When the Room No Longer Shares the Same Reality

There were fifteen of us in that meeting room along with the founder and the cofounder. The conversation was about sales numbers, recruiting activity, and why the team was not hitting the targets leadership expected.

Those meetings had followed the same pattern for a while. Someone who had a good week would be recognized, held up as the example, and the rest of the room would be expected to do what that person was doing. It was not motivating. It felt more like being told you were falling short, week after week, with a different name attached to the standard each time. People absorbed it and came to expect it. By the time you walked into the room, you already knew how it was going to go.

This particular meeting, something fell through. I do not remember exactly what happened with the placement, only that a deal or a candidate fell apart, and someone asked a question or brought something up that may have ended it. Whatever it was, it landed in a room that had very little left to absorb.

The founder lost control. He punched his fist through the drywall, and the meeting ended abruptly.

The cofounder was cringing. You could see it on his face. He did not stop what was happening, and afterward he said what he needed to say to get people out of the room. He tried to put something back together. But everyone could tell it had not worked.

People talked about it briefly at lunch and then did not talk about it again. The atmosphere was everybody walking on eggshells. Nobody was surprised when people started leaving over the next thirty to sixty days, and that included the cofounder.

There was no sense of reality between the owners and the people in that room. That is what I kept coming back to afterward. What leadership believed was happening and what the people sitting in those chairs were actually experiencing had grown so far apart that by the time it came out, there was no longer a shared place to have the conversation from.

The founder thought the problem was the numbers. The room already knew it was something else. And the cofounder, who could see both sides of that distance, tried once to close it after the meeting ended.

Then he made the same decision everyone else made.