Image credit: dmvasilenko
Gallup's numbers on workforce disengagement get passed around a lot. 69% of employees disengaged. $1.8 trillion in lost productivity. Leaders see those numbers and nod, because they're living it.
What the numbers don't tell you is how it happened.
How Teams Learn to Stay Quiet
It’s easy to assume disengagement is something that arrives from outside. A bad economy. A generation that works differently. Post-COVID malaise. Remote work killing culture. There's always a reasonable explanation that doesn't point back at the leader.
But you know what? In a lot of organizations, people didn't check out because of any of those things. They check out because they learned to.
Somebody taught them that their ideas don't go anywhere. That contributing feels worse than staying quiet. That the path of least resistance is to show up, do the work, and stop trying.
Most of the time, that somebody was their leader. And most of the time, that leader had no idea.
The Engineer Everyone Stopped Inviting
I was recently on Drew Sutton's Leadership Show talking about this. Drew ran large teams for years and really understands the gap between what leaders intend and what their teams actually experience. At one point he told me about an engineer on his team. Genuinely brilliant guy with six degrees and a good heart. And so difficult in meetings that Drew eventually stopped inviting him.
The guy was a “yes butter” in every conversation. He'd see the flaw in an idea before anyone else, but instead of raising it as a question, he'd just shut it down. Meetings stalled. People got frustrated. So Drew did what a lot of leaders do: he quietly started routing around him.
Then one day he pulled the engineer aside to have the conversation. The guy cried. Two adult men in a professional setting, and this person broke down because nobody was including him anymore. What he said stuck with Drew: I've never been able to connect like this. I didn't realize I was showing up in the right rooms in the wrong way.
Within a month of that conversation, he was invited to every meeting. He became one of the most valued people on the team.
This story captures something I see all too often in organizations: The person who looks like a resister is just operating with the wrong ruleset for the moment they're in. And instead of addressing that, most leaders work around them, which confirms for that person that they don't belong, which makes the behavior worse, which makes the leader avoid them more. The loop closes.
That's one way disengagement gets created. There are others.
Why Apathy Is More Dangerous Than Resistance
The more common version is less dramatic and harder to see.
A team member brings an idea. The leader, trying to be helpful, immediately starts identifying the problems with it. Not maliciously; they're “just doing their job.” They're thinking about risk, about resources, about the three times something similar was tried and didn't work.
What they're actually doing, from the other side of the table, is training the room.
Every time an idea gets immediately dissected, the message that lands isn't "let's refine this." The message that lands is "don't bother." Not because the leader said that. Because that's the pattern. And people are very good at learning patterns.
After enough repetitions, they stop contributing. They answer questions when asked and stay quiet otherwise. They do the work. They show up to meetings. But the energy is different, and the leader is left wondering what happened to the team that used to be engaged.
This is what I mean when I say apathy is the real obstacle to change, not resistance. Resistance is visible. You know who the skeptics are. You can have a conversation with a skeptic.
Apathy is quiet. It's the 80% of the bell curve who aren't fighting anything, aren't excited about anything, and are just waiting to see how it goes. They've seen enough initiatives come and go that they've stopped investing in any of them. They'll comply, but they won't commit.
And the organizations that struggle most with change aren't the ones dealing with loud resistance. They're the ones where that quiet majority never got on board.
The Power of "Yes, And"
The fix is less complicated than leaders expect, and also harder than they expect.
The simple version: when someone brings you an idea, your first move cannot be to poke holes in it. Not because the holes aren't real. Because the moment you do, you've made it less likely that person brings you an idea again.
Instead, use the "Yes, And" approach. Try "tell me more" or similar. Not just as a technique, but as a genuine attempt to understand what they're seeing before you respond to it. There's usually something worth finding.
When you do ultimately go a different direction, explain why. Not a long justification. Just: here's what I heard, here's what I liked, here's why we're going this way. People can handle disagreement. What they can't handle, over time, is feeling ignored…and those feel the same if you don't show your work.
Those 80% are where the opportunity is. They're not against you. They're just not with you yet. A little genuine inclusion goes further with them than a hundred town halls.
Leaders Can Reverse the Cycle
The engineer Drew told me about didn't become a different person after that conversation. He was always that person. He just finally got pointed at the right problem at the right moment.
Most disengagement works the same way. It's not a personality flaw or a generational attitude or a post-COVID hangover. It's a feedback loop that got started somewhere, usually quietly, and usually without anyone intending it.
The good news is that feedback loops can run in the other direction too.
I talked through all of this with Drew on his show, including what leaders can actually do when they have someone on their team who won't stop playing the same note in every meeting. If you lead people through change and you're dealing with a team that feels checked out, it's worth the watch/listen.
If this resonates and you want the longer version, this is exactly what Say Yes, And to Change is about. You can find it at sayyesandtochange.com.