Trish's Blog

There is a version of a well-run meeting that should make any leader pause. Everyone is present. The agenda moves at pace. Decisions get made without too much friction. People nod, confirm they are on board, and the meeting closes on time with a clear sense of forward momentum.

It looks like alignment. It feels like a team that is functioning well. And it may be masking something your team cannot afford to ignore.

What Silence Is Really Telling You

Silence in a team setting is rarely neutral. It usually means something. Someone is hesitating. Someone is uncertain about a direction but hasn’t found the moment to say so. Someone disagrees and has made the quiet calculation that the risk of raising it outweighs the value of being heard.

Most leaders miss this because silence is easy to read as agreement. The meeting moves forward, the decision gets confirmed, and everyone appears to be on the same page. But if the real thinking never made it into the room, that alignment is surface deep at best. It is agreement with what was said, not with what is true.

This is where decisions go wrong. Not in the dramatic moments of obvious conflict, but in the meetings that felt productive because nobody pushed back. The risk that went unexamined because naming it felt too uncomfortable. The assumption that shaped the entire plan without anyone having explicitly chosen it. The better approach that one person in the room could see clearly but had learned, from experience, was not worth the effort of raising.

Good people start to disengage long before they leave. And it often begins in the moment they realise their perspective isn’t going to change anything, so why take the risk of sharing it.

What Resistance Is Really Offering You

Silence is one signal worth learning to read. Resistance is another, and it is one that tends to get misread even more consistently.

When someone pushes back, slows things down, or responds to a proposal with hesitation rather than enthusiasm, the natural impulse is to manage it. To see it as negativity, or as someone being difficult, and to find the fastest route past it so the meeting can continue moving forward.

But resistance is almost always information. It might be pointing at a risk nobody has named yet. It might be reflecting an assumption that everyone is working from but that hasn’t been made explicit or examined. It might be the early signal of a perspective sitting just outside the conversation, waiting for someone to create enough space for it to surface properly.

When you move past resistance quickly, you don’t resolve it. You defer it. And what gets deferred has a way of becoming significantly more expensive later, when the decision has been made, the direction is set, and the thing nobody named is now the reason the plan isn’t holding up.

The Gap Between Who Is in the Room and What Gets Said

This is where Diversity of Thought stops being a principle and starts being a practical question worth asking honestly. The value of having different perspectives in your team is not measured by how many people are present in the meeting. It is measured by whether those people are letting their thinking be heard.

You can have a genuinely diverse team, with varied backgrounds, experiences, and ways of seeing, and still produce remarkably uniform decisions if the culture has quietly taught people that certain views are welcome and certain ones are not worth the risk. Diversity of Thought that stays unspoken is not diversity. It is unrealised potential sitting in silence while the meeting moves on.

This is central to what Weird Wisdom® at Work is about. Not simply ensuring that different people are represented, but creating the conditions where different thinking is genuinely expressed, genuinely explored, and genuinely used. That requires you to pay attention not just to what is being said in your meetings, but to what is missing. Not just to who is speaking, but to who has been quiet since the meeting began. Not just to the agreement in the room, but to the concern that hasn’t been raised yet.

Because the concern that hasn’t been raised is often the one that matters most.

What to Pay Attention to in Your Next Meeting

This does not require a restructure of how your meetings run. It requires a different quality of attention during them.

Notice who has not spoken by the halfway point. Not as a tick-box exercise, but as genuine curiosity about what you might be missing. Ask what concern hasn’t been raised yet. Not rhetorically, but as a real invitation for the room to go somewhere it hasn’t been willing to go. Pay attention to the moment the conversation gets a little uncomfortable, when someone says something that doesn’t quite fit the direction things were heading, or when the room goes quiet in a way that feels different from the quiet of people simply listening.

That moment of discomfort is often where the real work begins. It is the signal that something real is present in the room that hasn’t yet been fully seen. The instinct is to move past it. The more useful response is to move toward it, with curiosity rather than urgency to resolve it.

When you do that consistently, something changes in what your team brings to the room. People stop editing themselves before they speak. The thinking gets less polished and more honest. And the decisions that come out of those conversations are built on something more solid than the appearance of consensus.

A Question Worth Sitting With

There is a question underneath all of this that is worth asking yourself honestly, not as a critique but as a genuine leadership inquiry.

Are your people aligned? Or have they simply worked out that telling you the truth isn’t worth the risk?

Those two things can look identical from the outside. The meetings run smoothly in both cases. The decisions get made. The team appears to be moving in the same direction. But one of them is a team that is genuinely thinking together, and the other is a team that has learned to perform agreement because the cost of honesty felt too high.

The difference between those two teams is not talent. It is not commitment. It is the culture that has been built, in small moments and large ones, around whether honest contribution is genuinely welcomed or only welcomed in theory.

You have so much influence here. It can be shaped by what you do when the room goes quiet, when someone pushes back, when the uncomfortable question surfaces at the wrong point in the agenda. Those moments are not interruptions to the work of leadership. They are the work of leadership.

And the teams that know how to use them are the ones that consistently produce thinking worth acting on.