What You Tolerate, You Teach

Here's something no one tells you when you step into leadership: your team is not listening to your words. They're watching your tolerance.

Every time you let something slide — the disrespect you didn't address, the credit that was taken, the standard that quietly dropped — you just taught your team what's actually acceptable here. Not what you said was acceptable. What you showed them was acceptable.

In this episode, Lisa pulls apart the invisible force that shapes every team's culture: not the values on the wall, but the behaviors that go unchecked. She names four honest reasons leaders look the other way — comfort, fear, fatigue, and the one nobody wants to admit. Through two stories that will stay with you — one of a leader whose silence cost him three people he never should have lost, and one whose ninety-second conversation reset an entire team's culture — she makes the case that your authority gives you your title, but your tolerance defines your legacy.

She'll walk you through what she calls the tolerance audit — three questions designed to surface the gap between what you say you stand for and what you're actually allowing. And she'll challenge you to close that gap this week. Not next quarter. This week.

If you've ever sat in a meeting and known something needed to be said — and stayed quiet — this episode is for you.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to Soul to Soul with Lisa Carter Boba, where science meets soul. I need to tell you something that might be uncomfortable. You're teaching people how to treat each other every single day. Not with your mission statement, not with your value slide, not with a framed poster in the hallway that says integrity and a nice font. You're teaching them with what you tolerate. Every time someone on your team is disrespectful in a meeting and you say nothing, you just taught the room that that's acceptable. Every time someone takes credit for work that isn't theirs and you let it slide because confronting it would be awkward, you just taught your team that integrity is optional here. Every time someone misses a deadline with no accountability and no conversation, you just taught the person who always delivers on time that their effort does not actually matter. And every time you walk past mediocrity because confronting it feels inconvenient, you just lowered the bar for everyone who was watching. And trust me, people are always watching. Your team is not reading the values on your wall. They're reading you. They're reading what you respond to, what you ignore, what makes you uncomfortable enough to act, and what doesn't. That's the real playbook, and that's the one they follow. That's what this episode is about. What you tolerate, you teach. And most leaders have no idea what lesson plan they've been running. Every organization has two curriculums. There's the one on the wall, the values, the posters, the carefully worded handbook that someone in HR spent three months perfecting, the slides from the leadership offsite with the three pillars and the color-coded diagram. That's the stated curriculum. And then there's the real one, the one nobody wrote down, but everybody knows. The unspoken rules about who gets heard in meetings, what kind of behavior actually gets rewarded, who can get away with what and what you need to do, not what they say you need to do, but what you actually need to do to get ahead. That's the silent curriculum. And I promise you, your team follows the silent one every single time. Here's what makes this so dangerous. The silent curriculum does not come from bad intentions. It almost never does. It comes from inaction. It's built in the gaps, the space between what you say matters and what you actually respond to when it happens right in front of you. Let me give you an example. You can put respect on every wall in your building, the actual word respect. You can open every all hands meeting with a reminder about your culture of mutual respect. But if you sit in a meeting and let someone talk over a junior colleague, not once but repeatedly, without saying a word, your team just learned that respect has an asterisk. It applies unless you're senior enough to ignore it. Here's another one. You say you value innovation. You say you want people to take risks, to bring bold ideas, to challenge the status quo. But when someone actually does that and the idea doesn't land and the room goes quiet, and you don't say, I'm glad you brought that forward. You just taught your team that innovation is a bumper sticker, not a practice. The next person with a bold idea, they're going to keep it to themselves. The culture is not what you preach. It never was. The culture is what you permit. And what you permit is what your people learn to expect. Now, before you think I'm here to shame anyone, because I am not, I've been that leader. I've looked the other way. I've let things slide that I knew I shouldn't have. And I think we need to talk about why we do it, honestly, because it is not laziness. It's something deeper than that. The first reason is comfort. Plain and simple. Confrontation is uncomfortable. And most of us, and I mean most of us, we're never taught how to address behavior directly without blowing up a relationship. We don't have the language. We don't have the practice, so we avoid it. We tell ourselves it's not that serious. We convince ourselves it'll work itself out. We say, I'll address it if it happens again. And then it happens again and we say it again, and the cycle becomes the culture. The second reason is fear. And this one goes deeper than most people want to admit. Fear that the person will push back and it'll get ugly. Fear that you'll be seen as too demanding, too intense, too difficult. Fear that if you address this one thing, you'll have to address everything else you've been ignoring and the whole thing will unravel. So you pick your battles and slowly, without realizing it, you stop picking any. And now you're not leading. You're managing your own anxiety and calling it wisdom. The third reason is fatigue. And this is the one nobody talks about. When you're running a team, when you're carrying a hundred decisions a day, when you're managing up and managing down and managing sideways, sometimes you just don't have the energy to have one more hard conversation. You are depleted, and letting something slide feels like self-preservation. I get it. I really do. I really, really do. But here's what I'll say about that. Your fatigue is real, but it's not neutral. When you're too tired to address the thing, the team still learns a lesson. They just learn the wrong one. And the fourth reason, and this is the one that requires the most honesty, is complicity. Sometimes we tolerate something because we benefit from it. Let me say that again. Sometimes the thing we're tolerating is serving us in some way. The high performer who's toxic but hits every target, we tolerate the toxicity because the results serve us. The person who bulldozes other people in meetings but always pushes projects across the finish line. We look the other way because their output makes us look good. We're not ignoring the problem, we're subsidizing it. And the rest of the team can see the math. They see who gets held to the standard and who gets exempted from it. And they draw their own conclusions about what you actually value. Your team sees all of it every time. They're not confused about your values. They learn them from what you tolerated. Let me tell you about a leader. Let's call him Marcus. Marcus managed a team of about 20 people. Smart group, high output, tight deadlines, demanding stakeholders, the kind of environment where everybody's moving fast and performance is everything. And Marcus was good at his job. He cared about his people, he was he wasn't checked out. But there was one person on the team, let's call her Val, who had a way of making people feel small. Not in an obvious way. Val never yelled, she never crossed a line you could point to in a policy document. She was too smart for that. But she had a tone, a way of dismissing ideas and meetings that made people hesitate before speaking. A habit of CCing leadership on emails that should have been private conversations, just enough to make people feel watched. A pattern of taking the best parts of other people's work and presenting them as team output that somehow always had her fingerprints on it. Everyone on that team knew exactly what Val was doing. It was not a secret, it was a system. And nobody said anything, including Marcus. Because Val was brilliant. She delivered. When the pressure was on and the deadline was impossible, Val was the one who got it done. She was Marcus's safety net, the person he could always count on when things got critical. And because of that, he told himself a story. He told himself, she's just direct. That's her style. People need to toughen up. She means well. She's under a lot of pressure. It's not that bad. Sound familiar? We've all told ourselves some version of that story. The story that lets us off the hook. Then one quarter, three people on Marcus's team resigned within six weeks. Three people. Different roles, different tenure, different reasons on paper. But in the exit interviews, when they had nothing left to lose and no reason to be diplomatic, the same name kept coming up. Not as a complaint, as a question. Why does Marcus let her operate that way? Think about it. They weren't asking about Val, they were asking about him. Because the person who creates the behavior is a problem, yes. But the leader who tolerates it, that's a choice. And the team experienced that choice every single day they showed up to work. One of the people who left said something that struck me. They said, I didn't leave because of Val. I left because I realized Marcus knew. And it didn't matter enough for him to do anything about it. And if that doesn't matter, then I don't matter either. Marcus didn't lose those three people to Val. He lost them to his own silence. And the people who stayed, some of them adjusted their behavior to match what they learned. They got quieter, they stopped bringing ideas, they learned the silent curriculum. Now let me give you the other side of this because I don't want to just diagnose the problem. I want you to see what it looks like when someone leads differently. Imagine a leader named Priya. Priya runs a team of about 15 people, smaller group but high stakes. Client-facing, fast moving, the kind of work where trust between team members is not a nice to have, it's the infrastructure. Early in her tenure, something happened. In a team meeting, one of her senior people made a dismissive comment about a newer team member's suggestion. It wasn't cruel, it was just um careless, a quick eye roll, a yeah, we tried that already, with a tone that shut the conversation down. The room moved on, but Priya didn't. After the meeting, she pulled the senior person aside and she didn't make it a big deal. She didn't write them up, she didn't give a lecture, she just said, hey, that moment in the meeting where you dismiss that idea, I need you to know that when that happens, it changes the room. People stop contributing, and I need everyone contributing. So I'm asking you to be more aware of how you respond to ideas that are not yours. That's it. Direct, respectful, clear, took about 90 seconds. But here's what happened next. The person who had been dismissed, they noticed. Not because Priya made an announcement, but because in the next meeting the energy was different. The senior person made space, asked follow-up questions, and the newer team member brought another idea, a better one this time, because they felt safe enough to try again. Priya didn't just address a behavior, she reset the silent curriculum. She taught the entire team in 90 seconds that dismissiveness is not how we operate here, not through a policy, through a choice. And the thing about Priya is she did this consistently, not just the big moments, the small ones, the tone of an email, the way someone was left off of an invite, the way credit was or was not shared. She paid attention to the texture of how people treated each other, and she responded to it, not punitively, not dramatically, just consistently. And her team, they became the team other people wanted to transfer to. Not because of the work, because of the culture. Because they knew that in Priya's world, how you showed up mattered as much as what you delivered. That's what it looks like when a leader teaches with intention instead of teaching by default. So let me be direct about what tolerance costs you. And I'm not talking about turnover metrics or engagement scores. I'm talking about something deeper. When you tolerate behavior that contradicts your stated values, you create what I call a trust tax. Every interaction on your team now costs more emotional energy because people are working around the thing you won't address. They're editing themselves in meetings. They're managing sideways relationships that shouldn't need managing. They're spending energy on navigating the dysfunction instead of putting that energy toward the work. Your team's capacity is not infinite. And every ounce of energy they spend protecting themselves from something you should have addressed is an ounce they're not spending on innovation, on collaboration, on the thing that you actually hired them to do. But here's the part that should keep you up at night. The people who leave, they're not your biggest loss. The people who leave are the ones with enough confidence and enough options to walk away. They'll land on their feet, they'll find a leader who doesn't tolerate what you tolerated. They'll be fine. The people who stay and stop caring, those are the real casualties. They're the ones who watched you tolerate it, concluded that excellence does not actually matter here, and quietly downshifted. They stopped bringing their best ideas, they stopped going the extra mile, they stopped investing emotionally in the work. Not because they are lazy, because they're rational. They learned the real standard by watching you, and they adjusted to match it. You didn't lower the bar with an announcement, you lowered it with your silence, and the team recalibrated. And the worst part, you might not even notice. Because the team still functions, the work still gets done, the meetings still happen, but something vital is gone. The energy is different, the trust is thinner, the ideas are safer, and you can't quite put your finger on when it changed because it changed in the moments you chose not to act. So maybe you're with me, maybe you're recognizing some of this in your own leadership. The question is, what do you actually do about it? Let me make it concrete. It starts with developing what I call real-time awareness. Most of the things we tolerate do not happen in big dramatic moments. They happen in the small ones. The meeting that starts five minutes late every time and nobody addresses it, the person who consistently interrupts, the email chain where someone is subtly undermined and everyone pretends they did not notice. You have to start seeing these moments for what they are. Teaching moments. Because they are whether you treat them that way or not. The second thing is, and this is critical, you don't need to make it a big deal to make it a clear deal. The reason most leaders don't address things is because they think addressing it means scheduling a formal meeting, writing up documentation, creating a whole event around it. It doesn't. Priya did it in 90 seconds. You can too. A quiet word after a meeting, a direct message, a simple, hey, I noticed this and I need it to be different. That's it. The power isn't in the size of the intervention. The power is in the consistency. Third, address the pattern, not just the incident. One dismissive comment is a moment. Three dismissive comments is a pattern, and patterns are what build culture. When you address the pattern, you are not nitpicking. You're leading. You're saying this isn't about one meeting. This is about who we are. And fourth, and this one takes courage. Apply the standard evenly. The fastest way to destroy your credibility is to hold one person accountable and let another person slide because they're higher performing, more senior, or more difficult to confront. Your team will never say it to your face, but they will catalog every exception you make. And those exceptions become the real standard. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to run what I call the tolerance audit. And I want you to be ruthlessly honest with yourself. Three questions, that's all. But if you answer them truthfully, they will change how you lead. First, what am I pretending not to see? You know the answer. There is something on your team right now, a behavior, a pattern, a dynamic, a person that you've been stepping around. You've rationalized it, you've told yourself it's not that bad, or it's not your place, or it will resolve itself. It won't. Name it out loud. Say it to yourself in the car on the way home. Write it down, but stop pretending you don't see it. Second, what is this teaching the people who are watching? Because someone on your team, probably the person you most want to keep, the person whose commitment and integrity you depend on, is drawing a conclusion from your silence right now. They're not drawing a conclusion about the person who's causing the problem. They're drawing a conclusion about you. What conclusion are they reaching? What lesson are you teaching them by doing nothing? Third, what conversation do I need to have this week? Not this quarter, not at the next review cycle this week, to start closing the gap between what I say I stand for and what I'm actually allowing. This week I want you to put a date on it. I want you to know who you're talking to and what you're going to say. Because the gap between your values and your tolerance, that gap has a cost. And the cost is being paid by the people on your team who are too loyal to leave and too smart not to notice. This isn't about perfection. I'm not asking you to become a leader who confronts every single thing. I'm asking you to become a leader whose silence means something. Because when you do speak, people know you mean it. And when you don't speak, people know that's a choice too. And it's an intentional one, not a default. I want to leave you with this. Your title gives you authority, but your tolerance defines your culture. And those two things are not the same. You can have all the authority in the world and still build a culture that makes people feel invisible. Not because you mean to, but because you tolerated something that told them they didn't matter enough for you to be uncomfortable. And that's not a leadership failure you can fix with a workshop or an off-site or a new set of values posters. That's a soul-level reckoning. That's a moment where you have to look in the mirror and say, the culture I have is the culture I built, with my action and my inaction, both. Leading soul to soul means being willing to sit in the discomfort of addressing what needs to be addressed. Not because it's easy, but because the people around you deserve a leader whose standards are not for sale, whose values are not negotiable based on who's performing well and who's not, whose silence is intentional, not avoidant, not roll-to-roll, soul to soul. What you tolerate, you teach. So let me ask you one more time. What are you going to teach starting this week? Thank you for being here. I mean that. Every time you press play on this podcast, you're choosing to go deeper. And that tells me something about who you are and the kind of leader you're becoming. If this episode hits you somewhere real, I have a favor to ask. Share it, send it to a leader who needs to hear this, send it to someone who's in the middle of building a culture right now and might not realize what they're teaching. Tag me, screenshot it, text it. Just get it in the hands of someone who's ready for it. And if you haven't already, take two seconds and hit subscribe. Hit follow, leave a rating or a review. Those small things really do make a massive difference in helping the show reach more people who are hungry for this kind of conversation. And if you want to go deeper with me, if you want more of these conversations, more frameworks, more of the real talk about leadership and what it means to lead from your humanity, come find me on Substack. It's soul to soul leadership.com. I'm building something special over there, and I want you to be a part of it. Until next time, not roll to roll, soul to soul. I'll see you next Monday.