Why good employees go quiet when bosses undermine them

It starts quietly. A strong contributor shares a draft plan in a weekly review. The boss interrupts, corrects a minor point for show, and shifts credit to a favorite. The room goes flat. After the meeting, work continues, just with less initiative. The next week, the same contributor speaks less. By the third review, they have stopped volunteering solutions. They wait to be asked. Performance looks steady on paper, yet the energy that used to power stretch work has disappeared.

Founders tell themselves that this is a personality mismatch or a season of fatigue. It rarely is. In my experience with early teams in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Riyadh, it is a power problem dressed as performance feedback. Good people go quiet when the cost of speaking outweighs the benefit. When a manager undermines someone, the message is not subtle. The message is that ideas and status are not earned, they are permitted. In systems that run on permission, silence is a rational survival tool.

Undermining usually does not look like shouting. It looks like selective nitpicking in front of peers, late edits that erase authorship, private encouragement that becomes public distancing, or vague performance comments that cannot be disproven. In Southeast Asian cultures where respect and group harmony matter, the social penalty for confronting a manager can be severe. Employees weigh not only the boss’s reaction but the team’s willingness to back them. If they sense they will have to stand alone, they will protect relationships by staying quiet. This is not cowardice. It is calculus.

The situation becomes worse in hybrid or distributed teams. Undermining travels faster in chat logs and comment threads. Once a manager establishes the right to trim a contributor’s credibility, every future discussion is preloaded. The team reads tone as instruction. People adapt by removing risk. They stop shipping unpolished drafts. They limit proposals to what already has explicit approval. The company loses time and upside, then mislabels the loss as caution. Founders assume they need more motivation. They actually need to fix power.

The breakdown often starts with one misaligned incentive. A manager wants to look decisive to the executive team. They monitor optics instead of outcomes. That manager believes challenging a report publicly will brand them as rigorous, so they do it more. The behavior becomes a ritual. Over time, the best people either disengage or leave. Those who stay learn to optimize for safety, not impact. I have seen a whole product group in a Series A company move from ideation to permission seeking in under two quarters because one respected manager normalized small humiliations during standups. The metrics did not crash, which fooled leadership. What crashed was the appetite for bold work.

Many founders ask whether this can be fixed with training. Training helps only if you call the pattern by its real name. This is not a feedback deficiency. It is reputation theft. When managers chip away at a person’s credibility in public, every future decision about that person becomes biased. Even if the manager apologizes later, the reputation damage remains, because the team remembers the public moment. People silence themselves to avoid that moment. You cannot coach your way out of this with generic phrases about psychological safety. You need rules.

My moment of clarity came in a portfolio company where a top operator stopped proposing cross-border pilots. She had shipped more than anyone else, then went quiet. When I asked why, she said, very calmly, that she no longer trusted the review table. She was not afraid of rejection. She was tired of being corrected for effect. Her phrase stayed with me. Corrected for effect. The next day I sat with the founders and the VP who ran the group. We replayed recordings and read comments. The pattern was obvious once we looked. The manager’s critiques were not about raising the work. They were about raising himself. Every time pressure rose, he cut someone down to look taller.

What changed the team was not a town hall. It was a new operating agreement for how we challenge work. We separated the right to question from the right to perform public theater. We made contribution ownership visible and stable. We wrote down escalation routes that did not require the undermining manager’s approval. We also rotated who ran reviews and who opened the floor. The silence cracked within two cycles. The same operator who had gone quiet shipped two pilots in thirty days because the room stopped playing status games.

Founders need a simple way to diagnose and repair this without turning the company into a tribunal. Start with the rule that credibility cannot be edited after the fact. If someone led the work, their authorship stands in the room and in the writeups. If a manager wants to add context, they do it in a way that preserves authorship first. Next, enforce that critiques target the artifact, not the person. The moment a manager begins to generalize about capability in front of the group, stop the meeting and move that conversation to a private, structured channel. Finally, remove ambiguity in escalation. If a report feels undermined, there must be a path to raise it that is not social suicide. In Malaysia or Saudi, where deference to seniority can be strong, you may need to designate a neutral peer lead or HR business partner as the first step. Do not make the only option a confrontation with the offender.

Culture adds nuance. In Singapore you will see silence used to maintain harmony even when people are collectively unhappy. In Saudi you will see strong loyalty to leaders coexisting with an expectation that leaders defend dignity in public. In Malaysia teams often try to solve quietly in WhatsApp groups. Do not fight this reality. Design for it. Create private feedback windows that are real, then make sure leaders are judged on how they guard dignity under stress. If you want people to speak, protect them when they do. If someone raises a concern about undermining, your response should be procedural, not emotional. Thank them, investigate with specific examples, and adjust meeting and authorship rules fast. Do not signal that they created drama. They took a risk so the system can heal.

Why Good Employees Stay Silent is a question leaders ask when they already know the answer. People stop talking when talking stops working. They stay quiet when ideas get turned into evidence against them. They wait when the manager who undermines them is rewarded for being tough. If you do not change that math, no amount of values posters will matter.

Here is the mini framework I now use with founders who suspect they have a silence problem. First, restore safety in public. Make a clean rule that authors present their own work and that critiques address the work line by line. If a leader needs to raise a performance concern, they do it one to one with a clear record. Second, align accountability in writing. Every project document should show ownership at the top and keep that ownership through edits and reviews. This prevents quiet erasure, which is a common trigger for silence. Third, create fair escalation. Define who receives concerns about undermining and what happens next. Keep timelines short. Silence grows in long gaps. Fourth, insist on evidence. Managers must bring specific examples when they question capability. Vague claims are not accepted. When evidence is required, the team learns that confidence is based on work, not theater.

If you think this sounds heavy for an early team, I get it. New companies pride themselves on being informal. Informal is fine until power is misused. The point is not to build bureaucracy. The point is to keep the room safe enough for hard problems. The best people do not need comfort. They need protection from games. When they know the room works, they bring the bigger idea and accept the sharper critique.

What would I do differently if I were starting again with my first company in Kuala Lumpur. I would write our review rules on day one. I would make authorship visible, and I would rotate who runs the room. I would judge managers not only by delivery, but by how their teams speak. If a team is strangely quiet, I would not celebrate the calm. I would investigate the cost.

A final word to the founder who recognizes their company in this story. Do not look for villains. Look for rituals that train people to hide. Change the ritual. Set the rule that dignity is protected in public, and that hard conversations happen with evidence in private. When people see that you hold this line, they will speak again. The goal is not volume for its own sake. The goal is a room where the best idea can survive pressure without its author being cut down for effect. That is how you protect velocity. That is how you keep your best people from using silence as armor.