The Engagement Numbers Nobody in the Room Was Surprised About

She had prepared the presentation carefully. Ten slides. Two years of trend data. A recommendation with a budget line.

The numbers she showed were bad. Managerial trust was down. Willingness to raise concerns was down. High-performer intent to stay was down. She had color-coded everything.

The executives in the room looked at the slides. Nobody was surprised. Not one head tilted. Not one eyebrow moved. Her CEO said, "Yeah, that tracks."

She walked out of the meeting realizing something she had been trying not to realize for a year.

What "that tracks" was actually saying

The room's lack of surprise meant something specific. It meant every executive in the room had already known the numbers were bad. They had known before her presentation. They had lived it.

The CHRO's problem was not that leadership needed better data. Leadership had the data. Leadership was in the data. The problem was that the room was accepting the numbers as background weather rather than as an operating result they were responsible for.

The most expensive form of a bad engagement number is not the number itself. It is the room learning to live with the number. Once the room stops being surprised, it stops being motivated. The amygdala requires novelty to fire. Chronic bad news becomes ambient. Ambient bad news does not move behavior.

She had two problems. The engagement problem, which was solvable with the right investment. And the room problem, which was that her executives had normalized the outcome and would fund tactics without changing the behavior that produced the outcome.

How much is one unresolved conflict really costing your company?

What she said in the room the second time

She did not present engagement data at the next meeting. She presented one number.

She had pulled the list of every senior employee who had left in the previous eighteen months. For each of them, she had done a discreet outreach and asked one question. "What was the specific moment you decided to leave?"

Nine of the twelve had answered. Seven of the nine had named a specific meeting, in specific detail, that had involved a specific executive in the room. She did not name the executives. She read the seven descriptions.

The room was different this time. It was uncomfortable. Two of the executives recognized their own meetings without her naming them.

She had done a form of affect labeling on the room itself. She had made the ambient bad news specific. She had put the emotion back into the data. Numbers had failed to move the room. Stories about the room's own behavior did not fail.

Doug Noll's new book Empathy Leadership: The Powerful Skill That Drives Winning Results lays out the moves people leaders use to make an executive room feel a number it has learned to ignore. See it here.

What she committed to next

She stopped presenting aggregate engagement data to the executive team.

She replaced it with one specific standing item. Every executive meeting opened with a two-minute segment where each executive named one interaction from the previous week where they suspected they had cost someone on their team a small amount of trust. Not a confession. A named observation.

The first month it was awkward. The second month it was uneven. By the third month, the CFO opened a meeting by saying he had corrected his VP of FP&A in front of her team and had watched her go silent for the rest of the meeting. He described it in one paragraph. No one commented. That was the practice.

The engagement number the following year moved. So did attrition. The CHRO did not attribute it to a new investment. She attributed it to the room learning to notice, out loud, what it was doing to the people who worked for it.

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