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RECOGNIZE THE UNSAID

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In every story, there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Until we have spoken the unspoken, we have not come to the heart of the story.

—J.M. Coetzee, Foe: A Novel

Some years ago, I worked for a company that was merging five companies. The new company was spread across two countries and four states. The leadership’s main focus was to maintain its monthly recurring revenue, and employee engagement was low on its list of priorities. As you can imagine, mistrust set in and communication breakdowns became rampant. Frontline managers failed to communicate status updates around the merger, so fear set in quickly. People I knew confessed to me their concerns about being laid off. Meanwhile, customers told me they felt pressured to take advantage of new product offerings. My conversations with these folks helped me realize that if the leadership team had actively listened to what people had to say regarding the merger from the start, much of the fear and stress they were experiencing could have been avoided.

When the merger was completed, people were laid off and many long-term customers left—or else shifted much of their spending. Although the layoffs may have been inevitable given new organizational priorities, the entire process could have been much more humane and less hurtful. In this case, a failure to listen hurt the organization, its employees, its customers, and many other stakeholders.

After over thirty thousand engagement survey responses and years of working with organizations to transform employee engagement, here’s what I’ve seen over and over: When you know how to listen, people will tell you exactly what they need to bring their full selves to work. The Cycle of Active Listening is how I help organizations move organizational culture forward, and it always starts with a first step: recognizing the unsaid.

When you know how to listen, people will tell you exactly what they need to bring their full selves to work.

Recognizing the unsaid means paying attention, so that you can pick up on important signals—like someone’s facial expressions, body language, or tone of voice. You take time to sense what someone might be thinking but hasn’t revealed out loud yet. When you make an effort to notice when someone is holding back their feelings, opinions, or ideas, you’re recognizing the unsaid.

Here are some examples of things people might be thinking, but not saying out loud, where you work:

• “I wish management would show me that I’m valued here because I feel like I’m just a number to them.”

• “The rapid pace of change seems disorganized, and it’s stressing me out.”

• “I feel like my team doesn’t like me and excludes me from important conversations.”

• “I’m your customer, but instead of providing what we need, you keep trying to sell us what we don’t want.”

• “The way you miss deadlines, or reschedule calls all the time, makes me think I’m not an important client to you.”

Of course, recognizing the unsaid also comes into play outside of work. When it comes time to send our kiddos off to college, I feel like I speak for most parents when I say we always have an input or two—whether that’s about the location, distance, majors offered, or something else. Like most families, we went through the process with my daughter of choosing which college she wanted to go to, attending campus tours, and doing just about everything we could to ensure that she was making the best decision for herself. My husband had suggested a school to her that he thought would be a good fit, and in the end, that was the college she chose. She said she genuinely wanted to go, and we were rooting for her all the way.

Whether she made the decision to attend this college in haste or due to the unnoticed pressure of wanting to make a decision based on the opinion of someone she admired, things didn’t pan out for her in the way that any of us had hoped. After a while, she became miserable, and it started to take a toll on her mental health. As her mama, I noticed very soon that something wasn’t right. I could tell she wasn’t happy, but when I asked her about it, she insisted on putting on a brave face. Meanwhile, she kept trying to “sit in the muck,” as I call it, but nothing about the situation ever became positive. She didn’t like the atmosphere or how she had to travel the entire day to get home. Eventually, she found the courage to tell me she wanted to transfer to a school near our house. When she said she needed to make her own decision about finding a new school to attend, I felt so relieved that she’d found the courage to speak up and move somewhere she felt she could succeed, instead of staying where she was out of a sense of obligation to her dad and me.

As always, my children teach me just as much as I teach them—in my daughter’s case, she reminded me of the power we have to recognize the unsaid when those around us are struggling or trying to send us a message. Some examples: the customer who hasn’t been calling in new orders, the prospect who stops returning our calls, the coworker who has stopped contributing in meetings, the team member who has the choice to work from home or the office but only ever works from home.

The experience also made me reflect on how often people lose their voices when they start a new job. Organizational leadership steers the ship in the direction everyone must go, and people stay quiet to blend in, get along, and get ahead. This is even more likely to happen if someone has a marginalized identity and is worried about the potential negative repercussions of speaking up. If we don’t do our part, these are the same folks who are most likely to leave their jobs, seemingly out of the blue—although if we’d recognized the unsaid, we’d have noticed the signs all along.

I regularly run live events where I hold space to support people as they harness the power of listening inside their organizations. During one such event, one attendee revealed there was a huge amount of frustration brewing at her company internally. Despite her leadership team setting up a roundtable for employees to talk openly about issues related to race, prejudice, and other important topics—a space they assumed would feel safe—they were met with a tumbleweed moment. The leadership team thought employees would feel empowered to speak up, but nobody seemed to want to contribute.

I reminded the attendee that progress doesn’t happen overnight. Although she hadn’t realized it, the tumbleweed moment was an opportunity for her to recognize the unsaid. If the leadership team had been actively listening, the message would have been clear: employees were wary about speaking up. Inviting people to a roundtable discussion wasn’t enough. Instead, the leadership team needed to work to build people’s trust every day—for example, meeting more regularly with employees one-on-one instead of in large groups, demonstrating a consistent willingness to confront hard truths, and using tough feedback to make changes. If you can show that you value all opinions, all the time—and not just the ones people think you want to hear—people will feel safer speaking up in the long term.

If you’re interested in transforming your ability to recognize the unsaid, you must start by cultivating a listening mindset that puts you in the best position to uncover what’s true.

This advice holds true no matter your position at work. If you’re interested in transforming your ability to recognize the unsaid, you must start by cultivating a listening mindset that puts you in the best position to uncover what’s true—and that can require patience.

Much like my daughter, we also need to recognize what we’re personally leaving unsaid. If you work for a company with a culture that supports you to express yourself, and yet you don’t speak up when something feels amiss, take the time to listen to what your gut is telling you before speaking to someone you trust. By taking the time to go inward, you’ll become more aware of what you personally need to thrive at work. You just have to be willing to listen closely, so that you can understand your needs and act accordingly.

Cultivate a Listening Mindset

After reading many nonfiction books on communication, I’ve noticed that the majority focus on communicating as a way of securing what we want from others. In the context of listening, that means only listening to someone to create an outcome that works best for us—for example, a manager who only listens to an employee to determine how to drive greater productivity, a senior leader who only listens to a manager to figure out why their turnover is so high, a salesperson who only listens to a customer to figure out how to get them to buy. The problem with these examples is that they reflect a transactional listening mindset that does little to recognize the unsaid.

Recently, I was in conversation with Sarah, who explained she’d discovered that a few employees at her job had grown so unhappy they had decided to stage a walkout. The employees felt underpaid, unheard, and unappreciated. Sarah went to her manager, Kate, in confidence to let her know what was about to happen, without naming names, so Kate knew there were multiple people who felt this way. To Sarah’s alarm, Kate became more concerned about who was going to walk out and how it was going to affect her than about actually fixing the issue at its root.

After I thought about what Sarah had shared with me, I realized there were a few things Kate could have done instead, beginning with recognizing the unsaid. Employees weren’t coming to Kate directly to voice their concerns, but their proposed course of action spoke volumes. She could have faced the uncomfortable truth that people were unhappy and agreed to hear them out. Instead, she chose to focus on her ego—not on what people needed. If she had leaned into the discomfort of recognizing the unsaid, she would have cultivated more curiosity around understanding what motivated them, without being so focused on who was involved. The decision to seek out blame prevented her from finding a positive resolution.

Recognizing the unsaid often starts with facing the unknown and being prepared for whatever the truth may reveal.

Recognizing the unsaid often starts with facing the unknown and being prepared for whatever the truth may reveal—including when we need to take action in response to what we’ve learned. The temptation can be to bury our heads in the sand because we don’t feel prepared to deal with what could be an inconvenient reality. Even when the truth shines a light on where we need to focus our time and energy next, it might not seem timely or convenient to do so. One lesson I’ve seen many organizations learn the hard way is the danger of avoiding feedback that’s ill-timed. I’m rarely surprised to hear leaders express how much they regret not taking the time to address that same feedback earlier.

In the course of one of the employee listening sessions I facilitate for clients, one participant recounted a disappointing story. During Black History Month, she decided to contact Human Resources to share her opinion on the lack of support in her company for people of color. She provided some historical context, as well as a list of professionals who could conduct workshops and training on specific topics. Unfortunately, she said, the response she received from HR was full of excuses about why the company hadn’t yet made a statement of unity with Black staff members, who were feeling the strain. While the company did have an affirmative action plan, it was a plan and not a statement. When I asked her how this interaction made her feel, she said, “Invisible.” She felt underappreciated, as though her opinion and voice didn’t matter. “To this day, nothing has been addressed or changed.”

This is at the heart of why active listening at work is so critical. This team member already harbored some anger around how her work-place did not take a stand. The HR department then missed a huge opportunity to not only recognize that this employee was speaking up on behalf of others who were struggling, but also improve the company’s culture as a whole. The department’s lack of acknowledgment left her feeling even angrier and more misunderstood.

Recognizing the unsaid can be an uncomfortable experience, but there is necessary growth in that discomfort. We must enter into every listening interaction with a desire to know the truth—and without assuming what that truth might be. Not only that, but once we discover the truth, we must be prepared to act on it.

Recognizing the unsaid can be an uncomfortable experience, but there is necessary growth in that discomfort.

Next time you’re working to recognize the unsaid, take a moment to pause and reflect on how you feel. Can you keep an objective mind and not take things personally? The more you do this, the more you’ll build confidence in your ability to detect nonverbal cues from others that help you piece together what’s happening beneath the surface.

Detect Nonverbal Cues

During a LinkedIn Live discussion I hosted on the importance of listening, my guest, author Chris Spurvey, described what he thinks of as the crux of listening: “You have got to go into an interaction with the intention of getting to know someone. We all have our intuition and our sixth sense, and so inherently start to pick up on cues, whether the other person’s making eye contact or not.”¹

That intuition and sixth sense Chris mentioned can help us detect the nonverbal messages people send us to improve our listening. At the same time, we have to be careful not to make assumptions because other people’s cues may differ from ours. We must pursue curiosity and take the time to go deeper in order to figure out if our intuition is pointing us in the right direction, or we need more insight into someone else’s lived experiences. This is when we begin to seek to understand, which we’ll talk some more about in the next chapter.

Figure 2. Nonverbal Cues to Look For

In figure 2, you can find a list of nonverbal cues to look for. Remember, these cues often tell us much more than words alone ever can. Which nonverbal cues have you noticed in the past? Which will you look for in the future?

A while back, I watched the touching movie Coda, which is centered on a young woman whose parents and brothers are deaf. She serves as their interpreter in everything they do. As she pursues her gift of singing, she performs in the choir at school, and her family sits in the audience, hearing nothing. They don’t possess the biological ability to hear her voice, but they do look around at everyone’s faces and body language and discern happiness, tears of joy, clapping, and laughter. This was a powerful scene, and while I sat there feeling sad for them that they couldn’t hear her wonderful voice, I also knew they had picked up on things that most people in the room hadn’t even noticed.

Later in the movie, the daughter auditions at a music school, and her parents sneak in to watch from the mezzanine. Three people are in the evaluation seats, and all of a sudden, the daughter decides to sing directly up to her parents and incorporates sign language. They are thrilled, and the evaluators, wondering what’s happening, turn to look where her eyes are gazing, see her family above, and immediately understand. I loved this so much. She made those people in the evaluation seats recognize the unsaid. They had to step outside of the way they usually experienced people auditioning and allow space for something unexpected.

This story illustrates the power of using nonverbal cues to recognize the unsaid and figure out what we need to know. This is why listening in more than one way is critical—especially when people are hesitant or unable to speak up and use their voice to tell us what’s actually going on. Noticing nonverbal cues means pausing long enough to see the world through someone else’s eyes and noticing what’s important to them.

Read between the Lines

Sometimes, we have the opportunity to recognize the unsaid in written form. A few years back, I sat across the table from Receptive Katherine, the head of HR at a financial-services firm—let’s call the firm Unaware Bank—explaining to her how she needed data to understand what wasn’t being said out loud by the company’s employees. Her team had sent out employee surveys year after year but had never had the chance to do anything with them. When Katherine finally made time to comb through the results with my help, she had a huge aha moment. She could finally recognize what needed fixing. Unaware Bank finally understood what its people had been saying all along and began to take action to build a culture of trust in the workplace—one where people felt comfortable using their voice.

Without taking the time to read between the lines and understand what was really happening in that situation, Unaware Bank could have found itself in a precarious position: lacking understanding in an area that had the potential to harm it. The company might have chosen to change its strategic direction without having all the information, or it might have stayed the course when another type of action was required and expected. Thanks to Katherine, the right amount of time was taken to recognize what employees weren’t saying openly.

Sometimes, we may recognize the unsaid and decide to do nothing about it. I recall many years ago walking up to a member of my team and dropping a new project on her desk, right before heading out to a meeting. Although I saw the stress on her face from her already long list of things to do, I still left that file with her. While I sat in my meeting, I had her frustrated facial expression stamped in my mind the entire time. I couldn’t shake the uneasiness I felt and knew I had to make things right. Right after the meeting, I hurried to her office to apologize for handing off the new project in such an abrupt way without first providing context or checking to see if she had the bandwidth to take it on. Luckily, she was appreciative of my vulnerability, and we worked together to prioritize all her projects to put her at ease. In this example, I had recognized her stress and frustration, which were both unsaid. Yet, I chose to leave her with those unspoken negative emotions. While I was able to redeem myself by asking for her grace, I still regret that interaction even to this day.

Remember, recognizing the unsaid means understanding that people often don’t feel safe enough to speak the truth out loud. This is where listening always begins.

If you’re interested in transforming your ability to recognize the unsaid, you must start by cultivating a listening mindset that puts you in the best position to uncover what’s true . . .

Cycle of Active Listening Model: Step 2