Every team has behaviour it doesn’t talk about. The thing everyone’s noticed and nobody’s named. The meeting that happens after the meeting. The person whose mood sets the temperature of the room without a word being said. It’s all there, in plain sight, and it never makes it onto an agenda.
Here’s the part that should bother a leader: none of that is free. Behaviour that goes underground doesn’t stop. It carries on doing its work where you can’t see it — and it sends you the bill later, usually at the worst possible moment, and usually itemised as something else.
The cost you can’t see on a spreadsheet
You know the visible costs. The resignation. The missed deadline. The project that quietly lost momentum and nobody can quite say when. What you don’t see is that most of those were the last line of a much longer invoice — one that started months earlier, the first time someone decided it wasn’t worth saying the real thing out loud.
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety put language to why this happens: people speak up when they believe they won’t be punished or humiliated for it, and they go quiet when they’re not sure. That’s the map, and it’s a good one. But a leader doesn’t experience “low psychological safety.” They experience a team that’s gone a bit flat. A meeting where the ideas dried up. A sense that people are agreeing a little too quickly. The concept is on the wall; the behaviour is in the room. My job is the room.
Because underground behaviour isn’t random. It’s a set of patterns, and each one is a cost centre. Silence that used to be thinking and is now calculating. Decisions being made in corridors because the meeting doesn’t feel safe enough to make them in. Disagreement that’s stopped surfacing — which sounds like harmony and is actually the most expensive silence you can buy, because you’re now paying for consensus you don’t have.
None of it shows up as a line item. All of it shows up in the numbers eventually, wearing a disguise.
Why naming it is the whole job
The instinct, when you find behaviour like this, is to fix it. Bring in a process. Have the away day. Move someone. And it doesn’t stick, because none of those things touch the thing underneath — they treat the tip and leave the mass.
What actually shifts it is smaller and harder: naming the behaviour, out loud, without flinching, and then leaving it there. Not “stop doing that.” Just “this is what I see happening.” Naming a thing gives people ownership of it. Instructing them gives you compliance, which is just underground behaviour with better manners.
That’s the difference between the visible team and the real one. Most leaders are working hard on the part they can see. The cost is all in the part they can’t — and I’ve written before about how good people go quiet long before anyone notices the bill.
The behaviour going underground is never the problem itself. It’s the receipt. The question worth asking isn’t “how do I stop it” — it’s “what has this already cost me, and how long have I been paying?”
Further reading
Try the Behaviourist Mirror — A short, free, confidential look at how your own team behaves. If this struck a chord, start here.
→ https://mycoai.co.uk/the-behaviourist-mirror/
The Leadership Behaviour Audit — When something’s gone underground and nobody’s naming it, this is how you find out what it’s costing you.
→ https://mycoai.co.uk/leadership-team-audit/
