We’ve become experts at ignoring you.
If we believed every promise, every mission statement, and every ‘culture is our superpower’ slide, we’d be paralyzed.
It’s a survival mechanism.
We treat cheap talk like spam because, economically, that’s exactly what it is: low-cost, high-volume, and mostly irrelevant.
So we ignore it. Without even looking.
The only thing that makes it past the filter is a signal that was expensive to send. A signal that required you to sacrifice efficiency, burn resources, or take a risk.
If it was easy for you to say, it’s easy for us to ignore.
Now, words are cheap because everyone has access to the same dictionary. You can say “our people are our greatest asset” and “we’re committed to this transformation” and “I’ve got your back” without breaking a sweat.
That’s the first ninety percent.
The costly signal lives in the last ten percent, the part that most people believe is too expensive.
→ It’s the leader who cancels the board meeting to sit with the team during a crisis.
→ The executive who takes the smaller bonus so the team keeps their project funding.
→ The manager who stays late not to send more emails, but to learn the technical work deeply enough to actually help.
Except here’s the thing: it’s not about the gesture.
The Signal We’re Looking For
When you say something that costs you nothing, we know you might not mean it. When you say something and then do the hard thing – the expensive thing, the thing that extracts a price from you specifically – that’s when we start paying attention.
Most leaders optimize for the appearance of commitment without its cost. They write the values on the wall, announce the priority in the meeting, promise support in the moment, and then they vanish when the actual price comes due.
The team notices. They’re doing the same math the peacock’s mate does: can this signal be faked? If yes, it tells me nothing. If faking it would cost more than telling the truth, now I’m listening.
This is why the leader who says “I made this decision” without absorbing any personal consequence gets ignored. But the leader who says “I made this decision, here’s what I’m doing to fix it, and here’s the penalty I’m paying for getting it wrong”? That’s a different conversation entirely.
What You’re Really Asking
When you ask if your team trusts you, you’re actually asking: have I put enough skin in the game that they know I can’t afford to lie?
Not: did I say the right thing?
But: did saying it cost me something they can see?
The uncomfortable truth is that if your words and your incentives point in different directions, your team will believe your incentives every time. Costly signals beat cheap talk. Always have. Always will.
So the question your team is asking isn’t so much whether you mean what you say.
The question is: what are you willing to pay to prove it?
Keep lighting the path,
Michael
