Quiet Questions, Loud Change
- Christopher McCormick
- 12 minutes ago
- 4 min read
✔️ Schedule Bi-Weekly 1:1’s with each team member
✔️ Schedule Bi-weekly Leadership Team Meeting
✔️ Schedule Weekly Stand-up Check-in
✔️ Schedule Quarterly Performance & Development Check-in
I used to think leadership was a checklist: hire good people, tell them where to stand, measure what they do. Then Jonah walked into my meeting with headphones over his ears, a camouflage cap pulled low, and a portfolio so precise it made my notes look like hurried scraps (and I am very organized…ask anyone who works with me).
He didn’t raise his hand. He didn’t volunteer an opinion when the room spun through debate. He watched. He scribbled. Later, when half the team had left and the whiteboard still housed the remnants of our ideas, Jonah sat down and rearranged the whole thing. He drew connections I’d missed, labeled assumptions the group accepted, and circled a phrase I’d said in passing that suddenly mattered: “What if we let the problem tell us how it wants to be solved?”
I thought of the headphones and wondered: what is he trying to block out so he can hear better? I wondered about the cap. Was it a comfort, a shield, a signal? I wondered why someone who seemed so quiet could be so loud in the work he did. I didn’t hire Jonah. I acquired him in the latest round of re-org’s we tend to do during annual budgeting season. Given I didn’t have a lot of history, I simply made a note to “keep my eye out” on his ways of working.
Weeks later, an email landed in my inbox. It was short and precise - Jonah’s way. He asked if we could swap the first thirty minutes of our Monday stand-up for written updates. He said spoken updates sent his heart racing; writing gave him the space to think straight. He did not apologize. He did not accuse. He simply asked.
I felt a strange thing then: the urge to fix, to make it easier for everyone else. But what if “easier” is not the point? What if the question is:
Who are we making this workplace for, and who are we leaving to adapt?
What does it look like when we move from tolerating difference to making room for it?
When do we mistake visibility for value, or quiet for disengagement?
One afternoon I followed Jonah into a small room we’d turned into a “focus space” because someone had said the word and we’d nodded like we knew what it meant. As if creating a “focus space” would cement our legacy in perpetuity. In reflection, it is laughable. Entering the room, Jonah pulled down the shades, clicked a dimmer, and the room became a calm sanctuary, instead of the cold, predictable, meeting room designed for “collaboration” (large table in the middle, modern tech, chairs all around, whiteboards, etc.). He told me, slowly, about sensory overwhelm—the buzz of lights, the chatter that slides into the edges of thought, the mind-numbing slide decks that take up an entire wall as if to say “LOOK AT ME”. He described how instructions and predictable structures are like a map, while vague goals and constant changing agenda’s are like fog. He spoke without anger, only a steady insistence that clarity helps him show up fully.
I kept asking myself:
What systems did we build assuming everyone processed the world the same way?
How many bright people have retreated because the rules of engagement were never written for them?
How much creativity have we boxed out because it arrives in a different rhythm - fewer meetings, more preparatory notes, ideas that emerge in drafts instead of in the instant glow of a brainstorm?
There were awkward moments. There were times teammates misunderstood Jonah’s directness as rudeness, or mistook his need for routine for inflexibility. There were policies we clung to because they were familiar. Yet, when a deadline loomed and Jonah’s map guided us through complexity, his approach didn’t just help him - it steadied the whole team.
So I ask you, not to tell you what to do but to consider this:
Who in your office lowers the volume of their life to fit in?
What small question could you ask that would change how someone shows up - without making them explain everything about themselves?
When does “inclusion” become an invitation rather than an instruction?
If your systems had ears, what would they listen for?
If your meetings were designed to be heard differently, who would finally speak?
On a cool spring morning, Jonah left a page on my desk. On it he’d written one line:
“Let the work be shaped by the people doing it, not the people scheduling it.”
I placed that page on my wall, not because it absolved me of responsibility, but because it keeps asking me to look again.
Will you let the question sit in your office like an invited, yet quiet guest?
Will you listen long enough to notice who is adapting to you - and who might simply be waiting to be seen?