Your team is not lazy. They feel watched.

“Have you ever worked for someone who knew all your performance numbers, but they didn't know you?”

This is not a feelings topic. This is a performance topic because when people feel watched, they stop telling you the truth, and once truth disappears, you lose speed, you lose quality, and you lose trust, even if the numbers still look fine on paper.

Most leaders respond to tension with tighter management, adding more check-ins, status updates, and scorecards, but those moves often solve the wrong issue and make the real issue worse.

You do not have a KPI issue. You have a visibility issue.

There are two kinds of visibility, and your team knows the difference without needing a slide deck to explain it.

One kind feels like support because it reduces confusion and clears obstacles, while the other feels like surveillance because it increases pressure while ignoring the cost of production.

If you want loyalty, initiative, and ownership, you need a skill many leaders avoid because it requires honesty instead of control.

You need to see people accurately.

In my conversation with John R. Miles, he started in a place many leaders skip.

He said feeling seen starts with self-mattering, which means an inner sense of worth that does not rise and fall with performance, titles, or approval, and when worth depends on performance leadership drifts toward control because the leader starts chasing output and missing what it costs people to deliver.

You see this pattern long before a person gets a job.

Some people learn invisibility because it feels safer in their home, and other people learn performance because attention only shows up after achievement, but both paths teach the same lesson.

Worth becomes conditional. Then work finishes the job.

Workplaces measure outcomes, and measurement helps when it guides decisions, yet the danger starts when people become the metric, because a person who feels reduced to numbers stops offering truth and starts offering compliance.

John dropped a stat leaders tend to ignore until it shows up as turnover.

About 70 percent of people worldwide feel disengaged.

Leaders keep asking, “How do I motivate them?” while missing a better question.

“What keeps stripping away a person’s sense of worth until they stop bringing their full mind to work?”

When self-mattering erodes, people protect themselves in predictable ways.

They stop raising risks early because risk brings punishment, they stop offering new ideas because new ideas bring scrutiny, and they stop taking ownership because ownership feels unsafe under constant evaluation.

From the outside, it looks like disengagement.

From the inside, it feels like self-protection.

Then leadership responds with more management.

Another meeting appears on the calendar, updates get requested more often, and new tracking shows up for tasks that never needed tracking before, and from the leader’s seat, it looks like structure, while from the employee’s seat, it feels like being watched.

John also shared a painful personal turning point.

He hit external success and felt empty, and he described how busyness took over while his physical and emotional health, and his relationships, started unraveling, which matters for leaders because your team watches what your success costs you and learns what you reward.

So what replaces surveillance with support?

John described leadership as “eyes on, hands off,” which means you set clear intent, remove obstacles, train people well, and trust them to execute without hovering over every move, because high standards and high trust belong together; one without the other produces fear.

This is also where many organizations break.

Top leaders create a strategy; the strategy is translated through layers; and by the time it reaches the front line, the work feels disconnected from the mission, so people stop feeling proud of what they do and start feeling like parts of a machine.

If people do not know where they fit, they do not give their best, and it does not matter whether the role sits at the entry or executive level.

John offered a blunt way to spot the truth fast.

Watch faces, posture, and energy, because pride shows and depletion shows, and those signals appear long before a survey or an exit interview tells you what is happening.

So here is the move for next week.

Stop asking, “How do I manage them better?” and start asking, “Do they feel seen, heard, and valued here, and do they understand how their work connects to purpose?”

Start with your front-line leaders, because when their energy drains, their teams drain too, and no poster on a wall fixes that.

The strongest part of the conversation came near the end, because John did not prescribe a long list of changes.

He pointed to small moments where presence changes the direction of a relationship.

A pause before you reply, a question instead of a verdict, a clear statement of intent before you ask for an update, and recognition that names what a person did and why it mattered to the work.

Those moments shape trust, and trust shapes performance, and performance shapes loyalty.

Three takeaways:

• People do not leave accountability. People leave environments where truth feels unsafe.

• When worth depends on performance, leadership drifts toward control, and people drift toward hiding.

• Frontline leaders set the tone, and their energy becomes the team’s ceiling.

The full conversation includes the day-one question that one employer asks new hires, which leaves people in tears, and it explains why many engagement programs fail before they start.

Watch the full video: YOUTUBE