A regional director who ends every performance conversation with two minutes of silence and does not fill it.
The silence after a hard question is where the real answer lives. Most leaders fill it too fast.
Leaders who are uncomfortable with silence in a performance conversation communicate that they value resolution over truth, and teams quickly learn to give them the resolution they seek rather than the truth they need to hear.
The pause after a difficult question, held with patience and without rescue, creates the space in which a team member actually thinks rather than simply responds, and the difference between those two outputs is the difference between compliance and commitment.
Strong operators in multifamily have learned that the most important intelligence in any conversation is almost never the first thing said. It is what surfaces after the discomfort of not knowing what to say next.
She asked the question and held the silence for two full minutes. He said something he had never said out loud before. It changed the trajectory of the conversation, the relationship, and eventually the property. Do not fill the silence.
The leader who cannot tolerate silence will never hear the truth. — Mike Brewer
In your next one-on-one, ask the hardest question you have been avoiding and then say nothing for sixty seconds. What do you think you will hear?