The Invisible Cost of Saying Nothing

Note from the Author:

Eric is spending the week at Harvard University fully immersed in Adaptive Leadership conversations with colleagues from around the world. He'll be back next Tuesday, but in the meantime, I’m stepping in as your guest writer for the week. I hope you enjoy this one.

– Karen

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I was twenty-four the first time I sat at a senior leadership table. It looked like most other ordinary conference tables — long, rectangular, with a beautifully deep cherry finish — and yet it held the kind of gravity that makes you sit up straighter, speak more carefully, and question whether your voice belonged there at all. Each Tuesday morning, nearly every seat was filled with someone who had decades more experience than I did, and in some cases, more years than I’d been alive.

I was new to the role, new to the organization, and new to managing a team of my own. In essence, I knew nothing. Every meeting I’d take my seat, open a notebook, and prepare to listen — feverishly scribbling notes while everyone gave their reports. I was in full fake it till you make it mode. I believed that speaking less and listening more was a sign of maturity, so I was on a mission to appear as “professional” as possible. Deference, I thought, was a form of respect.

But as the weeks went by, something began to unravel beneath that assumption. I’d watch moments of confusion surface, go unspoken, and slide beneath the table like a dropped pen. Tension flared and then calcified. Someone would offer a carefully worded objection, and the conversation would edge around it, like a river flowing past a rock no one wanted to move.

I saw it. I felt it. But I did nothing.

I told myself I was being diplomatic. Strategic. That the politics of the room were too complex. But the truth is simpler: I was intimidated. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Afraid they’d suddenly look up and realize my seat at the table was a clerical error. What could a twenty-something possibly know about running an organization?

So I stayed quiet. And in that silence, I learned one of the hardest leadership lessons there is.

Silence, I learned, is ambiguous. It can signal wisdom or insecurity. Restraint or fear.

I believed I was demonstrating maturity — holding space, absorbing, deferring out of respect. But in rooms built on hierarchy, silence speaks for you.

What I saw as thoughtful, others interpreted as tentative. What I framed as humility, they framed as hesitation. And in a culture where decisiveness is currency, even a short pause can feel like debt.

No one pulled me aside. No one said I was failing. But the cultural cues were clear: silence was costing me my credibility. Because by staying silent, I was giving away authority I hadn’t yet learned to hold.

I had been given a seat, but not yet earned the trust that comes from showing up — really showing up. Not just taking notes. Not just nodding along. But offering something. An insight. A question. A thread others hadn’t yet seen.

Leadership, I’ve come to understand, is rarely about knowing more. It’s about seeing more. Reading the room. Naming what others won’t. Holding tension. Asking questions with curiosity. Not control — but clarity. And clarity isn’t created in silence. It’s forged in contribution.

I didn’t find my voice all at once.

There was no grand moment of clarity.

No mentor pulling me aside with a Hollywood-worthy pep talk.

What happened instead were smaller moments. A meeting where I asked a question that shifted the entire direction of the conversation. A project where I pushed back — respectfully, but firmly. A pause I filled not with agreement, but with curiosity: “Can we step back for a second… what are we actually trying to solve here?”

These weren’t acts of defiance. They were acts of leadership. Not the kind that comes with a title or a corner office, but the kind that says: I see what’s happening here, and I care enough to speak into it.

That’s when things started to shift.

I stopped performing professionalism and started practicing leadership. I learned to trust my instincts — especially the ones that told me something unspoken was swirling beneath the surface. And I stopped trying to sound like everyone else in the room and started sounding like myself.

Because leadership isn’t about volume.

It’s about presence.

Not speaking to impress, but to invite others in.

Not filling air time, but reshaping the air in the room.

And where does so much of that leadership actually play out?

In meetings.

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After Thoughts:

We tend to think of meetings as the work before the work. But they’re not. Meetings are the work — the place where direction is clarified, trust is tested, and culture is either reinforced or quietly eroded.

How we show up in those moments matters.

That’s why our June Leadership Lab is called How to Run Meetings That Energize.

It’s a 60-minute, high-impact session designed to help you shift from hosting status updates to leading real conversations — the kind that move things forward, build informal authority, and spark meaningful engagement.

Because leadership lives in the moments.

We hope to see you there.