“My team just won’t take initiative anymore.” That’s what one of your managers tells you. Employees who used to solve problems on their own now seem reluctant to make decisions. They’re asking for approval for routine tasks, projects are taking longer, and managers are spending more time sorting out issues their teams used to handle themselves. You’ve heard similar things from other managers. Some think employees have become too dependent on their direction. Others wonder whether people are just disengaged.
But employees are telling you something different. Some say priorities keep changing, so it’s hard to know which decisions will hold up. Others say they’re being asked to take more ownership while also being held accountable for outcomes they can’t fully control. A few say they have plenty of freedom to make decisions, but they’re stretched so thin that they don’t have time to think beyond what’s right in front of them. And not everyone is reporting a problem. Some teams seem to be doing just fine.
So you have managers describing a lack of initiative, employees describing several different obstacles, and no clear explanation for why things seem worse in some parts of the organization than others. Maybe decision-making authority is unclear. Maybe workload or shifting priorities are making people more cautious. Maybe expectations differ from manager to manager. Or maybe several of these are happening at once.
You could introduce leadership training, clarify responsibilities, or ask managers to encourage more independent decision-making. But each of those responses assumes something about what’s causing the problem. And this isn’t the only concern you’re hearing. With limited time and resources, you have to decide how to prioritize the employee concerns you’re hearing and where you can make a real difference. So where do you start?
Before You Respond, Understand What You’re Hearing
When different people describe the same situation differently, it’s tempting to decide whose account is more accurate. But that might not be the most useful place to start.
Research on how people make sense of ambiguous situations at work suggests that organizational experiences don’t always come with obvious explanations. People interpret what’s happening through their own experiences, expectations, and understanding of the situation. That matters because the concerns you hear usually contain two things: information about what someone has experienced, and an explanation of why they think it’s happening.
What someone experienced can be accurate even when their explanation for it isn’t.
In the example above, managers reported that employees are asking for more approvals and that work is slowing down. Employees report shifting priorities, unclear expectations, and competing demands. Those accounts give you something to work with. But the conclusion that employees lack initiative is an interpretation. So is the conclusion that managers aren’t giving employees enough authority. Either one might be partly right. Neither should automatically become the organization’s explanation for what’s happening.
You don’t have to dismiss anyone’s concerns to see that difference. And you don’t need to collect a mountain of new information before you start making sense of what you’ve heard. Instead, you can start with a few questions:
What are people actually describing or experiencing?
What explanations are they offering?
What evidence do we have that supports those explanations?
What are we treating as true that we haven’t yet established?
If you’ve already been working on understanding what your employee data is telling you, this may sound familiar. The same care you bring to interpreting survey results or turnover numbers applies to the concerns people raise in conversations and meetings. The goal isn’t to figure out who’s right. It’s to understand what the employee feedback is actually telling you—and what you can reasonably claim to know—before deciding what to do.
The Loudest Concern Isn’t Necessarily the One to Address First
Of course, some concerns are harder to set aside than others. A manager brings up the same problem at every leadership meeting. An employee sends a compelling email about a frustrating experience. A department head insists an issue needs attention right now. You want to be responsive, and when someone is persistent, worried, or influential, their issue can naturally move to the top of your list. But the concerns you hear most often don’t necessarily indicate what’s happening across the whole organization.
Research on employee voice and silence shows that whether employees speak up depends on more than whether they have something important to say. Their relationships with supervisors, their expectations about how their input will be received, and the work environment around them can all shape whether they raise concerns. That means the information reaching you might be incomplete. Some employees are comfortable speaking up; others might not believe it’ll make a difference. Some managers are quick to escalate problems, while others try to handle difficulties within their own teams.
So when a concern keeps coming up, ask yourself whether you’re hearing about a widespread problem, a particularly difficult situation, or just an issue that’s being raised more visibly than others. And when you don’t hear much from a particular group, that doesn’t necessarily mean things are going well.
None of this means you should disregard an urgent concern. Certainly, issues involving safety, misconduct, or serious harm need immediate action no matter how many people have raised them. For everything else, the challenge lies in not letting visibility alone set your priorities. You can take people seriously without treating every concern as equally urgent, or assuming the most frequently repeated explanation is the right one.
Start Where You Can Make a Meaningful Difference
Once you’ve looked more carefully at what you’re hearing, you might still have several concerns that deserve attention, and you probably can’t address them all at once. That’s the reality of leading a department or an organization, especially when resources are stretched and people already have more than enough on their plates. So instead of asking which problem is easiest to fix, try a different question: Where do we already understand enough to do something that can make a meaningful difference?
Say you’ve heard repeated concerns about delays between two departments. When you look at how work moves between them, you find that responsibilities for one part of the process are unclear. You may not understand every reason the departments are struggling to work together. But you know enough to clarify that responsibility and then observe the degree to which it helps. That’s a reasonable place to begin.
Research on evidence-based organizational change emphasizes drawing on several sources of information to understand a problem and decide how to respond. It also describes how small improvements developed close to where the work happens can help organizations make progress towards broader change. The point isn’t that every organization should launch a pilot project; it’s that meaningful progress doesn’t always require a sweeping solution. Sometimes you already have enough evidence to make a targeted change. And sometimes the evidence tells you that you don’t understand the concern well enough to choose a response yet.
Take high employee turnover, for example. You might know that people are leaving one department at an unusually high rate, but that doesn’t tell you why. Introducing a new retention program just because it’s available can use up resources without addressing what’s actually influencing people’s decisions to leave. In that situation, the most useful next step may be to investigate a more focused question. In another situation, you might find that a specific work process is creating avoidable delays and that the people involved already agree on what needs to change. In that case, you may be ready to act.
The important thing is that your response aligns with what you actually understand.
You’re not choosing between endless investigation and rushing to fix things. You’re deciding where you understand enough to move forward, and where you still need to learn more.
What Happens After You Act Is Information, Too
Suppose you address the unclear responsibilities between those two departments. You bring the people involved together, clarify who’s responsible for each part of the process, and then agree on how everyone will make decisions going forward. You might reasonably expect that process will resolve the delays. And maybe it does.
But what if the delays improve for one team and continue for another? That difference is worth paying attention to. Maybe the second team depends on information that arrives too late. Maybe their workload makes the new process hard to follow. Or maybe the responsibilities are clearer on paper but still interpreted differently in practice. You can’t tell which of these it is yet, and you don’t need to know before deciding what to do next. What matters is that you now have something specific to investigate: why did your process help one team and not the other?
Learning from a change like this has some research behind it. Researchers studied teams in seven financial enterprises in Denmark that tried short, time-limited changes to their work practices. They found that trying new ways of working, combined with opportunities for discussion and reflection, helped generate knowledge among employees, teams, and their organizations. That doesn’t mean every adjustment you make needs to become a formal experiment. But it’s a good reminder that a change can be something you learn from, not just something you put in place and then move past.
You can do that in a simple way. After you act, take a moment to look back at what happened and ask:
What changed?
What didn’t change?
Did people experience the response differently?
What did we learn that we didn’t understand before?
Does that change how we think about the other concerns we’re hearing?
Sometimes you’ll find your initial understanding was reasonably accurate. Sometimes you’ll find you addressed one part of a problem that’s more complicated than you anticipated. And sometimes you’ll realize the explanation you started with wasn’t quite right. That’s useful information, too.
Paying attention to what happens after you act is especially helpful when you’re trying to understand employee behavior. What looks like resistance to change, for example, may reflect different experiences of how a change is being implemented. Once you’ve changed the support employees receive, notice where people are still struggling. Your first action doesn’t have to answer every question you’re wondering about. Sometimes the most useful thing it does is show you what to ask next.
You Don’t Have to Solve Everything at Once
When concerns are coming at you from different directions, it’s understandable to want a clear answer about where to focus. People are expecting a response, your resources are limited, and your other responsibilities aren’t going anywhere.
But you can’t investigate every concern in depth, and you really don’t need to. Start by taking stock of what you’re hearing. Then, separate what people are experiencing from the explanations they’re offering. Think about whose perspectives are represented and whose might be missing. Look for a concern where you understand enough to make a meaningful difference. Then pay attention to what happens.
You might resolve something that’s been making work harder than it needs to be. You may find that a concern is more complicated than it first appeared. Or you might learn something that helps you understand several other issues you’ve been hearing about. Each of those moves you forward, even when it doesn’t feel like a big win.
That kind of progress doesn’t come from assuming every concern has the same cause, or from treating the loudest voice as the best guide to action. It comes from making thoughtful decisions about what you know, what you can address, and what you still need to understand.
You don’t need to solve everything at once. You just need a useful place to begin.
Start by getting clearer about what you need to understand.
What Are You Trying to Understand? is a free practical guide that helps you separate evidence from assumptions, see what your existing information can and can’t tell you, and turn an organizational problem into a question you can investigate.