Why Your Best People Stop Speaking Up
I spent years blaming my team for problems I was creating—and I had no idea I was doing it.
I was CEO of a high-growth startup. Nine C-levels reported to me. We were scaling fast, hiring from big-name brands, and the pressure felt enormous. On paper, I had one of the strongest leadership teams in the company's history.
But I kept walking out of leadership meetings furious. No one had ideas. No one pushed back. I was making every decision and solving every problem, and I couldn't understand why a room full of smart, experienced people just sat there.
So I brought in my CEO coach to observe.
He sat through an entire leadership meeting without saying a word. At the end, I turned to him and said: "See what I mean? No one speaks up. No one has ideas."
He looked at me and said: "Of course not. Only you do. You've made it clear you're the only one with good ideas." Oof. My stomach dropped.
Then he said something I'll never forget: "You don't have a leadership problem. You have a Christine problem. They're all afraid to speak when you're in the room."
I remember thinking, That's not what's happening. I ask for input all the time. But then I replayed the meeting in my head…and I could see it.
I'd ask someone for their perspective, and before they'd finished their second sentence, I was already proposing the solution. Not because I didn't trust them. Because solving problems was the only thing that quieted the anxiety of leading a company growing faster than I could keep up with.
I was taking my team's knees out, one meeting at a time. And I genuinely could not see it.
From that day forward, I stopped joining those meetings.
And suddenly, they had plenty of ideas.
This is what happens when you lead without awareness: you feel the pain, but you can't see the cause. From that place, every attempt to fix things either does nothing or makes it worse.
When I thought the team was the problem, I stepped up and took on more. The more I did this, the weaker they got. Without my coach's insight, only catastrophe would have made me rethink the dynamic.
Insights can come from the outside—coaches, teams, trusted friends—but awareness isn't something to wait for. It's something to build.
If you wait for it, you'll be leading blind—stuck reacting when you should be building.
What Awareness Looks Like
When you're in a good place, awareness amplifies. You see what's working and do more of it.
After I stopped attending those leadership meetings, I started noticing a pattern: my team solved problems faster without me. They weren't suddenly smarter, they finally had room to think.
That awareness led me to audit every meeting on my calendar and ask one question: Does my presence here help, or does it create dependency?
That question cut my weekly meetings in half. The team's output didn't drop. It went up.
Awareness stops you from reinventing the wheel. It lets you focus on the patterns that are already driving results — and the ones that are quietly undermining them.
When you're not in a good place, awareness acts as a circuit breaker. When a deal falls through or there's a crisis outside of work, awareness helps you recognize your sense of urgency before you act on it.
I know this about myself now: when I wake up anxious, I default to problem-solver mode. I start micromanaging my team and getting tangled up in the weeds. It soothes me, but it's never what my business needs. Awareness lets me catch this pattern before I'm in the thick of it—and choose a different response.
Building the Practice
Most CEOs treat awareness like a switch—something you decide to turn on. But if it were just a decision, you'd have already made it. Awareness is a muscle. It takes practice, and practice takes time.
I often write about reclaiming your time through delegation, systems, automation—but once you get that time back, some of it needs to go here. Because awareness is what makes vision and strategy count.
When we try to blanket awareness over everything—all at once, all the time—it doesn't stick. Here's what works instead: define key areas to track. Set a concrete time each week. Build a generous container for reflection—not a rushed 10 minutes before your next call, but real, protected time.
Three areas to start with:
Big Picture
Many CEOs operate on outdated assumptions about where they are and where they're going. The strategy that got you here is often not the strategy that gets you there—but without regular reflection, you won't notice the drift until you're miles off course.
Every Monday, before you open Slack, write down your answer to three questions. One sentence each—with a number and a date.
What are you actually building toward right now? Not your five-year vision. What's the specific milestone you're driving toward in the next 90 days? If you can't answer in one sentence with a number and a date, you don't have clarity—you have a vision statement. There's a difference.
What needs your attention to achieve this? What will move the business toward that goal this week? What is specifically needed from you—and what is needed from the team?
Based on those answers, what is your job? Pretend you're just an employee. Write your actual job description for this week. Not your title. Your function. Where are the responsibilities that only you can fulfill? Everything else is a candidate for delegation.
Time and Energy
I've coached CEOs who were absolutely sure about where their time went—and then shocked by the reality when we broke down their calendar together. The gap between where you think your time goes and where it actually goes is where your energy bleeds out.
Block 30 minutes on Friday afternoon. Pull up your calendar from the week. For every block, ask yourself one question: Was this the highest-value use of my time?
Then color-code it. Green for work only you can do. Yellow for work you should delegate. Red for work that shouldn't exist at all. If you're honest, 40-60% of your week will be yellow or red. That's not a failure—that's your roadmap.
Pay attention to what drains versus what energizes you. The things that drain you are almost always delegatable. The things that energize you are almost always where you create the most value. Channel your energy accordingly.
Leadership
This is the hardest one—because it requires seeing yourself through your team's eyes, not your own.
Building leadership awareness means tracking patterns you don't usually see. It means knowing the difference between who you want to be as a leader, what you think you're bringing, and how you're actually impacting the people around you.
Here's a practice that changed everything for me: in your next meeting, don't speak for the first 10 minutes. Just observe. Count how many times someone looks to you before offering their opinion. That number is your dependency score—and it tells you more about your leadership than any 360 review.
Ask yourself regularly: Am I empowering my team or creating a version of what I had—a room full of capable people who've learned to wait for the CEO to decide? And are the people in these roles still the right people — or have we outgrown each other?
Why Redundancy Works
Answering the same questions every week feels painfully redundant at first. But if you answer with curiosity and honesty each time, something will shift.
You might answer the same way for weeks—and then one week, you won't. You'll go to write down that goal and feel a quiet "no." Wait. That's not what we're building toward anymore.
It's nearly impossible to catch change while you're in it. But when you build a habit of challenging the assumption of continuity, you catch drift early—before it becomes a crisis. Before the company falls out of alignment with itself.
Putting It All Together
A coach once told me I loved "blowing things up." I didn't want to hear it, but my resistance told me there was truth there. Sitting with it revealed how my "hero complex"—my need to be the one who fixed everything—was holding my entire team back. That's what awareness does. It shows you the pattern you can't see from inside it.
That leadership meeting—the one where my coach told me I had a Christine problem—changed how I run every company I've built since. Not because of the specific feedback. Because it showed me what it costs to lead without seeing clearly.
Awareness isn't about perfection. It's about calibrating to reality. The best CEOs I know aren't the smartest operators—they're the ones who've built the habit of seeing clearly, even when the picture isn't flattering. Especially then.
Because the gap between where you think you are and where you actually are? That's the gap where businesses die quietly.
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See you next week! 👑
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