We’re all more vulnerable at work than in other areas of our lives because there’s so much as stake—

Why Traditional Solutions Don't Work

Most organizations try to address disengagement through:

Employee engagement surveys

Recognition programs

Team-building activities

Performance improvement plans

While well-intentioned, these approaches miss the core issue: Employees can't engage authentically when they're in protective mode.

You can't motivate someone out of a neurological threat response. You can't incentivize someone to drop their armor when their brain is convinced that armor is keeping them safe.

You need to address the root cause: the social hiding patterns that drive disengagement in the first place.

Social Hiding at Work

Employees and managers are human, of course, which means they experience—or fear—social pain at work. Criticism from a manager, judgment from peers, the fear of looking incompetent, worry about being "too much" or "not enough." Managers, in particular, frequently suffer from impostor syndrome, fearing they're not smart, knowledgeable, or competent enough to lead. And so they default to unconscious hiding behaviors such as (but not limited to):

Perfectionists are extremely uncomfortable with collaboration and innovation because both disrupt the control they feel compelled to maintain. Instead, they endlessly refine their work to avoid looking bad.

Inaccessible people, often hiding behind their computers or in their offices, spend as much time alone as they can to avoid the tension of being "found out" as not enough.

People-pleasers say yes to everything while secretly resenting the workload and burning themselves out.

Overachievers exhaust themselves to prove their worth and avoid disappointing their manager and teammates. "Looking good" and being admired are also frequently at the source of their drive to overachieve.

Cynics/iconoclasts reject organizational goals and norms as wrong, or "beneath" them, to avoid looking incompetent at doing things as expected and failing.

The smartest people in the room are driven to appear like they always know more than their team, and so they become very uncomfortable when other ideas might be accepted by the team or manager.

Procrastinators?

Over-delegators who avoid doing the hard work themselves?

Micromanagers?