For months, you searched for someone who could make decisions without constant supervision. Someone who had already seen how costly mistakes happen, how clients are lost, and why certain procedures survive only because no one has questioned them for years. When you found that person, their experience was the main reason you hired them.
Then they started work.
They pointed out work being done twice, a decision that was continually put off, and a process that took time away from employees while offering clients nothing. They had not come to argue or to prove they knew more. They were doing what you had hired them to do. They were trying to recognise what, after years of repetition, had come to seem normal to the people inside the company.
At first, you listened. Then you explained that “things are different here.” Before long, you started saying they struggled to fit in, asked too many questions, and did not understand the company’s culture. The experience that had been their greatest strength in the interview became a problem as soon as it challenged the established way of working.
Of course, an experienced person is not always right. Nor is every change good simply because it is new. But if you hired someone for their ability to think independently, you cannot accept their opinion only when it confirms your own. In that case, you were not looking for experience. You were looking for someone who would carry out your decisions without asking too many questions.
Then something happens that no report records. The person stops making suggestions. Not because they no longer see the problems, but because they have learned what it costs them to speak about them. They still come to work, finish their tasks, and meet their deadlines. On paper, everything is fine. But they no longer bring to the company what you hired them for.
For an owner, that is a serious defeat, even when it goes unnoticed. It is not enough to hire people who know more than we do in particular areas. We must also be willing to hear them when they show us that we have set something up incorrectly. If we treat every disagreement as an attack on our authority, over time we will end up with a team that does not raise problems, but works out what we want to hear.
Few people notice that kind of loss. No one has resigned, no position is vacant, and there is no cause for alarm. Everything seems to be working, until one day you make a mistake that someone in your company could have prevented, but stopped warning you about long ago.
If that person leaves one day, their departure will not be the moment you lost them.
You lost them much earlier.
On the day they concluded that, in your company, it was wiser to stay silent than to think for themselves.
From that moment on, you are no longer paying for their experience.
You are paying for their silence.
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