, I think the World Economic Forum did a study and came out with the stats.

20:43Like, it's going to be 9.6%, I think, of women's jobs will be eliminated by AI. And that's not to scare people. It's just, it's three times more than men, was the stat that I was really more concerned with. And I thought, those women, on paper, you look at their roles and you say, oh, AI can do this. But you have no idea what's happening behind the scenes. And you alluded to it earlier when we were talking about AI, about people are figuring out ways to do things. And if they're not communicating, we're losing out. The women whose roles might be getting eliminated, you have no idea what they're doing behind the scenes.

21:18Did they tweak a process? Did they talk to a customer in a certain way that ended up with a new event? But because women's voices aren't often heard, when you don't know those things, you might be eliminating far more than the roll-on paper. And you don't even recognize it. You don't even know. So that's one piece of the sort of AI conversation. But the other piece is people may really know how to implement AI in a way that works, that will be adopted, and that will make sense for the customer, will make sense for the team. And if you're not talking to them, then you are missing out on potentially a wealth of information and knowledge of how to do this in a way that works.

21:58And I'm always concerned that we move so fast on certain things, but we forget to bring the people along with us. And they're what matters in the conversation. So I really think that this is an opportunity. I look at AI as an opportunity to really think about design, to really think about how are you going to work with the team and create a culture that is different.

22:22David Rice: It's interesting because we're in this time where everybody's like walked away from DEI and there's this perception of it. But I think what this highlights and what AI sort of brings to the table, because, you know, what is it learning on? It's learning on the data that we generate, right? And so it actually kind of underscores the need for it more so, so that we can listen better and find voices of people who, quite frankly, it hasn't yet learned from. So they can get a more complete picture of how to do things or how we work as teams and when we're at our best, right? Like, what's the best judgment?

22:59Yeah. You know, that's something that's really concerning about AI in some ways. You're right. It's learned on voices and what voices has it taken in. I remember I had like a chat fight, you know, chat and I were going back and forth on something. And I was like, have you considered these sources chat? And chat was like, well, I'm trained on these. And I hadn't, you know, no, it's true that I'm trained on a particular type of voice and not others. And I thought, OK, because the majority of what you're trained on is what's out there. And some of what's out there is not reflective of everybody. So, I mean, I think that that is going to be a big part of the conversation with AI.

23:36and this is a moment, if inclusion is done right, it's all the voices. It's not one voice celebrated over another. It's not lifting up one group and demolishing another. It's all the voices so that you have real clarity about what's happening in your organization, what's happening in the marketplace and what you need to do with it.

23:54David Rice: Yes. I was saying to somebody like, they've never really used AI before. I was a member of my family. And I was saying to her, like, don't let it live a privileged life. Tell it that it's wrong all the time. I love that. Don't let it live a life of privilege. Like you can't just take it at its word and then like praise it or think that it's a great thing. Like you should be kind of combative with it and make its life difficult. Cause that's how it learns. What's so interesting about that, right? Is that you need somebody on the other side to check. It's a check and balance with AI, just like you would with the person.

24:29In some ways, you have that check and balance. And if you are silencing all the people in the room who are going to be able to do that, what happens? You're just going to run on this algorithm that may or may not be accurate. Nobody checked it. People get checked all the time. That's a part of the human experience. I love that. Don't let them live a privileged life. Yeah.

24:52David Rice: It's tempting to treat a lot of this as like something that individual employees have to solve, right? Like we've been talking about with managers, you know, they have a great deal of influence, probably more than they realize in a lot of cases about how this plays out. I'm curious, what are leaders unintentionally doing, in your opinion right now, that reinforces silence instead of participation? Yeah, I think we're doing a few things that reinforces silence. Obviously, I've said it before, I don't think we're really thinking about silence. I think we're thinking about getting the job done. And sometimes, and I saw this particularly during COVID, sometimes when we think about getting the job done, we don't want voices in the room because it's harder.

25:34It impedes us when people talk and people say things, but you have a much better product at the end of the day. And so organizations that really tapped into a lot of people during COVID had the tough conversations, I think they ended up doing better than folks who just quieted all the voices and said, we're going in one direction and that's it. Nobody has to speak. So I think you have to be thoughtful around that. But I think when they're not, especially around AI, there is a real fear that if employees speak up, it will create more fear in the organization. Right. I mean, there's this whole idea that like, we're just going to go ahead with it.

26:13We can't talk to the team about AI because if we do, they're just going to be talking about worried about their jobs. And that's not untrue, but you will get gems out of them talking to them about it. You will understand exactly how you can implement this change without scaring your team, without silencing the team. And I think when people look back at this time, they're going to say to themselves, did I really implement this change in the best way? Or did I run and did I run scared and say, I can't hear from the team right now because I'm not sure what they're going to bring to me. I think that's going to be a real mark of who's successful in the AI conversation and who's not successful.

26:56You know, if you have those conversations with your team early and often, and you can implement while you're doing it. I understand. Look, I worked in the office of the CEO. I understand the pressure of quarterly results. I get it. I know what your board is telling you right now. So I get it. But I also think there's a way to do this where you are having those conversations up front and really talking to the team. And then I have this acronym for it's called CARE, right? So the first part of it is like conversations with the team. That's the first thing you do when you're trying to get the AI models in.

27:28Let's hear from them and understand what are the roles? What are they worried about? What do they think it takes to implement. When you have people's buy-in early on, they're going to want to do it because they're part of the contributing force to how you're doing it. So they're going to want to do it. And then I think there's other steps that you can take along the way that will bring your team along.

27:49David Rice: Couldn't agree more. Like the conversation of like, you know, what is this technology? What are we using it for? All that. Those are, they're micro interactions, but they add up to be a lot more than that, right? Managers shape meeting culture, for example, more than any policy ever will. And we know from the research that's been done out there, managers account for like 70 % of the variance in employee engagement at the team level. So while we talk a lot about mission statements when we talk about culture, I think it's built through those micro interactions that you might forget at the end of the day, but they remember who got interrupted, who was invited into the discussion, who gets acknowledged, those small moments, they compound over time.

28:33David Rice: And just having the conversation around this thing that is so, I mean, it's like, it's so flammable, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It helps build your overall cultural and approach, like how your culture fuels the approach to AI and the comfort with the technology amongst your employees. Yeah, you know, I have never found that silencing people led us to the best results in anywhere for anything, right? It just never ended up being the right way to do something because, and I think managers, you're right. First, I want to say leadership has to empower their managers. There's a lot of times leadership doesn't do that.

29:12And that's a mistake. So number one, empower your managers to have the conversations with their team. And then number two, managers should feel like they should and could do this. And it will make a difference. It makes a difference to their team when their leadership engages them in thoughtful conversation around what's happening. and it's funny I remember doing roundtables after George Floyd which again I understand that the moment is different but the principles are the same which is you have something in the organization there is some flammability to use your word around it and what do you do do you ignore it because it'll go away or do you actually tap in and say okay what's happening and what can we do as an organization to be better.

29:58And I think it's very clear who wins when they do that, right? Everybody wins when you have that conversation with them and managers too. It's time to have the one-on-ones, do the roundtables, have the conversation, find out what's going on. Your team is probably scared and also ready. And it's a strange thing to be, but like they're probably scared for their roles, but they're probably also got a lot of innovation in there that they can offer you on the AI front that you may not be hearing.

30:25David Rice: This is one of the things I like about you. work, right? Like you don't stop at identifying the problem. And you mentioned previously the care framework as a way to help leaders navigate change, especially around AI, you know, in a way that actually brings people into the conversation more. So I'm curious if you can walk us through that framework a little bit and why each step matters. Yeah, for sure. So it starts with conversations. I said that earlier, right? Let's have the conversations with our team. Let's engage them early. And it matters because when you do that, they're invested. First of all, they feel herd.

30:57You're creating some level of safety for them.

30:59David Rice: And they feel invested. They are part of the organization. It's not being handed to them. They're now a part of the conversation. That's a big change. When people feel invested in what's going on, they're more likely to support whatever it is you're rolling out. So that's one. The A is for articulate the strategy. And that's one thing I think companies have been reticent to do, which is what's the strategic imperative behind AI? Why are we adopting it? Where are we adopting it? What do we plan to do with it? A lot of times it's just coming in and people are saying, hey, we're adopting AI. Here's what we're doing.

31:33Why? What do you hope it will achieve in the organization? Because if you tell me that, then I can be on board with that. I can support that. If I know what you want, want to achieve and want to create, then I can support that. But if I don't know that, then it just feels like it's something being handed to me. And I'm less likely to engage with something that I fear. So first have the conversation, then articulate the strategy, then sort of reveal the consequences. And this is probably the hardest one that is going to be there. But be honest with your team. What is this going to mean for them?

32:04What is it going to mean for them? Because when you tell them that, look, people are people. The gossip mill will always be there. I heard from this person that that entire team is getting eliminated. It is far worse what people are talking about than what you're actually going to say to them. I promise you. The undercurrents of the organization, far worse. So squelch the noise, give them the real talk, let them know exactly what's happening so that they can move forward. Okay, you have to do it in certain ways, working with the HR team, I totally get that, but the real talk is going to help the team get calibrated instead of having all the side hustle conversations that are absolutely going on in your organization

32:45David Rice: at this moment. So that's the R and that's why it's really important. And then E is really about evolving the team. getting them to the point where they are either they're upskilling on AI or they're reskilling because, you know, their role has transitioned and you want them to do something else. But evolve the team to be the type of team that understands and can keep AI as part of the tools that they use. Instead of looking at it as like an enemy, it is something that is going to enhance their work experience or, you know, help the business, which ultimately is good for them at the end of the day.

33:21So I think if you use each step, you're doing the psychological safety bit, you're doing the innovation bit for yourself, and then you're also doing the adoption, the change adoption. And all of that helps you to move AI to a place where then it's just part of the everyday.

33:37David Rice: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think the biggest problem we've seen in the last two years is too many orgs have started with implementation. That was their first letter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you announce a change before people have made sense of it, and then they've got to live through it, right? And there's all this change management discussion going on. But one of the things I think we can consistently find, employees will adopt a change when they understand the business reason and their personal impact. Those are the two things that they are just naturally interested in, right? Because is this place going to exist and what does it mean for me?

34:11David Rice: Those are two questions you can't blame anybody for asking, right? And so I don't think people do resist change because it's new. I think they resist uncertainty because they don't know what it means for them. That's what we've seen time and time again. Part of what I do is education, and I do a change management education. And what I talk about there is there is a neuroscience behind change. You know, change destabilizes us a little bit. And the thing, and it sort of puts the, I don't want to get too nerdy out here, puts the amygdala online. Get nerdy, I love it. Get there. I'll do it. The amygdala is online.

34:45So it's like survival mechanism, right? We're in fight or flight right now. And the thing that changes that is when you engage people's prefrontal cortex.

34:55David Rice: And the only thing that'll do that is information. When you give them information, they can think through, process, understand, have conversations about, they move from fight or flight to thought. And that's where you want people to be. And so you're totally right. Because otherwise what you're doing, if you keep them in that state of fight or flight, you're going to burn them all out. Nobody's going to adopt the change in the way that you want because they're stressed. They're burnt out. They may not even, you may say you're going to be doing less and I'm still burnt out because I'm sitting here thinking about whether or not I'm surviving.

35:26That's where my brain went. That's exactly where I went. So give me the information to help me not burn out, to help me actually adopt this.

35:33David Rice: And the same goes for you as a leader, right? So if you're not engaged in thought and you're in fight or flight mode, because whether it's, you know, you've got pressure from the board or employees are not reacting well and performance has taken a turn, now you're in fight or flight mode, you're having the same problem. And then you're burnt out. Whereas all of this could have been avoided by simply, let's get together, have conversation, let's think through this together. It would make the whole situation a lot easier, even though there's some discomfort that's attached to it. That's such a great point about how leaders access this information and what they do.

36:11And they do get burned out. I mean, you know, I can definitely tell you from my role in leadership that there are moments where you face that. And I think what we have to do is stop fearing team members. Stop fearing the response of the team and start integrating it. I have never known, I say this to my kids all the time,

36:29David Rice: And when they hear this podcast, they'll be angry that I say to them all the time, you know, shame lives in shadows. So bring it out. Let's just talk about it openly, because once you do that, it makes it much easier to handle. When you leave it to the gossip train and to the shadows and to everything else, everything becomes much, much harder. So even if there's a little discomfort in it, bring it out. Have the conversation. I promise it will be much better for you than if you just sweep it right under the rug and keep going. If you were to fast forward five years, I'm curious, you know, what's one assumption organizations currently have about leadership or communication that you think will look back on and realize that was holding us back all along?

37:13That it is fully about natural instinct. It's a great question. That it is only about natural ability. We think leadership is about natural ability. We think voices are about natural ability. And it's never really been about that. It is about the environment you create. It is about how you develop your leadership. You know, one of the reasons I like talking about having an open voice culture is because you will naturally develop your team in that moment. The more people have the opportunity to speak up, the more they hone that craft, the better they are. and I think believing that people come ready made is a mistake.

37:54It's not just natural ability. It's natural ability means opportunity, means preparation. All of those things are things we can develop in people. So I think when people look back and they thought it's just natural ability, they will understand that that's not really the case. I think the L &D leaders who listen to this are going, yeah, exactly right. It's not just about the natural ability. It's about the environments we create for people.

38:17David Rice: A hundred percent. You said their natural ability and I was thinking about it with leaders. I was thinking about how some people think, well, you know, he's very charismatic. He just has a charisma about him. And I'm like, okay, yeah. But like, is that not learned as well? Because he's been allowed in environments to be himself, to come alive in moments and talk freely. He's learned what worked and what didn't work and all of those things. He's gone through the painful lessons of probably humiliated himself a few times. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like any great comedian, right? You've got to test out what gets laughs and where your timing works and where it doesn't.

38:58David Rice: You've got to shop ideas. And there's this idea that that comes naturally for some people. And I'm like, I don't know that it does, actually. I think that it comes out of the environment that you put yourself in or that you're exposed to and how that helps you refine your skills and your ability to communicate in those moments. I think it's like, can we make communication a little bit less of a soft skill and more of an operational capability for everybody? Yeah, I mean, first of all, you have to value it. It's not a soft skill. It is clearly tied to profits and end results. I mean, it's definitely not a soft skill.

39:34So by the way, I think soft skills are real skills too. but you know, I do think put some metrics behind it, right? And when you do that, when you put it as a value, when you put it as a goal, if it's part of your core leadership capabilities, something that we have in our organization, I was a, my old organization, I was a part of developing where core leadership capabilities, when you put those in there and you tie them to actual performance, two things happen. One, you're aware that this is something I need to develop and two, the organization needs to help you develop it. because we're saying this is a valuable skill.

40:10This is something that we want for the folks in our organization. We think it is going to have an intense ROI. And so we're going to focus on it. And when you do that, you give people the opportunity to build and develop in a way that they may not have otherwise. And organizations did this with lots of things back in the day, and they do it now with things like wellness, where you put it in the MBO goals of your leaders. How much wellness do you talk about? Or is your team burnt out? There's lots of things that they do this with. When you give it a hard metric like that, you are going to see people engage in it because you have to treat it like you treat anything else.

40:48You know, like you treat sales numbers. This is going to be important for our organization. Then let's put it in there and make it important for the organization. I'm sure people are doing that with AI right now, right? AI adoption, how's your team utilization, right? They're going to put it in the MBO goals and make it something that's important. Well, that's what it takes. That's what it takes for people to feel that way.

41:08David Rice: No, absolutely. Yeah. You've got to make it real for the business in order for it to show up in the business, right? Yeah. Yeah. Seema, thank you for coming on the show today. It's a really good conversation. I loved it. I loved it. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Well, listeners, until next time, be sure to head on over to peoplemanagepeople.com forward slash subscribe. Get signed up for the newsletter. You'll get this podcast and a whole lot more directly in your inbox. Check out our AI Signal briefings. is an executive brief every week on the latest things that you need to know regarding AI and what you need to be thinking about.

41:38David Rice: And until next time, don't be afraid to have the conversations.