Leaders often assume silence means agreement

In reality, silence is frequently something else entirely.

• It can be uncertainty.
• It can be caution.
• It can be fatigue.

More often than we realise, it’s the outcome of a carefully calculated assessment of perceived personal risk.

Silence is rarely agreement

Imagine a project meeting where a new software platform is about to be approved. The discussion is brief. The executive sponsor asks whether anyone has concerns. The room falls silent. The proposal is approved within minutes. Three months later, the implementation fails.

Afterwards, several employees admit that they had already recognised the problems from the beginning. They understood the operational risks; they saw the challenges. They knew customers would struggle with the system. Yet nobody spoke. This scenario is all too common.

The absence of disagreement isn’t the presence of consensus

Employees are constantly weighing whether to speak up, given the potential consequences.

Research by Amy Edmondson describes psychological safety as people’s shared belief that they can take interpersonal risks without fear of embarrassment, rejection, or punishment or reprisal. When that belief is absent, people don’t necessarily disengage from their work. They disengage from contributing their judgement. That is a critical distinction for leaders.

The risk calculation behind every comment

Every time an employee considers asking a difficult question, challenging a decision, or offering an alternative idea, a psychological calculation takes place.

• Will I be listened to?
• Will I be dismissed?
• Will this affect how people see me?
• Will I damage my future opportunities?

For some employees, this calculation lasts only a moment. For others, it has become second nature.

Many have learned through experience that asking difficult questions attracts unwanted attention. Others have watched colleagues being interrupted, ignored, or quietly excluded after challenging the status quo. Eventually, silence becomes the safer option.

The risk isn’t always disciplinary action

Sometimes it’s reputational.

• Being labelled as “difficult”.
• Being overlooked for interesting projects.
• Being excluded from informal conversations where important decisions are shaped.

These experiences rarely appear in HR reports, yet they profoundly influence organisational culture.

The South African context

South African workplaces bring additional complexity to these everyday decisions, particularly where language, hierarchy, culture, and status intersect. Many organisations operate in English, even though it isn’t the first language of most employees. While colleagues may understand the discussion perfectly, expressing disagreement with confidence in a second or third language requires more effort than it should. By the time they have found the right words, the conversation may already have moved on.

Culture also shapes how people understand hierarchy

Ubuntu places strong values on respect, care, and responsibility within relationships. In many families and communities, openly challenging someone older or more senior may be regarded as disrespectful rather than constructive. These values enrich organisations in many ways. However, if leaders interpret respectful silence as agreement, valuable perspectives can easily remain unheard.

The leadership task is therefore not to dismiss respect, but to create ways for respectful challenge to become possible.

• Status differences add another layer.
• Educational background.
• Professional experience.
• Economic circumstances.
• Length of service.
• Formal position.

Each of these influences how safe someone feels when contributing an unpopular opinion. Understanding these dynamics isn’t about treating people differently. It’s about recognising that not everyone experiences organisational power in the same way. What employees learn after being ignored is that silence can feel safer than speaking up.

Most people don’t stop speaking because of a single experience.

Silence is learned

A graduate suggests a better process. Nobody acknowledges the idea.

A supervisor raises a recurring customer complaint. Nothing changes.

A team member questions an unrealistic deadline. They are told to “be positive”.

Each incident may appear insignificant. Together, they teach employees something powerful: your opinion is not welcome.

Over time, employees become remarkably accurate at predicting which conversations are worth having and which aren’t. Unfortunately, organisations lose far more than ideas.

• They lose initiative.
• They lose constructive challenge.
• They lose early warning signs.

Eventually, they lose trust.

How fear reduces innovation

Innovation depends on people sharing unfinished thoughts. The best ideas rarely arrive fully formed.

They begin as observations, questions, and suggestions that improve through discussion. Where people fear criticism, those early conversations never happen. Leaders often wonder why innovation has slowed or why continuous improvement has stalled. The answer may not lie in capability. It may lie in the environment people are working in.

Employees who believe their contribution carries personal risk naturally become more cautious.

• They stop volunteering ideas.
• They stop experimenting.
• They stop identifying problems before they become crises.

An organisation may still perform adequately. It is unlikely to perform exceptionally.

Creating a workplace where voice matters

Encouraging people to speak is not simply the leader’s responsibility. Nor is it solely the employee’s responsibility. It’s a relationship. Psychological safety is therefore co-created by leaders and employees.

Leaders can begin by asking:

• Who rarely speaks, even though they have valuable experience?
• Which concerns are raised informally but not in meetings?
• Who challenges decisions, and who never does?
• How do we respond when someone disagrees with us?

Leaders reduce voice risk by being accessible, by responding with curiosity rather than defensiveness, inviting challenge rather than rewarding agreement, and acknowledging contributions even when they ultimately decide differently. Employees strengthen that environment by raising concerns respectfully, contributing solutions alongside problems, and recognising that constructive disagreement is part of collective success. This is where healthy followership becomes essential.

Strong organisations are built not only by courageous leaders, but by courageous followers who understand that responsible challenge is an act of commitment, not disloyalty. When both parties recognise their shared responsibility, silence begins to lose its power.

Listening for what is not being said

Every organisation has conversations that never happen.

• Questions that remain unasked.
• Ideas that stay unspoken.
• Problems that everyone notices but nobody names.

The challenge for leaders isn’t simply to listen carefully when people speak. It’s to become curious about who has stopped speaking altogether. Because organisational silence is rarely empty. More often than not, it’s full of information that has never found a safe place to be heard.

At 4Seeds Consulting, we help leaders and teams build cultures where challenge, curiosity, and respectful dialogue become strengths rather than risks. When people feel safe to contribute honestly, organisations gain more than better conversations; they gain better decisions.

Click here to to get in touch.

For South African organisations, this matters deeply because culture is often shaped by daily interactions, language, trust, shared history, and access. When leaders miss these dynamics, they may mistake silence for agreement and compliance for commitment.

Why the organogram only tells half the story

Formal power sits in titles, mandates, reporting lines, and decision rights. Informal power is earned through relationships, credibility, expertise and access to information. Both matter, but they don’t always sit in the same person.

The classic model developed by French and Raven in 1958 remains useful: influence may come from reward, coercion, legitimate authority, expertise, personal credibility, and information. In practice, the most influential person in the room isn’t always the most senior person.

Hidden influence isn’t automatically negative. Organisations rely on people who carry institutional memory, connect teams, and help get things done. The risk emerges when informal pathways become exclusive, go unexamined, or carry more weight than stated values.

Influence isn’t always about position

Imagine a medium-sized manufacturing business in Gauteng. A new operations director joins with clear authority and responsibility for improving systems and efficiency. Within weeks, however, it becomes clear that every significant decision appears to pass through a production supervisor who has worked in the business for nearly 30 years. Employees seek this supervisor’s view before committing to decisions. Managers consult them before introducing change. Officially, the supervisor has limited authority outside their department. Unofficially, they are one of the most influential people in the business.

This is hidden power, and it exists in almost every organisation.

The organisation behind the organisation

Power often grows from relationships rather than rank. It may belong to the person who controls information, the executive assistant who knows how decisions are made, the long-serving employee who understands the company’s history, or the team member whose judgement others trust.

Sometimes people respect someone’s competence. Sometimes they fear being excluded. Sometimes influence exists because “this is how things have always been done”.

These dynamics don’t appear on the organogram, yet they shape how quickly decisions are made, whose ideas gain traction, and whose concerns are quietly ignored.

Hidden power shapes organisational culture

In South African organisations, hidden influence often develops through shared language, educational background, long-standing relationships, professional networks, and cultural familiarity. None of these is inherently problematic; trust naturally grows through shared experiences.

The challenge arises when these networks become invisible pathways through which opportunities, information, and influence flow, or are held back.

Consider a leadership meeting conducted in English. One manager speaks English fluently but thinks in isiXhosa. Another is more comfortable in Afrikaans. By the time they have translated their thoughts and decided how best to contribute, the conversation has moved on.

The louder voices dominate. The quicker responses are rewarded. The quieter contributions are never heard. Silence is then easily mistaken for agreement.

No one may intend to exclude others, yet the outcome can still be exclusionary. Over time, these subtle dynamics shape who participates, who stays silent, and who believes that their contribution matters.

When people stop contributing

One of the greatest risks of hidden power isn’t open conflict. It’s a quiet withdrawal. Employees rarely stop caring overnight. Instead, they make small adjustments.

• They stop challenging weak decisions.
• They keep innovative ideas to themselves.
• They avoid difficult conversations.
• They contribute only what is required.

From a leadership perspective, nothing may appear wrong. Productivity may even remain stable. But beneath the surface, trust begins to erode. Culture is shaped less by annual strategy sessions than by the thousands of everyday interactions.

Seeing what the organogram cannot

Strong leaders understand that authority and influence are not the same. They pay attention to patterns that reveal how power moves through the organisation.

• Who speaks first in meetings?
• Who is interrupted?
• Whose opinions are consistently sought?
• Who is left out of informal conversations?
• Who controls the flow of information?
• Who rarely speaks, yet consistently has valuable insight?

These observations often reveal more about culture than a survey can. HR leaders are well placed to notice them across recruitment, promotion, succession planning, performance conversations, and exits.

Turning hidden influence into organisational strength

Informal power isn’t something to eliminate. The objective is to ensure that influence supports organisational purpose rather than personal control, exclusion, or silence. That requires curiosity, courage, and attention to everyday moments where culture is created.

Power exercised well in a South African organisation is authority held with accountability and used in the service of growth and voice. It’s the leader who notices who hasn’t spoken and creates a genuine opening. It’s the executive who becomes curious about cultural dynamics before they become engagement problems.

If your team is struggling with disengagement, slow decision-making, resistance to change, or quiet withdrawal, the issue may not be only about communication. It may be hidden power.

At 4Seeds Consulting, we help leaders and teams surface these dynamics and turn influence into trust, voice, and healthier performance.

Click here to to get in touch.

The most common response is to look more closely at your managers and to sharpen accountability. Provide coaching or additional support, or hold more frequent one-on-ones. Without a doubt, there’s genuine value in that work. However, the assumption underneath it is worth examining, because it may be the reason the needle keeps moving so slowly. 

The Assumption That Shapes Everything 

Most engagement strategies are built on a leader-centric premise: the leader is the primary driver of engagement, and the person responsible for creating the conditions in which commitment either flourishes or fails. This logic has produced a substantial industry of management development and leadership coaching, and it isn’t without merit. Leadership behaviour certainly matters, yet it’s only one side of the coin. 

When the leader is regarded as the architect of engagement, people become passive recipients. They’re the objects of good management rather than active participants in a shared relational dynamic. In that framing, engagement becomes something done to people rather than something co-created with them. 

Research conducted across South African SMEs found that leaders and employees disagree significantly on how they understand this relationship. Leaders described engagement in terms of compliance, reliability, and task delivery. In contrast, employees described engagement as a conditional and strategic choice, shaped by whether trust was present, recognition feels fair, and whether it’s safe to speak. Many employees regard themselves as “collaborators” in their roles at work and in their relationships with leaders. 

The preference isn’t semantic. It reflects, from two perspectives, a fundamentally different theory of what engagement is and who’s responsible for it. 

What Your People Are Actually Evaluating 

When your employees decide how much of themselves to bring to their work, they’re not waiting for a leadership communication or an engagement initiative to land. They’re making an ongoing assessment. Is this leader credible? Is recognition fair? Is it safe to say what I actually think? Does my effort here mean something beyond a performance rating? 

“You put your all in your work… not being appreciated, not being seen.” 

That isn’t a complaint about a line manager’s skills. It’s a statement about perceived value. And perceived value, in a South African workplace shaped by relational norms, isn’t restored by a training programme. It’s rebuilt through daily behaviour, consistent fairness, and the experience of being taken seriously as a contributor rather than being managed as a resource. 

Research has found that employees who perceived their leaders as credible and fair showed higher levels of active engagement, constructive challenge, and discretionary effort. Those who didn’t did so by intentionally and consciously moderating their contribution. Not dramatically, not in ways that necessarily surfaced in a quarterly performance review, but consistently and cumulatively. 

That moderation is quiet, and it doesn’t announce itself. From the outside, it appears like adequate performance, just “good enough” that would pass for acceptable productivity. And here’s where many leaders misread the situation, interpreting silence as disengagement, but it isn’t. It’s a strategic, self-protective choice the employee has made. The person is still present, still delivering, but they’ve made a calculated decision about how much of themselves is safe to invest. Those are two entirely different organisational problems, and only one of them can be solved by a management intervention. 

The Implication for How You Lead 

If your engagement strategy is designed around activating your managers, you’re addressing half the problem. The other half lives in how your people understand their own role, and whether your organisational environment gives them reason to fully inhabit it. 

The question worth sitting with isn’t: “How do I create more engagement in my organisation?” It’s: “What would need to be true here for my people to choose to bring more of themselves to their work?” 

That shift in framing doesn’t make the leader irrelevant. It makes the leader’s role more precise. The work becomes less about driving engagement from above and more about building the conditions in which people decide to invest from within. In South African SMEs, where relational proximity means that trust is visible and its absence even more so, this distinction matters considerably. 

4Seeds Consulting helps South African and international organisations develop engagement strategies that are culturally grounded and practically effective. If you’re questioning whether your current approach is working as well as it should, we would be glad to explore this with you. 

Click here to to get in touch.

You’re running the weekly team meeting. You ask whether there are any concerns, questions, or anything people see differently. The room goes quiet. A few people nod. Nobody challenges anything, so the meeting moves on. 

On the surface it looks like alignment. 

But silence in teams is rarely neutral. 

When last did someone openly disagree with you?
When last did a concern surface before it became a bigger operational problem?
When last did someone tell you something you probably didn’t want to hear? 

If it’s been a while, the silence may not be agreement. It may be caution. 

What Silence Actually Signals 

One of the more consistent findings in workplace research is that employees slowly adjust how much they speak up based on perceived interpersonal risk. 

In simpler terms, people learn when speaking feels safe – and when it doesn’t. 

Employees often make a deliberate decision that saying less is the safer method of survival in the workplace. Not necessarily because they’re disengaged from the work itself, but because previous interactions have taught them which opinions are welcomed, ignored, or subtly penalised. 

Over time, silence becomes adaptive. 

Managers often misread this silence as passive agreement, when beneath the surface things may look very different. Contribution slowly shifts from participation to hesitation, then to strategic withdrawal. 

At first, employees stop raising smaller concerns.
Then they stop challenging decisions.
Eventually, many contribute only what is operationally necessary to perform their role. 

The work still gets done. Productivity may remain stable for a while. But something important quietly disappears in the background: initiative, creativity, honest upward communication, and early visibility of risk. 

That’s the danger of a quiet team. Silence can easily masquerade as harmony. 

Why Middle Managers Carry So Much of This Pressure 

Middle managers sit in a uniquely complex space in an organisation. 

You’re expected to translate strategy from above while staying closed to what’s really happening on the ground. In many ways, you’re also the person through whom people experience the organisation. 

For your team, you’re often the organisation itself. 

The quality of information flowing upward through you depends almost entirely on whether your team trusts you enough to tell you the truth. 

This is why leadership behaviour matters more than many organisations tend to realise. People don’t experience culture through vision statements, posters, or corporate values. They experience it through how managers show up, day after day, in small but repeated interactions. 

Your reaction when somebody challenges an idea matters.
Your response to mistakes matters.
Your body language during disagreement matters.
How you behave under pressure matters. 

These moments become behavioural data points employees use to assess whether honesty is safe, useful, or risky. 

In South African SMEs, this dynamic if often more pronounced because people work much closer together. Teams are smaller, visibility is higher, and leadership behaviour has a stronger cultural impact. Employees pick up on patterns quickly. 

They notice whose ideas get attention.
They notice who gets interrupted.
They notice whether disagreement leads to discussion or defensiveness. 

Over time, these repeated interactions shape the unwritten rules of voice within the team. 

The Part Many Organisations Still Miss 

Many organisations put a lot of weight on salaries, performance targets, and operational efficiency. And those things do matter. 

But underneath the obvious issues are the quieter ones: recognition, trust, psychological safety, and whether someone feels their work actually matters to their manager. 

When contributions are repeatedly ignored or quietly dismissed, something shifts in the relationship. Employees don’t always leave physically; more often, they start to withdraw psychologically. 

The disengagement is subtle. 

People stop volunteering ideas.
They stop pushing for improvement.
They stop bringing energy into the room.
Eventually, silence becomes normalised within the culture itself. 

And once a culture of silence forms, leaders lose access to one of the most important organisational resources they have: honest information. 

Psychological Safety Is Behavioural 

Psychological safety is often discussed as though it’s created through policy or leadership slogans from the top. 

In practice, employees experience psychological safety behaviourally rather than organisationally. 

Some of the highest-performing teams are also the most direct and demanding. The difference isn’t the absence of accountability. The difference is that honesty isn’t automatically punished through embarrassment, avoidance, defensiveness, or exclusion. 

What strengthens trust over time is managerial curiosity. 

Managers who ask before defending.
Managers who tolerate discomfort without shutting conversation down.
Managers who create room for challenge without interpreting it as disloyalty. 

These behaviours may seem small, but they quietly shape whether employees keep contributing honestly over time. 

When Satya Nadella reshaped the culture at Microsoft, empathy and listening weren’t framed as soft leadership traits. They were treated as strategic capabilities, directly linked directly to innovation, learning, and organisational adaptability. 

The same principle applies within SMEs. 

Teams speak when they believe speaking carries value rather than consequence. 

A Question Worth Sitting With 

The next time your meeting ends in silence, it may be worth pausing before assuming everything is fine. 

Are people quiet because they genuinely agree?
Or are they quiet because they’ve learned, collectively, that silence feels safer? 

Those are two very different organisational cultures, and only one of them is likely to sustain trust, innovation, and long-term performance. 

4Seeds Consulting partners with organisations to develop followership as a deliberate capability, not an afterthought to leadership strategy. We work with executive and management teams to reveal the cultural dynamics that shape how people follow, challenge, and invest in shared outcomes. Drawing on both international research and the rich philosophical tradition of Ubuntu, we help organisations build the relational conditions that make genuine co-creation possible. If this resonates with what you are seeing in your organisation, click here to to read more on our website.

Part of the explanation, I would argue, is that we have been studying half the equation. Leadership, as a process, does not belong to the person at the top of an organisational chart. It is produced in the space between leaders and the people around them. And in that space, the quality of followership is every bit as consequential as the quality of leadership.  

South African organisations, navigating the convergence of Ubuntu philosophy, high-power-distance legacy structures, and rapidly evolving knowledge economies, are particularly well-positioned to make something of this insight. But only if we are prepared to take followership seriously as a subject of strategy, not just a byproduct of leadership development. 

Why organisations ignore followership at their own risk 

The traditional organisational narrative positions followers as the background against which leadership is performed. The leader acts and the follower responds. The leader decides and the follower implements. This narrative is comfortable because it is tidy. It also happens to be flawed.  

Followership theory, consolidated significantly in the work of prominent leadership scholars, Uhl-Bien, Riggio, Lowe and Carsten (2014), positions followership as an independent variable in organisational outcomes, not merely a dependent one. In plain terms, how people follow shapes what leadership actually becomes, not the other way around.  

There is no leadership, in any meaningful sense, without the active participation of those who choose to follow, challenge, contribute, and hold leaders accountable. When followership is passive, leadership becomes brittle. When followership is proactive, leadership gains traction, depth, and ethical accountability. 

The Ubuntu dimension: followership as shared humanity 

In an African business context, the dichotomy between leader and follower begins to look quite different. Ubuntu does not deny differentiation or hierarchy. The proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu insists on mutual constitution: I am, in part, because you are. The leader’s effectiveness is, in part, a product of the follower’s investment, and the follower’s identity is bound up in the wellbeing of the collective.  

This has a direct organisational implication. In a genuinely Ubuntu-informed workplace, followership is not a role one performs reluctantly while waiting for a promotion. It is a form of communal stewardship. Followers who are genuinely invested in Ubuntu values are not waiting to be told what to do. They are co-creating outcomes because they understand their own identity and effectiveness to be entangled with the organisation’s.  

Muller et al. (2019, p. 1), cited in: The African Philosophy of Ubuntu and Family Businesses – Journal of Family Business Management states, “Ubuntu significantly influences organisational performance by increasing employee engagement.” 

When followership fails, so does the organisation 

Consider what passive followership actually costs an organisation. It costs the quality of decisions because no one challenges assumptions. It costs innovation because ideas that carry any risk are withheld. It costs ethical resilience, because followers who do not see themselves as co-producers of outcomes are more likely to comply with directives they privately believe are wrong.  

Engagement is culturally constructed, not universally designed 

Here lies the central insight that most engagement frameworks miss. Engagement is not a universal human response to a standard set of managerial inputs. It is constructed through culture, relationship, and the implicit contracts that define what it means to work in a particular organisation, in a particular society, at a particular moment.  

In South Africa, this means that engagement models that are imported wholesale from American or European research traditions will capture some of the picture but miss significant parts of it. An employee operating from a strong Ubuntu orientation is not primarily motivated by individual recognition or personalised goal-setting, though these are not irrelevant. They are motivated by relational quality, collective meaning, and the sense that their contribution matters to a shared outcome. They want to be seen as a co-author of results, not merely a resource deployed in their service.  

Understanding this requires that managers attend to the cultural architecture of engagement in their specific teams and contexts. It requires intellectual humility about the limits of borrowed frameworks. And it requires a genuine curiosity about what followership looks and feels like for the people in your organisation, which means asking them, listening to the answers, and building structures that honour what you hear. 

The strategic case for followership development 

Companies that invest deliberately in followership development are not undermining their leadership. They are strengthening it. A team of proactive co-producers does not diminish a leader’s authority. It sharpens it, challenges it productively, and ensures that it rests on something more durable than position or power.  

Developing followership capability in your organisation means examining the implicit theories that govern how followers are perceived and treated. It means creating structures in which upward communication is genuinely valued, not merely tolerated. It means rewarding constructive challenge alongside compliance. And it means taking seriously the philosophical tradition that surrounds us: the Ubuntu insight that performance, identity, and accountability are fundamentally relational.  

Organisations rise or fall not through the brilliance of their leaders alone, but through the quality of the relational field they create. Followership is half of that field. It is time we started treating it accordingly. 

4Seeds Consulting partners with organisations to develop followership as a deliberate capability, not an afterthought to leadership strategy. We work with executive and management teams to reveal the cultural dynamics that shape how people follow, challenge, and invest in shared outcomes. Drawing on both international research and the rich philosophical tradition of Ubuntu, we help organisations build the relational conditions that make genuine co-creation possible. If this resonates with what you are seeing in your organisation, click here to to read more on our website.

This is not simply an oversight. It reflects a deeply held assumption about how organisations work: that the leadership flow is downward, and that the employees who receive it are, at best, energetic implementers. In South Africa, where organisations are navigating the tension between hierarchical tradition and the communal ethics of Ubuntu, this assumption deserves to be examined very carefully indeed.  

The truth is, that engagement is not a magic ingredient that is dispensed from the top. It is co-authored. And understanding why requires us to revisit what we believe followership actually is.
 

The science of what we assume about followers 

In 2010, organisational psychologist Thomas Sy published what has become a foundational study in the field of followership research. His investigation into Implicit Followership Theories (IFTs) showed that both leaders and employees carry deeply internalised mental outlines, or schemas, about what a follower is and should be. These schemas are not conscious policies. They are cognitive shortcuts, shaped through experience, culture, and observation, that impact on how we treat people and how people treat themselves at work.  

Sy identified a six-factor model of follower prototypes. The positive dimensions, which he termed the “followership prototype,” included industry, enthusiasm, and good citizenship. The negative dimensions, he clustered as the “followership antiprototype.” These included conformity, insubordination, and incompetence.   

Critically, his research found that when leaders hold positive implicit theories about their followers, they tend to set higher expectations, grant more autonomy, and develop stronger working relationships. When they hold negative implicit theories, the reverse follows. Followers, in turn, often perform in line with the expectations they sense being held of them.  

For South African managers, this has immediate practical significance. If your mental model of the people who report to you defaults to compliance-seeker or passive implementer, you are not managing a neutral situation. You are actively shaping the conditions that produce exactly that outcome. 

Reframing followership as agency 

The dominant narrative in organisational life positions followers as recipients of leadership. They receive vision, instruction, strategy, and feedback. Their role, in this framing, is fundamentally reactive. Carsten, Uhl-Bien and colleagues challenged this framing in their landmark 2010 qualitative study, in which they identified meaningfully different social constructions of the follower role. Some individuals did indeed describe followership as deference and compliance. But a significant group described something altogether different: a proactive orientation, in which followership meant co-producing outcomes, contributing ideas, challenging assumptions, and holding themselves accountable for shared results.  

In 2014, Uhl-Bien, Riggio, Lowe and Carsten formalised this into Followership Theory, positioning followers as active participants in a co-constructed leadership process. In their framework, constructionist approaches see followers as actively shaping leadership itself through the quality, nature, and intent of their following behaviours. Leadership, in this view, does not precede followership. The two are produced together, in context, through relational dynamics that neither party controls alone.  

This is not a semantic distinction. It has measurable consequences. Followers with what the researchers call a co-production orientation engage in higher levels of voice, constructive challenge, proactive problem-solving, and discretionary effort. They are more difficult to steer toward unethical compliance because they hold a sense of personal accountability for shared outcomes, rather than deferring entirely to positional authority. 

Ubuntu and the co-authorship of organisational life 

Here is where the African philosophical tradition offers something that Western leadership has taken far longer to articulate. Ubuntu, the Nguni Bantu philosophy expressed in the proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other persons), does not place the individual in isolation. Identity itself is relational and communal. There is no self that exists prior to relationship.  

In a 2012 address, Reuel Khoza, one of South Africa’s most respected voices on Ubuntu leadership, identified that in the African tradition, leadership is achieved, not given. The leader’s moral authority is fashioned in encounter with community. This is not a metaphor. It is a structural claim about how influence works in a society shaped by Ubuntu values: the capacity to lead is a product of the community’s recognition and support, not merely of formal appointment.  

What this means for followership is profound. In an Ubuntu-informed organisational context, following is not subordination. It is a form of communal co-creation. The follower who contributes, challenges constructively, and invests their full capability is not exceeding their role. They are fulfilling it. They are exercising the relational accountability that Ubuntu demands.  

This reframing has real traction in the South African workplace, where many employees carry an implicit Ubuntu ethic that management frameworks often fail to activate. When leaders treat their people as passive implementers, they are not simply limiting individual potential. They are severing the relational thread on which Ubuntu-informed engagement depends. 

What this means for middle and senior managers 

The implications for your company are not abstract. Your implicit theories about followers determine what you communicate, what you expect, and what you tolerate. If your team meetings are characterised by top-down direction and minimal challenge, it is worth asking whether the silence is a reflection of the implicit contract you have established rather than a lack of ideas or investment.  

Engagement that is co-authored requires leaders who are genuinely curious about what their people think. It requires structures that make contribution safe. And it requires a willingness to examine the assumptions that currently govern how followership is understood and rewarded in your organisation.  

The research is consistent: followers who believe their role is to co-produce outcomes are more engaged, more ethical in moments of pressure, and more effective partners in navigating complexity. They are not a risk to your authority. They are its most important champions.  

The question is whether your organisation is designed to produce them.  

4Seeds works with leadership teams to examine the implicit assumptions that quietly govern how followership is understood and rewarded in their organisations. We help managers recognise the difference between compliance and co-authorship, create the conditions in which people feel safe to contribute fully, and build cultures where engagement is something people genuinely bring rather than something they are expected to perform.  

If you want to explore what followership really looks like in your organisation, click here to to read more on our website.

What these leaders are observing is not a financial problem. It is a human energy problem, and it usually begins with disengagement.  In leadership development research, engagement is not simply about morale or job satisfaction. It is the degree to which employees are psychologically invested in the success of the company. When that investment is present, teams contribute far more than their job descriptions require. When it is absent, teams begin to lose their innovative edge; retention numbers slip and employee resilience is eroded long before the problem becomes visible in financial performance. For SMEs, the consequences are particularly significant.  

Engagement is the engine of innovation 

In smaller businesses, innovation rarely comes from formal research and development departments. It comes from people who are close to the work. An engaged employee notices inefficiencies. They suggest improvements to client service processes. They share ideas in meetings because they believe those ideas will be heard and valued. A disengaged employee behaves differently. They do what is required and little more. They keep insights to themselves. They stop proposing solutions because past experience has taught them that doing so is unlikely to matter. Over time, this behavioural shift has a measurable impact. 

Research from Gallup consistently shows that highly engaged teams produce significantly better outcomes. In their global workplace studies, engaged teams demonstrate higher productivity, stronger innovation behaviour and greater profitability than disengaged ones. As Gallup notes, “Employees who are engaged are more likely to be looking for ways to improve processes and innovate.” In an SME environment, where improvements often come from practical operational insights, this difference matters enormously.  

Engagement is the strongest driver of retention 

Many businesses still approach retention primarily through salary benchmarking and benefits. Compensation certainly matters, but it is rarely a decisive factor for high performers. What retains talented people is their relationship with the organisation and its leadership. Engaged employees feel that their work matters. They experience fairness and respect. They believe their contribution is recognised. As a result, they invest more of themselves in the business. On the other hand, disengaged employees start withdrawing long before they resign. They reduce discretionary effort. They become quieter in meetings. They focus on completing tasks rather than improving outcomes. Eventually, they begin to look elsewhere.  

A 2022 study cited by MIT Sloan Management Review highlights this dynamic clearly. In research analysing millions of employee reviews, the authors concluded that toxic culture and poor leadership behaviour were far stronger predictors of employee turnover than compensation. As the researchers observed, “Toxic culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition.” For SMEs, where institutional knowledge often sits in the minds of a handful of experienced individuals, losing even one key employee can have profound consequences.  

Engagement strengthens resilience 

Resilience is the ability of people in a business to navigate pressure, change, and uncertainty. In South Africa’s economic environment, this capability is essential. Engaged teams behave differently during difficult periods. They communicate openly. They collaborate to solve problems. They support one another when workloads increase or conditions become uncertain. Disengaged teams tend to move in the opposite direction. People become protective of their own responsibilities. Communication narrows. Initiative declines precisely when the company needs it most. The result is a business that becomes slower to adapt and more vulnerable to external shocks. This is why leadership scholars increasingly describe engagement as a form of organisational energy. It determines how much capacity a company has to respond when conditions change.  

Why SMEs feel disengagement more quickly 

Large corporations can sometimes absorb disengagement through scale. A team in one department may compensate for another that is struggling. SMEs rarely have that buffer. Teams are smaller. Roles overlap. Relationships are more visible. Cultural signals spread quickly. When disengagement appears, it affects a larger proportion of the company almost immediately.  One disengaged employee can influence the tone of an entire department. Conversely, one highly engaged individual can lift the energy of a whole team. This amplification effect makes leadership behaviour particularly influential in smaller businesses.  

What are the signs of disengagement?  

Disengagement rarely announces itself dramatically. It tends to appear through small, observable changes in behaviour. 

• Employees stop volunteering ideas. 

• Meetings become quieter. 

• People execute instructions but rarely challenge them. 

• Energy shifts from improvement to maintenance.

These are early indicators that the company may be losing the discretionary effort that fuels innovation and resilience. The critical point for leaders to understand is that engagement cannot be mandated. It is earned through consistent leadership behaviour. Employees watch how decisions are made. They observe whether commitments are honoured. They notice whether their input is genuinely considered. Over time, these signals determine whether people invest their full capability in the business or gradually withdraw it.  

A leadership question worth asking 

For leaders who want to understand the true level of engagement among their employees, a useful question is this: When last did someone on your team challenge your thinking or offer an idea that carried some risk for them personally? If that does not happen often, it may indicate that people are protecting themselves rather than investing fully in the company’s success. Engagement shows itself through courage, initiative, and contribution. Disengagement shows itself through silence. And silence is often the quiet risk no balance sheet shows until it is too late.  

4Seeds works with leadership teams to recognise the early signals of declining engagement, understand how their behaviour shapes team climate, and develop practical leadership habits that strengthen trust, encourage contribution, and sustain commitment so that talented people remain engaged and invested. 

Click here to to read more on our website.

In my work within leadership and team development, this question tells me everything I need to know. Not because said remuneration was unimportant, but because the question itself reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of why good people leave. They are not primarily leaving jobs. They are leaving broken trust loops.  

High-performing committed employees usually do not resign just because the work is hard; the pressure is high, or even because the pay is low. More often, they leave when trust between them and their leaders is broken. When they feel that respect, fairness, and mutual commitment are no longer there, they start looking for opportunities elsewhere.  

Trust is earned, not assumed, and most leaders have it backwards 

The phrase “trust is earned, not assumed” has become something of a management cliché. Most leaders will nod when they hear it. Far fewer actually live it from the follower’s perspective. In practice, many leaders unconsciously operate from the assumption that their positional authority carries a baseline of trust with it; that the title of manager or director confers a kind of relational credit that simply exists until an employee chooses to withdraw it.  

This is the wrong direction entirely. In healthy businesses, and within the framework of competent followership, trust moves in a loop. Leaders demonstrate trustworthiness through consistent, transparent, and fair behaviour. Followers respond with discretionary effort, honest engagement, and genuine commitment. Leaders observe this, affirm it, and reciprocate with greater investment in the individuals on their team. The loop sustains itself, and both parties grow within it.  

When a leader breaks that loop – even once or without realising it – the repair work required is considerable. And when the loop breaks repeatedly, or is never properly established in the first place, the rational response of any competent, self-aware employee is to start planning their exit.  

What a broken trust loop actually looks like 

It is rarely a dramatic incident. In my experience, trust in a leader does not usually collapse because of one spectacular failure. It erodes quietly, through a pattern of small signals that accumulate over months and sometimes years. The broken trust loop often begins with a commitment that is not honoured. A promise made in a one-on-one meeting that is quietly forgotten. A decision communicated without any rationale. A concern raised and dismissed without genuine consideration.  

The employee notices. They adjust their behaviour accordingly. They become a little more cautious, a little less forthcoming. The leader, often unaware that anything has shifted, continues as before. The gap widens. The employee stops bringing their real thinking to meetings. They execute their responsibilities functionally but stop contributing ideas they are not certain will be heard. They begin to manage their visibility rather than their contribution.  

This is the trust loop breaking down in slow motion. And in South Africa’s deeply relational workplace culture, where loyalty, respect, and the quality of interpersonal relationships carry extraordinary weight, this process is accelerated. People do not simply process a broken commitment as a management oversight. They experience it as a relational breach.  

The data confirms what leaders often do not want to hear 

This is not merely a qualitative observation. A report from LiveCareer (2025) found that 40 per cent of employees have resigned from a position specifically because they did not trust their manager. One in four workers surveyed said they did not believe their manager would act in their best interests. These are not employees who left because they found a better salary. They left because the relational contract had been broken. 

ADP Research (2025), drawing on three years of monthly data from 2,500 workers, found that employees who trust their managers and supervisors are 26 times more likely to report high levels of motivation and commitment than those who do not. HR Executive’s analysis of this research2 concludes that trust in leadership, not compensation, is the single most powerful predictor of long-term retention.  

To put it plainly: if your retention strategy is primarily built around salary benchmarks and benefits packages, you are addressing the wrong problem. The leaders I work with are often surprised by this. They have been taught to think in terms of economic incentives. They are less accustomed to examining themselves as the primary variable in whether their best people stay or go.  

Competent leadership means understanding how trust actually works 

The field of leadership and followership development has known for some time that trustworthiness is not a personality trait. It is a behavioural pattern, specifically, the pattern of doing what you say you will do, being consistent in how you treat people, and being transparent about the decisions that affect your team’s working lives. These are learnable behaviours. They are also behaviours that require a level of self-awareness that many leaders, however capable in technical or strategic terms, have never been asked to develop.  

Competent followership research adds an important dimension to this. Followers are not passive recipients of leadership behaviour. They are active, observant, and sophisticated assessors of their leaders’ character. They are watching, not to catch their leader out, but to determine whether investing their full energy and genuine commitment in this person and this company is a reasonable bet. When the signals they receive suggest that it is not, the most talented among them will act on that information.  

The leaders who retain their best people are not necessarily those with the most impressive credentials or the most charismatic presence. They are the ones whose people have learned, through accumulated experience, that they can be trusted to tell the truth, to follow through, and to treat each person on their team as someone whose contribution genuinely matters.  

Rebuilding a broken loop is possible, but it is slow work 

If you recognise elements of a broken trust loop in your team, the instinct is often to act quickly, to launch a new initiative, schedule a team-building day, or make a visible gesture of goodwill. These impulses are understandable but usually insufficient. Trust is not rebuilt through events. It is rebuilt through consistency over time. 

The first step is acknowledgement, not necessarily a public confession of error, but an internal recognition that something has shifted and that the responsibility for rebuilding it lies primarily with the leader. This requires the kind of honest self-examination that most leadership teams do not create the conditions for. It means asking your team for feedback and genuinely sitting with the answer, even when it is uncomfortable. It means doing what you say, in small things and large ones, without exception.  

It also means understanding that your team will need time to observe the new pattern before they believe it is real. This is not cynicism on their part. It is intelligence. A workforce that adjusts its trust levels based on observable evidence is doing exactly what a healthy, functioning team should do.   

The leader’s job is to give them sustained evidence worth trusting. 

Here is a question worth sitting with: When last did someone on your team tell you something that cost them something to say? Not a small logistical concern, but a genuine piece of honest feedback about how they are experiencing your leadership. If the answer does not come easily, it is worth asking why.  

Good people do not leave bad jobs. They leave when the loop that should connect their effort to a leader’s recognition and reciprocal investment has been broken, and when nothing in their experience suggests it will be repaired. The vacancy that follows is rarely filled with someone of equivalent calibre. The institutional knowledge, relational capital, and accumulated trust that person built with colleagues all walks out of the door with them.  

At 4Seeds Consulting, we work with leaders who are ready to examine the honest quality of their trust relationships with their teams. If this is a conversation your leaders need to have, we would welcome the opportunity to have it with you. Click here to to read more on our website.

It is one of the most honest and painful questions a leader can ask. And the answer, in my experience, is rarely about bad intent. Most leaders I work with are not cold or indifferent. They are busy, well-meaning, and doing what they believe good leadership looks like. The problem is that what they believe is happening, and what their people actually experience, are two very different things. In relational cultures (and South Africa is one of the most relationally oriented workplaces in the world) that gap between intention and impact is where disengagement quietly takes root.  

Intent does not equal impact in relational cultures 

What does well-intended leadership look like? We are talking about the manager who sends a motivational message on Monday morning. The executive who invests in team-building events. The director who genuinely believes their people are their greatest asset. None of this is insincere. And yet, disengagement persists.  

Gallup’s most recent global data tells a sobering story. In 2024, global employee engagement fell to 21 per cent. This is the lowest level recorded in over a decade. Gallup has called this “The Great Detachment”: employees who remain in their jobs but are emotionally checked out, going through the motions rather than genuinely investing in their work.  

What makes this striking is that most of these businesses are not led by people who do not care. Disengagement is not a product of malice or neglect but of a leadership approach that prioritises visible action over relational depth. Intent is assumed to be sufficient. Impacts are rarely examined.  

The relational gap that leaders often miss 

In relational cultures, people do not simply respond to what you do as a leader. They respond to how you make them feel. They are reading the room with extraordinary precision; noticing whether you remembered what they shared with you last week, whether your affirmation felt genuine or formulaic, whether your open-door policy is a real invitation or a performance. These are not trivial observations. They are the “data points” from which your people construct their experience of working for you.  

The Centre for Respectful Leadership captures this clearly when it notes that in most workplace interactions, we assume positive intent on our own part without considering how our behaviour lands on the receiving end. The target of behaviour – the employee on the other side of the interaction – cannot see your intentions. They can only experience your impact. This is the crux of the problem for well-intended leaders. A leader might genuinely believe they are being transparent, inclusive, and supportive. Yet their team might experience them as inconsistent and unapproachable. Both realities are true simultaneously. And in a relational culture, it is the experienced reality that drives engagement, not the intended one.  

The manager effect is real, and it is profound 

Gallup’s research consistently finds that 70 per cent of the variance in team engagement is attributable directly to the manager. Not the strategy. Not the compensation package. Not the office environment. The manager. When managers themselves feel disconnected, overwhelmed, or unclear about their role as people-leaders, their teams will reflect this. And the Gallup 2025 report highlights a particularly concerning trend: manager engagement fell from 30 per cent to 27 per cent in just one year. That is a steeper decline than in any other employee category.  

What this tells us is that we have a generation of middle and senior managers who are carrying significant pressure, attempting to lead with good intentions, and still producing disengaged teams. The issue is not motivation or effort. It is capability, specifically the relational capability that allows a leader to move beyond surface-level engagement and build the kind of trust that sustains discretionary effort over time.  

Data from Culture Amp confirms this further: when employees’ perception of their leaders declines, organisations can expect an immediate drop of around ten per cent in overall engagement levels, and that decline can take considerable time to reverse. What is more, the leading indicator is almost never a dramatic event. It is a quiet accumulation of moments where leaders failed to show up in the way their people needed.  

When the gap between values and experience widens 

One of the most damaging dynamics we observe in business is what happens when a company espouses strong values around people, respect, and inclusion, but the day-to-day experience of employees tells a different story. Leaders talk about psychological safety, but people do not feel safe raising concerns. Leaders talk about recognition, but acknowledgement is infrequent, generic, or applied inconsistently. Leaders talk about growth, but conversations about development are rushed or non-existent.  

This is not hypocrisy, in most cases. It is a gap between aspiration and skill. Leaders genuinely believe in these values. They simply have not been equipped to translate belief into consistent relational practice. And in a culture where people are extraordinarily attuned to authenticity – where they will sense immediately whether something is real or performed – this gap is felt acutely. 

Disengagement in these environments is not defiance. It is a rational response. When the cost of investing fully in a team or company exceeds the perceived return, people protect themselves by withdrawing. They remain. They perform at a functional level. But they stop bringing their full selves to work, and that is precisely where creativity, innovation, and genuine commitment reside.  

What this means for leadership today 

If you are a middle or senior leader reading this, the most important question to sit with is not “Do I have good intentions?” You almost certainly do. The question is: “What is the actual experience of working for me like?”  

This requires a willingness to look beyond output metrics and performance dashboards and to examine the relational quality of everyday interactions. It requires curiosity rather than assumption. It requires leaders who are willing to hear difficult feedback without becoming defensive, and who understand that impact, not intent, is where trust is built or broken.  

In a country and continent where relationships are not merely a cultural nicety but a fundamental currency of working life, leaders who do not understand this dynamic will continue to invest in engagement initiatives that produce surface-level compliance rather than genuine commitment. The numbers are already telling us this is happening. The question is whether leaders are willing to examine why.  

At 4Seeds Consulting, we work with leadership teams who are ready to close the gap between who they intend to be as leaders and who their people actually experience them to be. If this resonates with navigating leadership in your organisation, get in touch. We would welcome the conversation. Click here to book a discovery call with Kerstin Jatho to scope a bespoke programme designed to restore and retain employee engagement. 

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, only around one in five employees are strongly engaged worldwide. While executive teams may believe engagement is stable based on performance indicators, employees describe a very different lived reality. Contrary to leaders believing their companies provide a thriving, supportive culture, their employees frequently experience stress, lack of recognition, and poor communication. This has led to a state of ‘polite disillusionment’, where employees stay, but stop believing.  

Leaders must understand the distance between perception and “lived” reality if they want to close the gap, to sustain performance, build loyalty, and restore trust.  

What is causing the rift? 

Employees are feeling less engaged primarily due to burnout, a lack of clear communication, and a decline in feeling supported by leadership. Key drivers of this disengagement include unclear role expectations, stagnant career growth, insufficient recognition for hard work, and, in many cases, a mismatch between compensation and employee value.  

For example, one key reason is that the higher up a leader is in the organisation, the more insulated they are from ground-level feedback. Leaders often operate with a broader strategic view, while employees see only the immediate implementation and daily frustrations. Another is down to the knock-on effects of visibility bias. Research has found that leaders often equate presence in the office with productivity, while remote workers report higher productivity but feel less recognised. 

The mirage of performance 

Leaders often equate engagement with performance outputs like meeting targets, closing sales, and hitting deadlines. Yet performance alone is a lagging indicator. It signals what has happened, not how people feel while doing their work. Global research shows that recent engagement declines are tied to psychological disconnection and manager burnout rather than output metrics alone. Engaged employees show initiative, resilience, and discretionary effort. Performance without these qualities can mask disengagement and the slow erosion of capability. When leaders miss this nuance, they can misinterpret strong quarterly results as evidence of healthy engagement. In reality, many employees may be coasting, doing their jobs but not investing in their best energy or creativity.  

Loyalty versus transactional retention 

Leaders frequently assume that employees stay loyal because they have not resigned. Yet loyalty is no longer measured by job duration alone. Many employees remain where they are because of economic uncertainty, limited opportunities elsewhere, or the absence of compelling alternatives, not because they feel committed.  

Research suggests that when companies focus narrowly on retention – through rewards, bonuses, or job security – they may secure presence but not commitment. True loyalty comes from emotional and professional connection: employees who feel valued, respected, and treated fairly are far more likely to invest in discretionary effort.  

Rewards versus trust 

Many reward systems assume that financial or material incentives automatically generate engagement. In practice, rewards without trust can feel hollow. Trust is built through consistency, transparency, and fairness. Leaders who promise recognition or growth but fail to deliver erode trust quickly.  

An article published by Great Place to Work highlights how fairness in promotion decisions, transparent performance evaluations and credibility in leadership communication are foundational to trust. Without these, employees may view rewards as instruments of control rather than appreciation. Trust, not perks, sustains engagement.  

Voice and psychological safety 

Leaders often rely on annual engagement surveys or pulse tools to gauge sentiment. While these tools can generate data, they are frequently superficial if leaders do not act on the insights. Many employees report that they rarely see outcomes from survey feedback, leading to cynicism and a sense that their voice does not matter. Employee voice must be accompanied by psychological safety, the belief that speaking up will not lead to punishment or dismissal. Without this, employees withhold ideas and concerns, which stifles learning and erodes trust.  

Dignity and day-to-day experience 

Engagement is often discussed in broad terms such as goals, missions, and culture. Yet employees live engagement in daily interactions. Dignity at work is experienced when employees feel respected as whole human beings: their opinions acknowledged, their contributions fairly evaluated, and their wellbeing genuinely considered. When leaders ignore dignity, companies create environments where people comply and perform, but do not connect.  

Dignity includes ensuring equitable workloads, respectful communication, inclusive decision-making, and recognition beyond job titles and performance numbers. Daily behaviours matter far more than occasional corporate statements about culture.  

Fairness and transparency 

Fairness is a core psychological need. Leaders may believe that formal policies on equity and compliance are sufficient. However, fairness felt in daily practice is different from fairness designed on paper. Employees judge fairness by visible consistency: how decisions are made, conflicts resolved, and leaders behave under pressure. Leaders who make transparency a priority—sharing rationales for decisions, explaining promotion criteria, and allowing open dialogue—create a stronger sense of justice and connection.  

Conclusion 

Leaders often conceptualise engagement as performance, loyalty, and role fulfilment. Yet followers experience engagement through trust, fairness, voice, and dignity. Without aligning these realities, companies risk superficial engagement—performance without commitment, loyalty without connection and rewards without trust. Leaders who bridge this gap create workplaces where people contribute, innovate, and stay because they belong.  

4Seeds Consulting works with leaders and their teams to help bridge the gap between superficial engagement practices and those that have a profound impact on the way employees remain engaged and committed. 

Click here to book a discovery call with Kerstin Jatho to scope a bespoke programme designed to restore and retain employee engagement.