Things Leaders Do

The Feedback Blackout

• Colby Morris

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 25:49

Why does a good team end up with broken processes and a quietly toxic culture? Usually because the leader stopped listening long before anything visibly broke. In this episode, Colby Morris introduces The Feedback Blackout, the three-stage slide by which honest information stops flowing up to a leader until the operation breaks and the leader blames the system instead of the silence. The broken process, it turns out, is the last thing to break. Not the first.

Why are my team's processes broken when I have good people?

Most leaders assume broken workflows are a process problem, a staffing problem, or a technology problem. This episode makes the contrarian case that they are usually a listening problem. Good people don't stop caring. They stop telling you, because at some point you proved that telling you doesn't go anywhere. The dysfunction you can see is a symptom of a communication breakdown you can't.

What is The Feedback Blackout?

The Feedback Blackout (Colby Morris) is the three-stage process by which the flow of honest information from a team up to its leader goes dark:

  1. The leader stops asking the right questions (yes-or-no questions, status questions instead of reality questions, and reading silence as health).
  2. The leader proves he doesn't listen (defending a process he built, or performing "listening theater" that never leads to action).
  3. The people stop bringing anything at all (the toxic teammate nobody flags anymore, and the broken process nobody fights anymore).

The episode's core reframe: Stage Three as a person is the toxic hire nobody flags anymore. Stage Three as a system is the broken process nobody fights anymore. Same disease, two faces, and both of them are silence.

How do you fix a team that's stopped speaking up?

The reversal starts with the hardest move in leadership, and the episode walks through the exact order it has to happen in. The short version: you can't out-question a bridge you already burned. Something has to come first. (Colby names it in the episode, and it isn't a technique.)

Ask yourself (the diagnostic)

  • When did someone last bring me a problem before it became a crisis?
  • Is there a process on my team that I built and quietly refuse to hear criticism about?
  • Is there a person everyone used to flag to me, and now nobody mentions?
  • When I ask "are we good?", am I asking a real question, or asking permission to stop looking?
  • What has my team stopped bringing me, and what did I do to teach them to stop?

When to apply this guidance

  • Your operation feels broken and you've already tried new tools, new software, or a reorg without it sticking
  • Your team has gotten suspiciously quiet and you've been reading that as a good sign
  • You keep finding out about problems late, as emergencies instead of early warnings
  • There's a person or a process everyone works around, and nobody brings it up anymore
  • You're a leader honest enough to consider that the blackout might trace back to you

Research referenced in this episode

  • Gallup: Only about 1 in 4 employees strongly agree that their opinions count at work.
  • The Workforce Institute at UKG, "The Heard and the Heard-Nots": 63% of employees feel their voice has been ignored in some way by a manager or employer, and 34% would rather quit or switch teams than voice their true concerns to management.
  • Ethan Burris (University of Texas at Austin): Employees go quiet for two core reasons, fear and futility, with futility (the sense that speaking up leads nowhere) being the quieter and more corrosive of the two.

Related episodes

  • What Actually Builds Psychological Safety on Gen X-Led Teams (the in-the-moment, interpersonal side of this)
  • Stop Trying to Win Tough Conversations (Win the Trust Instead)
  • The Dirty Yes: Why Your Team Agrees With You and Does Something Else
  • One-on-One Meetings That Work: Build Trust, Track Goals, and Transform Your Team

Connect with Colby Morris

About The Things Leaders Do

The Things Leaders Do is a weekly leadership podcast hosted by Colby Morris, Founder of NXT Step Advisors. The show delivers practical, immediately actionable leadership tools for middle managers and senior leaders navigating real workplace challenges. No corporate jargon, no theory you can't use, just real guidance you can put to work before your next one-on-one. New episodes every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.


People First Leadership Setup

SPEAKER_00

People first leadership. Actionable strategies, real results. This is Things Leaders Do with Colby Morris.

The Team That Fights The System

SPEAKER_02

Let me tell you about a team I keep thinking about. Picture a clinical team. Genuinely good people, skilled, experienced. It's, you know, the kind of folks you'd want in the room if your family were on the table. And every single day, they fight the building. Not the work, the building, the system around them, broken workflow, clunky handoffs, you know, a scheduling process that adds 40 minutes every morning for a reason nobody can even actually explain. So they do what good people do. They build workarounds. You know, those little side processes, sticky notes, a group text that exists entirely to route around the official way of doing things. And the leader? He sees the numbers slipping. He sees the team. They just look tired. And he decides he's got a process problem. So he buys new software. You know, 50 grand, beautiful dashboard, does a demo that makes everybody in the room clap. Then he reorganizes the org chart because, well, that always feels like progress. Then he brings in a consultant because when in doubt, rent an opinion. None of it works. And I want to tell you why none of it works. 18 months ago, somebody on that team walked into his office and said, Hey, this workflow is broken. It's costing us every single morning. And he said, Yeah, that's just how we do it here. And he moved on. Never thought about it again, really. She did though. She thought about it. And she stopped bringing it up. And so did everyone else. So it was never a process problem. It was never a staffing problem. It was never a software problem. It was a listening problem. That broken workflow, that was a symptom. The disease showed up 18 months earlier in a five-second reaction in an office when a leader taught his best person that telling him the truth was a waste of her breath. And look, I opened with the healthcare team because that's the conversation that got me thinking about all this. But you know, this is every industry. This is manufacturing, this is retail, your accounting department, this is in a church, this is a nonprofit, this is a startup in a garage. Anywhere a human being can quietly decide it's not worth telling you the truth, which is everywhere.

The Feedback Blackout Explained

SPEAKER_02

So here's what I want to do today. I want to show you how a leader goes deaf. Not all at once, but in three stages. It's a slow slide, and most leaders are somewhere on it right now, and they literally have no idea. I'm going to give you three stages. I'm going to show you exactly what each one looks like with some examples that are going to hit a little too close to home, probably. And then I'm going to show you the way back, which is harder than you think, but simpler than you'd hope. Hey leaders, this is Colby Morris, and this is the Things Leaders Do podcast. Twenty something minutes. No corporate jargon, no theory you can't actually use. So let's get into it. Alright. So let's start with a thing nobody wants to hear. If your operation is broken, there's a real good chance you broke it. Not on purpose. Not in one big dramatic moment. You broke it the way most things break. Slowly, quietly even. One dismissed comment at a time. So here's some data to sit with. Gallup found that only one in four employees strongly agree that their opinions count at work. One in four. So three out of four people you lead are walking around fairly convinced that what they think doesn't really matter to the people above them. Yeah. You want to hear that again? Three out of four. And it gets more expensive. The Workforce Institute at UKG ran a study. They called it the Herd and the Herd Nights. And I love that name. And they found that 63% of employees feel their voice has been ignored in some way by their manager or their employer. 63%. Yeah. And here's the part that should really get your attention if the human part didn't. A third of employees, 34%, said they would rather quit or switch teams than voice their true concerns to management. Yeah, I'm going to let that sit for a second. A third of your people would rather leave than tell you the truth. Yeah, yeah. That's not a communication problem, y'all. That's a blackout. And I want to give it a name because naming a thing is how you start to actually see it. I call it the feedback blackout. It's what happens when the flow of honest information from your people up to you goes dark. And it again, it doesn't go dark all at once. It it browns out in three stages, and I'm going to walk you through every one. But before I do, I need you to understand the thing that makes this so sneaky. Leaders think the problems run in one direction. They think my process is broken, so my people are struggling. Cause then effect, process, then people. Yeah, it runs the other way. The people went quiet first. Then, with nobody flagging the problems, the process quietly rotted. And then months later, you noticed the broken processes and you blame the system, you blame the environment, you blame the moon, Mercury was probably in retrograde, you blamed everything except the moment you stop listening. So burn this into your brain. The broken process is the last thing to break, not the first.

SPEAKER_01

The silence comes first. Always. Okay. So stage one.

Stage One Wrong Questions

SPEAKER_02

You stop asking the right questions. I want to be precise here because this one is quiet. This is not the leader who yells. This is not the you know the obvious villain. This is a competent, well-meaning leader who genuinely believes his door is open. Stage one is death by the wrong questions. Here's what it sounds like. You walk the floor and you say, Hey, we all good here? And what do people say? Yeah, we're good. Of course they say that. You asked a yes or no question with your eyebrows already pointed at yes. You didn't ask a question. You asked for permission to keep not knowing. Or you asked status questions instead of reality questions. Are we on track? Is the status question. What are you working around right now that makes us look on track? That is a reality question. One of those gets you a green dashboard. The other one gets you the truth. And most leaders, if we're being honest, we love a green dashboard. The green dashboard lets us go home. Here's another version. You ask your direct reports and you stop there. You never ask the person actually running the broken thing. You get the manager summary of the manager summary. And by the time it climbs all the way up to you, it's been sanded down so smooth there's nothing left to grab on to. Everybody upstream had a reason to round the corners. Nobody like lied. It just got overly polite. And then the big one. You read silence as health. No complaints. Must be fine. Nobody's bringing me problems. I must be crushing it. Man, that is the single most dangerous sentence in leadership. Nobody's bringing me problems. Y'all, that that is not a trophy. Okay, that's a smoke detector with a battery pulled out. Quiet is not the same as safe. A lot of the time, quiet is just the sound of people who've already given up on you. There's a researcher named Ethan Burris. He's out of the University of Texas, right down the road for a lot of us, and his work on why employees go quiet points to two reasons. Fear and futility. Fear gets all the attention. The scary boss, the fear of retaliation. But futility, that's the quiet killer. Futility is it's when your people have simply learned that speaking up doesn't go anywhere anyway. It's not it's not dangerous to tell you.

Stage Two Ego And Listening Theater

SPEAKER_02

stupid. It's tax. Everybody who touches it every day knows it's broken. And here's the catch: you built it. It was your beautiful idea. You rolled it out in a meeting two years ago and you were proud of it. So when somebody comes to you and says, hey, this process is really slowing us down, what they're actually saying to your ears is, hey, your idea is bad and you can't hear it. Not because you're a bad person, because it's your baby. So you defend it. You explain the constraints they don't understand. You say, Well, there's a reason we do it that way. You give them the whole history, and the process stays. And everybody in that room just learned something. They learned that this leader cannot separate feedback on the work from feedback on his ego. So they stop. They stop telling you that the process is broken and they just quietly work around it forever. Adding that 40 minutes every single day for years because you couldn't take one uncomfortable sentence about a thing you made. Now, there's another flavor of stage two, and it might actually be worse because this one's disguised as good leadership. It's it's listening theater. This is this is where you nod, you lean in, you say something like, that's a great point. Thank you so much for raising that. I really appreciate you bringing it to me. Full eye contact, chef's kiss of active listening. And then nothing happens. Like ever. No follow-up, no change, no acknowledgement three weeks later. And your people are not stupid. They clocked the gap between how good the nodding was and how completely nothing changed. And listening theater is worse than not listening because you spent trust you never earned. You cashed the check and the account was empty. Real quick, and I'll say this once. I did a whole episode a while back on in the moment version of this. The tiny reactions that shut people down before your conscious brain even catches up. The face you make in the first five seconds. If that's your struggle, go back and find the psychological safety episode. That's the interpersonal side. This right here is the operational side, same disease, but today we're following it all the way down. Because when you prove over and over again that bringing you the truth is a bad investment, your people make a completely rational decision. They stop investing. And that takes us straight to stage three.

Stage Three Silence Looks Like Peace

SPEAKER_02

All right, stage three, the blackout. This is the end state. And it's the quietest and most dangerous of all because from the outside, stage three looks like peace. Everybody's calm, nobody's complaining, meetings are short, and you, the leader, you look around and you think you fine got yourself a well-oiled machine. What you've actually got is a team that has completely given up on the idea that you will ever do anything different about what's broken. That is not peace, that's surrender. And there is a difference. And the difference is everything. Let me give you the two faces of stage three because this is the part I really want you to walk away with. Stage three shows up as a person. You've got a team member who is a cancer. I'm I'm gonna just say it plainly because you already know who I mean. This is the person who's bleeding your culture dry. Toxic in meetings, tortures morale, they run good people off. And everybody, I mean everybody knows it. And your team came to you about it once, maybe twice early on, and you didn't act. You had your reasons, they're talented, they're hard to replace, it's complicated, you didn't want the drama, so you sat on it. You know what? Your people watched you sit on it, and they made the only logical call left to make. They stopped bringing it to you. And then, one by one, they started leaving, didn't they? Because here's the brutal math. That, you know, when you start looking at the cancer that that you won't cut out, you don't get to keep everybody. You either lose one toxic person or you slowly lose every good person around them. That's the trade. There's there's no version of this where you get to keep them all. And the fact that nobody's mentioned that toxic person to you in six months, that's not because it got better. That's stage three. It's your people protecting their own energy because they've quietly written you off on this one. Now, here's the other face. Stage three shows up as a system. It's it's that process from stage two, except now everybody, I'm sorry, nobody fights it anymore. In stage two, they were still bringing it up and you were still defending it. In stage three, the argument's over. They lost. So now they just build the work around economy. Shadow the spreadsheets, the real process that lives in a group chat you're not invited to, the thing everybody actually does, running quietly underneath the thing you think they do. And you have no idea any of it exists because the dashboard's green and nobody's complaining. So, look at that. Same exact disease, two completely different faces. Stage three as a person is the toxic hire nobody flags anymore. Stage three as a system is the broken process nobody fights anymore. One's a who, one's a what, and both of them are silence. Both of them are your people quietly deciding that the truth is just not worth the breath it costs to say to you. And the tell, the one symptom that that tells you for certain you're living in stage three is this. You're always the last one to know. Every problem reaches you as a full-blown crisis. Never as you know, an early warning, because the early warning system was your people and you unplugged it. One dismissed comment at a time. All right. So

The Way Back Starts With Crow

SPEAKER_02

that's how the lights go out. Three stages. Now let's talk about how you turn them back on. And I need you to hear the order of this because the order is the whole thing. Most leaders want to skip straight to the tools. They they want the magic questions. We'll get to the questions, I promise. But if you start here, you're gonna fail. And I want you, I want to tell you exactly why. You already burned the bridge. Your people watched you not listen for months, maybe for years. So if you just show up on Monday morning with a clipboard full of great new questions, they're not gonna think you changed. Okay. They're they're gonna think it's a trick. Some management fad you read about on a plane. They'll hand you, you know, hand you the safe answer and they'll wait for you to go back to normal. New question on top of the old history just reads this manipulation. So the door, the actual first move, is the single hardest thing in this entire episode. You have to eat the crow. And I mean, really eat it. You stand up in front of your people and do not cushion it. You say out loud, I've been leading this the wrong way. I stopped listening. Some of you brought me real things and I dismissed them, or I defended my own decisions instead of hearing you. And over time, you stopped bringing them to me. And that's on me. That's that's not even leadership, honestly. That was me protecting my ego. And I need this to be different, not because it sounds nice, because I actually need your help to fix what's broken. And I cannot fix it if you won't tell me the truth.

SPEAKER_01

That's it. That's the move.

SPEAKER_02

No spin, no mistakes were made, no corporate non-apology where you apologize for how they felt instead of what you did. You you own the actual thing you did. And I know, I know, this is deeply uncomfortable. Everything in your gut, especially if you came up in a leadership world that told you the boss is supposed to have all the answers, everything inside you is screaming that admitting you were wrong is gonna cost you your authority. But it's the opposite. Real talk, vulnerability is not the weak move here. It is the single most powerful credibility-building thing you could possibly do. Because your people already know you blew it. You're not hiding anything, they've known for months. The only open question is whether you're the kind of leader with the guts to say it out loud. When you name it before they do, you don't lose authority. You earn back trust. That's the whole trade. Now and only now do the questions actually work because now you've earned the right to ask them.

Ask Better Questions And Close Loops

SPEAKER_02

So you start asking the questions that cannot be answered with a yes. What's something we do around here that just doesn't make sense anymore? What have you stopped bringing to me and why? If you were sitting in my chair, what would you be worried about that I'm clearly not? Those questions reopen stage one. They pull the truth back out into the light, and then The part that makes or breaks every bit of this, you close the loop visibly, fast. When somebody tells you something's broken, you go do something about it. And then you come back and you tell them what you did. Hey, remember that process you flagged? I killed it. Here's what we're going to do instead. Thank you. That one move, done out in the open a few times in a row, is how you dismantle the futility. It's how you prove that you're that talking to you is finally worth the breath again. So there's your order. You eat the crow to open the door. You ask the questions to walk through it, and you close the loop out loud to prove the door is going to stay open this time. And you remember that leader from the very top of the show? The one who bought the software, reorganized the org chart, rented the consultant. He never once tried the free thing. He never stood up in front of his team and said, I got this wrong, help me. The day he does is the day that his operations actually start to heal.

SPEAKER_01

Not the day the new software goes live, but the day he eats the crow. So let's bring this home.

SPEAKER_02

If you take one single thing out of this episode, take this. That broken thing in your operation, the process, the workflow, the toxic person you keep tolerating, whatever, whatever it is for you, it is almost never the root problem. It's a symptom. And if you trace it back far enough and you're honest with yourself, it usually traces back to a moment you stopped listening and a person who decided you weren't worth telling anymore. The feedback blackout doesn't happen to you, it happens because of you. And here's why that's actually good news. Because if you built it, you can rebuild it. Stage one, ask the real question. Stage two, prove you can hear a hard thing without defending your ego. And stage three reverses itself the moment your people believe the truth is safe with you again. But it starts with the crow. It always starts with the crow. The most powerful sentence a leader can say is not, here's the plan. It's I got this wrong and I need your help. Say that and mean it and then back it up and watch how fast your people come back to life. They were never gone. They were just quiet, waiting to see if you were finally serious.

SPEAKER_01

So go be serious. You got this.

Final Takeaways And Share Request

SPEAKER_02

I usually tell you here about how you can connect with me, and I want you to know that you can connect with me. The links are in the show notes. But if you would do me a favor, if this one landed, will you just subscribe where you listen? Just leave a review and send it to a leader who might be sitting in a little too much quiet room right now. And remember, keep asking the questions that can't be answered with a yes. Keep closing the loop so your people know the truth. Actually go somewhere. And keep eating the crow when you get it wrong, because that's how you earn back the room. And you know why? Because those are the things that leaders do.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you for listening to Things Leaders Do. If you're looking for more tips on how to be a better leader, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and listen to next week's episode. Until next time, keep working on being a better leader by doing the things that leaders do.