Don't Wait For Your Own Headline
- Debbie Braden
- Apr 20
- 4 min read
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live.” Those are the words of an unidentified man in a video as he lit pallets of toilet paper on fire in a Kimberly-Clark warehouse resulting in damaged estimated to be $500 million.1
A fired worker in Spain caused $2.7 million in damage by deliberately opening wine storage tanks spilling 60,000 liters of red wine.2
Molotov cocktails thrown at Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s home3, arsonists setting Tesla sales offices on fire in New Orleans—employees and customers and other acts of violence are on the rise.4
It’s easy to read these headlines as someone else’s problem. These are lagging indicators of something that was already broken much earlier upstream. This is not political commentary.
When an employee lights a match or opens a valve—the first reaction is shock. But it shouldn’t be because the match was lit long before anyone struck it.
Employee disengagement doesn’t arrive as an event. It builds over time. It’s the concern raised in a one-on-one that never got a follow-up. It’s the employee survey that was taken and summarized in a quick slide about the company but never mentioned again.
These moments may start as employee disagreement, pointed email responses, or awkward questions in a town hall—small moments of unaddressed friction compound over a period of time, until they don’t. It’s when things go quiet that should cause you to pay closer attention.
Are you actually listening—or just collecting?
Most organizations have listening tools. Annual engagement surveys, pulse checks, town halls. And many leaders believe these tools are working because there are metrics and a public forum for engagement. But there are a couple inherent problems that exist with these tools today, even if the intent is there.
First, they were designed for a time when organizations moved at a slower pace. Annual surveys, quarterly pulse checks no longer surface information fast enough for the rapid pace organizations are moving in today’s world. By the time the results are in, the moments that may have mattered have long passed with more pressing issues surfaced after.
The second is that these tools were created for the organization, not the people. Questions like: Would you recommend this company to friends and family as a great place to work. Do you know how your work supports company goals? Do leaders keep you informed about what’s happening?
Their questions geared toward people tend to look like: Do you believe there are career opportunities at this company? Do you feel recognized and appreciated?
And the fundamental challenge underneath it all is these surveys are not anonymous. People know their opinions are not protected. Small teams. Employee IDs and email addresses used to log into the survey. Employees are not naïve. They calculate what’s safe to say and calibrate accordingly. What comes back to the employer is useful vanity metrics but is scrubbed from the very data that would help them learn true employee sentiment.
Informal listening is where the early signal lives. It’s making sure there are channels open for employees to speak – respond and comment to articles. Making sure managers have the tools they need to know what to look for and how to raise up questions and concerns that come from their teams. It may be to remove itself from the conversation entirely and hire a third party to do the listening—and get at the heart of what people see and how they feel. What’s actually being said in the hallway and on the front-lines. What the questions are that aren’t being asked in the all-hands because they believe the answer won’t be real.
I recently supported a high-growth company with confidential employee listening—confidential interviews of a cross-section of their employee population giving voice to people who raised issues the company was unaware of. Not because they didn’t care but that the channels were not in place. Now they have the ability to address these issues that if left unchecked would have festered into increased absenteeism and turnover which would have led to poor customer experience and loss of revenue.
Things need to be addressed before they become something harder to contain. That was where my client was headed. And what leaders often misread.
Silence isn’t resolution
When employees stop raising concerns, it can feel like things have stabilized. That’s not necessarily true. People don’t go quiet because the problem went away. They go quiet because they stopped believing it mattered to speak. That silence is not the end of the problem. It’s the problem going underground.
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace reports that global employee engagement has dropped to 20% and cost world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity.5
You don’t have to be Kimberly-Clark or face $500 million loss to feel the cost of a workforce that has stopped trusting you. Disengagement is expensive long before it becomes criminal. Turnover, productivity loss, institutional knowledge walking out the door, customers who feel the culture break through their interactions—the cost is accumulating whether or not it makes the news.
There is a lot going on for leaders to be considering right now—hitting quarterly numbers, navigating a changing landscape of supply chain, and more. But the leaders paying attention right now aren’t waiting for their own headline. They’re asking harder questions about what they’re not hearing—and why.
That’s the only place this work can start.
1 Los Angeles Magazine https://lamag.com/crimeinla/worker-charged-federally-and-by-state-in-500m-kimberly-clark-warehouse-fire/
3 The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/us/open-ai-sam-altman-molotov-cocktail.html
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