The People You Ignore Save or Sink You
Why real leadership—and real love—begins not with the loudest voices, but with listening to those we often fail to notice.
It was a Tuesday evening, and I was pacing the kitchen, phone wedged between my shoulder and cheek, reviewing a crisis deck with a colleague while scanning the fridge for snack ideas I wouldn’t act on.
Behind me, my youngest son stood quietly with a poster board and a glue stick.
“Daddy, can I—”
“Just a second,” I mouthed.
He waited. Long enough. Then disappeared down the hallway without a word.
Later that night, I found his school project propped against a chair in the dining room.
There were bulleted facts about dairy animals, a grainy photo of us by the goat pen from a petting zoo visit, and—at the bottom—blue marker scribbled over construction paper:
“My Dad teaches people how to listen.”
He hadn’t said it to me.
He’d written it for someone who might read it.
And that someone… was me.
In the corporate world, I’ve learned that there are always two org charts.
The one they give you, and the one that tells you how things actually get done.
Titles are often decorations.
Influence lives in the details.
I remember a woman named Liz, executive assistant to a regional CEO. She wasn’t on the risk committee or the tech transformation team. But she knew the pulse of the firm better than anyone with a 3-letter title.
She once pulled me aside before a major board presentation. “You may want to flip slides 12 and 13,” she said quietly. “The Chairman’s attention drifts before lunch—acronyms don’t help.”
I flipped them.
The meeting went better than expected.
Afterwards, she simply smiled and said, “You’re welcome.”
She’d seen it happen dozens of times. She just didn’t always say it.
The difference? I asked.
Early in my product transformation days, I sat in a war room with a dozen engineers debating rollback scenarios for a payments release. There was one junior engineer—Anil—who sat quietly for most of the session. Near the end, he spoke just above a whisper.
“I think we’re underestimating the rollback failure chain. Especially the way it interacts with FX.”
I nodded. Thanked him. Moved on.
Three weeks later, we rolled back. And triggered a chain of failures across our international settlement rails.
When I circled back to him, apologizing for brushing it off, he shrugged.
“I figured maybe it wasn’t my place to push.”
That line still bothers me.
It wasn’t that I didn’t hear him.
It’s that I didn’t invite him.
My middle son is a different kind of quiet. He listens with full eyes.
Last year, during a particularly stressful week, I was buried in meetings. We were launching a new advisory product, and everything felt on fire—timelines slipping, team tensions rising.
At home, I was silent at dinner. Edgy. Half-present.
Later that night, my son walked in, sat down across from me, and said something I wasn’t ready for.
“Dad, I know when you’re pretending everything’s okay. You’re good at it. But you blink a lot when you’re mad.”
He smiled gently, like it wasn’t a challenge. Just truth.
Then he added, “You don’t have to protect us from your hard days. We just like knowing you’re real.”
It disarmed me in the deepest way.
Because he wasn’t asking me to fix anything.
He was reminding me I didn’t need to carry it all alone.
In both the boardroom and the living room, I’ve learned this:
The loudest voice isn’t always the wisest.
And the people who save us rarely announce themselves.
I’ve worked through global state-actor cyber incidents, M&A meltdowns, and vendor breakdowns. In each of those moments, the person who helped break the logjam was never the most senior person in the room.
It was the one watching closely from the edges.
A junior compliance analyst who flagged the subtle pattern in transaction logs.
A silent PM who saw the team was burning out and quietly shifted timelines before it became public.
A receptionist who overheard a casual client comment that turned out to be the start of a reputational risk.
Sometimes, the people we overlook are the ones holding the very thread we’re about to lose.
And at home, it’s no different.
My daughter once came to me after an awkward conversation at a family gathering. I had spoken with a relative too directly—what I thought was clarity, she felt was cold.
She didn’t lecture. Didn’t raise her voice.
She just said, “You know, sometimes the truth doesn’t land because of what you said. It lands because of how safe you made someone feel when you said it.”
She was 17.
And I—someone who had spent years coaching executives on clarity, trust, and influence—felt like I was back in kindergarten.
My wife has always had that gift.
She once said after a particularly rough breakup with a partner-client, “Maybe they didn’t betray you. Maybe they just never had the same values, and you were the only one pretending.”
She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to free me.
And she did.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe:
Leadership isn’t about being the loudest voice. It’s about noticing the voices that rarely get invited in.
Presence matters more than persuasion. People offer their truth when they feel it’s safe to do so.
Listening is not passive. It’s an act of generosity. Of setting down your ego long enough to let someone else’s clarity shine through.
The hardest truths are not shouted. They are offered. Gently. From the margins.
And too often, we miss them—because we’re too busy broadcasting, too addicted to certainty, too in love with our own voice.
But the people you ignore?
They save you. Or they let you sink.
Not out of spite, but because you never gave them room to offer the truth they were carrying.
These days, I try something new.
In every meeting, I look for the person who hasn’t spoken.
I ask the intern, the analyst, the associate: “What are we missing?”
At home, I check in with the quiet kid.
And I’ve learned:
The voices that stay quiet the longest often carry the weightiest truths.
Not because they’re timid.
But because they’ve been watching.
And waiting.
Take a moment to really listen to the people you love—and enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
And thank you for spending some of it with me.
Warm regards,
Adi