Trish's Blog

You have probably seen it. Someone posts a considered piece of content on Social Media, something that invites a response, sparks a reaction, or asks a question worth answering. People engage. Comments appear. Thoughtful replies arrive underneath the post.

And the person who wrote it? Gone. No response. No acknowledgement. Not even an emoji. Just silence where a conversation could have been.

It happens constantly, and it happens most visibly among people who describe themselves as leaders.

What the Silence Is Actually Saying

There is a familiar justification for not responding. You are busy. You posted when you had a moment and now the moment has passed. You will get to it later, and later never quite arrives. The post was the contribution; surely that is enough.

But here is the thing. When you post something and then disappear, you are not just leaving a comment unanswered. You are sending a signal about how you engage with people who take the time to respond to you. And that signal is worth paying attention to, because it doesn’t stay neatly contained to your Social Media activity.

Most of us are not dealing with hundreds of comments a day. This is not a Tony Robbins or Mel Robbins situation where the volume of engagement makes responding genuinely impossible. For most leaders posting on LinkedIn, the comments are manageable. Responding is a choice. And choosing not to is worth examining honestly.

How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything

There is a quote often linked to Dr. Phil: how you do anything is how you do everything. Whether he said it or not, the idea holds. The habits you bring to small, low-stakes moments tend to reflect the habits you bring to the larger ones. They are not separate versions of you. They are the same instincts, operating in different contexts.

So when you see someone post and disappear, it is reasonable to ask what their team meetings look like. When someone contributes an idea in a discussion, do they get a response? When someone takes a risk and speaks up, do they feel heard? Or does the communication run in one direction only, outward from the leader, with engagement treated as optional on the way back?

Leadership is not just about being visible. It is about making the people around you feel visible. And that capacity, or the absence of it, tends to show up consistently across contexts. The leader who ignores comments on their post is often the same leader whose team has learned that speaking up doesn’t produce much of a response. Not because they are unkind, but because the habit of genuine two-way engagement was never really built.

Why This Matters for How Your Team Shows Up

This connects to something fundamental about how teams develop, or don’t. When people feel heard, they contribute more. When they know their input will be acknowledged, they bring more of their thinking into the room. When the culture signals that communication genuinely goes both ways, people stop performing engagement and start offering it honestly.

This is directly relevant to Diversity of Thought and to what Weird Wisdom® at Work is about. One of the most consistent barriers to diverse thinking making it into team conversations is the quiet calculation people make about whether it is worth the risk. Whether their contribution will be received, considered, or simply absorbed into silence. That calculation is shaped by every interaction they have had with you as a leader, including the small ones, including the ones that feel inconsequential.

When you respond to someone who engages with your post, you are practising something real. You are building the habit of acknowledging contribution. You are demonstrating that when someone takes the time to engage with your thinking, you notice and you respond. That is not a small thing. It is the same muscle that determines whether your team believes it is worth raising the unconventional idea, naming the concern, or saying the thing that might not land cleanly.

Connection is built in the small things. And the small things are where character is most clearly visible, precisely because they feel low-stakes enough that nobody is performing.

The Practical Reality

Responding does not require a lengthy reply. It does not require you to engage with every comment in depth or turn your Socil Media feed into a second job. It requires acknowledgement. A genuine response that tells the person who took the time to engage with your thinking that you noticed and you appreciated it.

That takes less time than most leaders think. And the return on it, in terms of what it builds, both in your online community and in the habits it reinforces in how you engage more broadly, is disproportionate to the effort.

If you are posting content about leadership, about culture, about the kind of teams you believe in building, and then disappearing the moment the post goes live, there is a gap between what you are saying and what you are doing. That gap is visible. To your network, and if you are honest about it, to yourself.

Leadership in the Small Moments

The leaders who build genuinely engaged teams are rarely the ones who perform engagement in the big moments and ignore it everywhere else. They are the ones who have understood that how you show up in the small moments, the quick response, the moment of acknowledgement, the choice to stay present rather than move on, shapes everything about the culture around you.

Your post is not the contribution. Your post is the beginning of a conversation. The contribution is what you do when someone responds to it.

So the next time you feel the pull to post and move on, stay for a little while. See who shows up. And show up back.

Because if the people in your online community can’t count on hearing from you, it is worth asking honestly whether the people in your team can.