📍 Welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I am Sarah Beth Herman, and today we are continuing our Human Side of Leadership series. And I have to tell you, this episode was probably one of the harder ones for me to write so far, and not because the research was difficult, but because it made me think about my own leadership over the years.
As I've gotten older, I've realized something. Some of the biggest lessons I've learned in business didn't come from the people who stayed. They came from people who left. I think every leader has had one of those moments where someone walks into your office, gets on a phone call with you, sends you an email, and they say they've accepted another position or that they're moving on, and your first reaction is complete surprise.
You're thinking, "Wait a minute, I thought everything was fine." I have had those moments. After hiring more than seven hundred people over the years, I have had employees leave for wonderful reasons. They moved closer to family, they changed careers, they stayed home with their babies. They had opportunities that were simply better for where they were in their life.
And honestly, I celebrate those things. But there have been a few departures that stayed with me. And not because I was upset that someone left, but because after they were gone, I started replaying conversations in my mind. I found myself wondering if I had missed something.
Did I dismiss a comment because I was busy? Did I assume someone was doing okay because they always smiled, they were always on it, they replied the fastest, they were the first ones in and the last ones out? Did I confuse consistency with contentment? Those are uncomfortable questions for any leader to ask, but I think they are important ones.
One thing I've learned is that resignation letters rarely tell the whole story. They're usually the ending of a story that has been unfolding for a long time. Most people don't wake up on a Tuesday morning and suddenly decide to leave a job they loved on Monday. Something has usually been changing beneath the surface for weeks or months before anyone else notices.
And that got me thinking about something much bigger than employee retention. What if this isn't really about people leaving jobs? What if it's about the moments when people quietly begin disconnecting? Because I don't think this only happens in the workplace. I think it happens in marriages. I think it happens in friendships.
It happens between parents and children, and even it happens with clients and patients. People rarely wake up one day and decide they no longer trust someone. Trust usually erodes a little bit at a time. Connection fades a little at a time, and unfortunately, we often don't recognize it until there is enough distance that repairing it becomes much harder.
As leaders, we are trained to pay attention to numbers: revenue, productivity, case acceptance, accounts receivable, employee turnover. Those things, they all matter, but I've started wondering if we spend enough time paying attention to people. Not just how they're performing, but how they're experiencing the environment that we have created.
Because here's something I don't think I fully understood early on in my career. As leaders, we are living in one reality. Our team members are often living in another. I'm thinking about payroll, growth, hiring, compliance, marketing, a difficult client conversation, strategic planning, and making sure everyone has a paycheck every two weeks.
Someone else might simply be wondering if anyone noticed how hard they worked today. Neither perspective is wrong, they're just different, and I think really good leadership begins the moment we recognize that our experience isn't the only experience happening inside of our organization. One of the things I appreciate about neuroscience is that it's giving language to things many experienced leaders have observed for years.
Researchers have found that our brains don't separate social experiences as much as we once thought they did. Feeling excluded, ignored, or dismissed isn't something we just get over. Our brains actually repeated social rejection as a threat. That's fascinating to me because it reminds us that leadership isn't simply about assigning work.
It's about creating an environment where people feel safe enough to contribute, ask questions, admit mistakes, and share ideas. Before we go any further, I wanna be careful here because this episode, it isn't about blaming leaders. I've never met a perfect leader, and I certainly haven't ever been one.
I've made mistakes that I'd handle differently today if I had the opportunity. I've missed things. I've assumed things, gotten busy, learned the hard way, and it's all part of growing. So this episode isn't about guilt. It's about awareness because if we become more aware, we become better. And I think that's really what leadership is.
It's a lifelong commitment to paying better attention to ourselves, to the people we have entrusted to lead, to the environments that we're creating every single day. So let's talk about what actually begins happening long before someone walks into your office, picks up the phone, sends you a text, sends an email with a resignation letter.
Because I don't think the resignation is where the story starts. I think that's simply the moment that we finally notice it You know, one of the things i've learned over the years that people rarely stop caring overnight. It's one of the biggest misconceptions that we have as leaders. We see someone who seems disengaged, and it's easy to assume that they just don't have the same work ethic that they used to have. We might even tell ourselves that they've become lazy or that they're simply checked out.
Sometimes that's true, but I don't think that's true as often as we think it is. More often, I think people stop believing their contribution makes a difference, and there's a really important distinction between those two things. When someone no longer believes they matter, their behavior changes. They stop raising their hand in meetings.
They stop offering new ideas. They stop asking thoughtful questions. They just do what's expected and nothing more. From the outside, it looks like disengagement, but underneath it, it may simply be discouragement, and that is a completely different problem. I remember reading Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety several years ago, and one sentence stayed with me ever since.
She describes psychological safety as an environment where people feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks. In other words, they believe they can ask questions, admit mistakes, disagree respectfully, or offer an idea without being embarrassed or punished for it. And when I first read that, I immediately stopped thinking about boardrooms, and I started thinking about everyday leadership because psychological safety doesn't only exist during formal meetings.
It exists in the way we respond when someone makes a mistake. It exists in our facial expressions when we're on camera or in person when someone disagrees with us. It also exists whether people feel interrupted every time they begin talking, or whether someone leaves a conversation feeling smaller or stronger than when they walked in.
As leaders, we often think people are listening to what we say, and I think they're watching how we respond. They're paying attention to whether we're approachable, whether we are predictable, whether they are going to be respected, even if the answer is no. And I've come to believe that consistency creates that safety, not perfection, but consistency.
People should know who they're going to get when they walk into your office, pick up a phone, send you a text, or even send you an email. If one day you're encouraging and the next day you're impatient because you're under pressure, people begin protecting themselves, and not because they're weak, but because they are human.
I know there have been seasons in my own leadership where I was carrying so much that I probably wasn't as present as I should have been. I wasn't trying to ignore anyone, and I wasn't trying to make anyone feel unimportant. I was simply overwhelmed. But here's what I've learned. Intent and impact are not the same thing.
I may have intended to communicate one thing, and someone else may have experienced something completely different. That is a very humbling realization. It is also an important one because once we understand that we stop defending our intentions and start becoming curious about other people's experiences
Because once we understand that, we stop defending our intentions and we start becoming curious about other people's experiences. Instead of saying, "Well, that's not what I meant," we start asking, " Help me understand how you experienced that." I honestly think those five words have made me a better leader.
Help me understand. Not convince me, not defend yourself, just help me understand. Another body of research that influenced me over the years is something called self-determination theory. It suggests that people tend to thrive when three basic psychological needs are being met. They need to feel capable, they need to feel trusted with some level of ownership, and they need to feel like they belong.
Think about that. Not free lunches, not ping pong tables, not bigger offices, competence, autonomy, connection. When those things begin disappearing, motivation often begins disappearing too. I've watched incredibly talented people become completely different employees depending on the environment they were working in.
The same person, same skill set, same intelligence. One environment caused them to shrink. Another environment helped them flourish. That should make every leader pause because maybe the first question isn't, "What's wrong with this employee?" Maybe it's, "What is this environment inviting out of them?" I ask myself that question a lot now, and not because I'm always right, but because I have been wrong enough to know it's worth asking.
One thing I've noticed is that leaders often spend a tremendous amount of time trying to motivate people. I've stopped believing motivation is the primary goal. I think the better question is this: What am I doing that either fuels or drains the people around me? Because every interaction does one of those two things.
Every meeting, email, every different conversation, correction, celebration. People either leave with a little more energy or a little less. That's the influence. And influence isn't reserved for CEOs. If you're listening today and you're a dentist leading a team of six, an office manager, a supervisor, a parent, a teacher, a coach, you're shaping environments every single day.
The question isn't whether you're influencing people, you are. The question is what kind of environment your influence is creating And I don't say that to create some sort of pressure. I actually find it encouraging because environments can change, leadership can grow, relationships can heal, trust can be rebuilt.
I've seen it happen. I've watched people who were ready to give up become some of the strongest leaders I've ever worked alongside because someone believed in them long enough for them to start believing in themselves. Sometimes leadership isn't about having all the right answers. Sometimes it's simply about creating a place where people feel safe enough to become who they're capable of becoming
As we wrap up today's conversation, I want to leave you with something that's been on my mind while I was preparing this episode. Leadership has changed a lot over the years.
Technology has changed. The workplace has changed. The way we communicate has changed. But people really haven't. At the end of the day, every single one of us wants to know that what we're doing matters. We wanna know we're contributing to something bigger than ourselves. We wanna know someone notices our effort.
We want to know that if we're having a hard day, there's someone who actually cares enough to ask. It isn't weakness, it's humanity. And I think sometimes as leaders, we get so focused on solving problems, improving systems, hitting production goals, increasing profitability, growing the business, and getting through the next challenge that we unintentionally forget the business has always been about people.
Businesses don't build themselves. Dental practices don't build themselves. Families don't build themselves. People build those things. Which means if we're going to spend our lives leading anything, then we should probably spend just as much time learning people as we do learning business.
If there's one challenge I leave you with this week, it's this: Before the week is over, intentionally encourage someone who isn't expecting it. And not because they've hit a milestone, not because they're leaving, not because it's an employee appreciation day. Just because they're valuable Tell them specifically what you noticed.
Tell them why they matter. You may never fully realize what that conversation means to them. I've learned over the years that people rarely remember every meeting they attend or every project they worked on, but they almost always remember the leaders who believed in them before they believed in themselves.
And if we can be that person for someone else, I think we've done something worthwhile Before we go, it's time for my That's Good moment, where we take just a minute to reflect on what we talked about today. One of the biggest takeaways for me is this. People usually don't leave because of one bad day.
More often than not, they've been slowly disconnecting for a while, and their resignation is simply the moment everyone else becomes aware of it. As leaders, we can't control every outcome, and we certainly can't keep every person forever. People are going to grow, opportunities are going to change, and seasons of life are going to come and go.
That is just part of leadership. What we can control is the kind of environment we create while people are with us. We can choose to listen a little more carefully. We can choose to slow down enough to notice when someone seems different. We can choose to ask better questions instead of making assumptions.
And maybe most importantly, we can choose to tell people they matter while we still have the opportunity. If today's episode made you think about one person on your team, one friend, one family member, or even one conversation you have been putting off, don't ignore that feeling. Reach out and have the conversation.
Encourage them. Leadership isn't always found in the big decisions. It's typically found in those ordinary moments that don't seem all that significant until years later when someone says, " You probably don't remember this, but you said something to me that changed my life."
Those moments matter, and that's what I hope you take with you this week. Before I let you go, I want to also thank you for joining me for this summer series. This is episode one thirty-three, which means
we have seven episodes left, and I'm excited about where we're going from here. Over the next several weeks, we're going to talk about trust, conflict, emotional intelligence, decision-making, and some of the invisible patterns that shape the way we lead and the way we relate to other people. Every episode is building on the one before it.
So if you've missed one, I'd encourage you to go back and listen because they really are designed to work together. When we finish this series, we will wrap up season five of No Silver Spoons, and then we'll kick off season six, where we are going to take everything we've learned about people and leadership and start applying it to building stronger businesses, healthier cultures, and more intentional lives.
I have some topics planned that I honestly can't wait to share with you. As always, thank you for spending part of your day with me. I'll never take that for granted. I hope today's conversation gave you something to think about long after this episode 📍 ends. I'll catch you on the next episode
