Most CEOs are terrified of disengaged employees.

They should be more afraid of something else.

The real danger is a team that looks fully engaged, gives you great survey scores, claps at all hands, repeats the mission perfectly, and has quietly stopped telling you the truth.

This is what happens when engagement crosses a line.

People stop treating work as a place where they contribute. They start treating it as a place where they belong. Their identity is tied to being one of the “good ones” who get it. Questioning becomes risky. Disagreement sounds disloyal. So they stay involved, stay positive, and slowly pull their real thinking off the table.

On paper, engagement is high. In reality, candor is gone. And without candor, engagement is just a costume that rips the first time the market hits you in the mouth.

The scary part is that you can hear this shift, if you know what to listen for.

Engagement’s Dark Side Nobody Wants To Talk About

Research on engagement used to sound like a fairy tale. The more engaged people are, the better everything gets. Higher performance. Less turnover. More innovation.

Then a harder truth showed up.

In a seven year study of professionals, Jari Hakanen and Wilmar Schaufeli found that high engagement can sit right next to rising depressive symptoms when job demands stay high and support stays thin. In other words, people can look fired up while quietly burning out (Hakanen & Schaufeli, 2012).

Workplace data tells the same story. Engagement scores rise while energy drops. Cameras stay on while ideas dry up. People keep saying yes while their language shifts from “I will” to “should be fine.” Hedging goes up. Ownership language goes down. Dissent fades into the background before it disappears completely.

Here is the big mistake leadership teams make. They see high engagement and assume safety. They assume loyalty. They assume truth is flowing freely.

They never ask the sharper question.

“What have our most engaged people stopped saying out loud?”

If you want to know where your culture really stands, start there.

The Five Sentences That Vanish Before Candor Does

Healthy engagement has a sound.

It is not just enthusiasm. It is friction from people who care enough to argue, to flag risk, to protect standards, to say the thing that makes the room shift.

When cultures get over engaged, the sound changes. People still talk. They just stop saying the sentences that once kept you honest.

1. “I don’t think this will work, here’s why.”

In strong teams, this sentence is everywhere. An engineer says it in sprint planning. A sales leader says it before a launch. A junior analyst says it in front of the COO and lives to tell the tale.

It used to mean “I’m invested enough to protect us from our own blind spots.”

When it disappears, something ugly has happened.

Somewhere along the way, your culture decided that doubt sounds negative. That hard questions make you “not a team player.” That only “constructive” feedback is welcome, which mysteriously turns out to mean “feedback that still sounds enthusiastic.”

People notice. They still see the risk. They still feel the concern. They just stop saying it in the room.

They give you the PowerPoint version instead.

If you want this sentence back, you can’t just say “all feedback is welcome.” You have to operationalize it.

Add a line to your meeting norms that says “Everyone finds at least one thing to challenge before we decide.” Then honor it. Publicly thank the person who spots the weak assumption before it hits the customer. Make that story louder than the story of the person who kept quiet to “keep momentum.”

2. “This feels unfair.”

Nothing kills real engagement faster than quiet unfairness.

People will stretch for years if they believe the deal is fair. They will sprint for a leader they trust. They will forgive mistakes if the process feels honest.

Then pay bands start to wobble. Promotions get fuzzy. One leader plays favorites and nobody does anything about it. A team that carried the hard work gets a smaller bonus than the team that presented the slide deck.

At first, people say it out loud. “This feels unfair.”

Then they realize that nothing changes. Or worse, the person who spoke up quietly loses opportunity. That is when the sentence vanishes.

The research is brutal here. Jason Colquitt’s work on organizational justice shows that fairness across pay, process, and explanation predicts commitment and performance far more reliably than any pep talk or perk (Colquitt et al., 2001). When fairness drops, people do not argue forever. They pull their effort back.

Here is the rule.

Once your best people stop using the word unfair, they have already started to leave. Their body might stay. Their belief has checked out.

Want the sentence back. Put fairness on the record. Publish pay bands. Make promotion criteria bluntly clear. Require written rationales when you make exceptions. Then watch how fast people start trusting their voice again when they see that speaking up about fairness actually changes decisions.

3. “What problem are we actually solving?”

Every great company has people who annoy the room with this line.

They are the ones who stop a project two weeks in and ask “Why are we doing this at all.” They are the person in your product review who keeps asking “What is the customer pain here, in real words.”

They slow you down just enough to avoid expensive stupidity.

In over engaged cultures, this question starts to sound rude. Leaders interpret it as resistance. Teams label it as “not aligned.” Everyone is so committed to being positive and supportive that they forget the most supportive thing you can do for a company is to stop it from building polished nonsense.

The moment people learn that this question triggers eye rolls, they stop asking it in public. Strategy sessions stay upbeat. Roadmaps look full. And you quietly start executing on projects nobody believes in.

To fix this, you need to reframe the question as a job requirement, not a personality quirk.

Build a simple discipline into every major initiative. First slide in any deck. First box in any brief. “What problem are we solving, for who, and how will we know it worked.” If a leader cannot answer it clearly, they do not have approval to proceed.

Tools like Workplace can even show you when curiosity language fades from your written communication. Fewer “why” and “what if” questions. More polite agreement. That is your early signal that this sentence is dying and groupthink is taking its place.

4. “I’m at capacity, something has to give.”

This is the sentence every high performer swallows first.

They are the ones who always deliver. So leaders pile more work on them. They get the critical projects. The fire drills. The “quick favors.” They say yes because they care and because their identity is tied to being the person who comes through.

On the outside, they look engaged. On every scorecard, they are stars.

On the inside, they are drowning.

Burnout rarely shows up as open cynicism at first. It shows up as people who keep saying yes while quietly stripping away everything that is not essential to survival. Fewer risks. Fewer new ideas. Less pushback. More “whatever you think” in meetings.

The research matches this pattern. When job demands stay high and resources stay thin, even highly engaged people start to slide toward exhaustion and distress. The body keeps running. The mind shuts the door.

If nobody ever tells you “I’m at capacity,” it is not because you staffed perfectly. It is because you taught people that admitting limits is a career risk.

Change that rule fast.

Add one line to your weekly meetings. “Where is your energy this week. Green, yellow, or red.” No therapy. One sentence per person. When someone sits at yellow or red for more than a couple of weeks, you rebalance their load. You do not applaud their hustle. You move work.

Then go one step further. Start praising the person who hands work back when their plate is full. Celebrate the leader who protects recovery after a hard sprint. You build what you recognize. If you only recognize heroic overload, you will never hear this sentence again until it shows up in an exit interview.

5. “Can we talk about what we’re not saying.”

This is the most powerful sentence in any company.

It is the moment someone names the fog in the room. The unraised risk. The political landmine. The trade off nobody wants to own.

When this sentence is common, you get early truth. Small problems stay small. Decisions get cleaner. People trust that difficult information actually moves the system.

When it disappears, the opposite happens.

Updates stay positive until the very end. Risks surface as “unexpected issues” instead of “things we ignored three months ago.” Leaders hear about problems only when they explode. The company starts living in a permanent state of surprise.

You do not fix that with another anonymous survey.

You fix it by making this sentence part of the operating system.

Add a standing agenda item to your senior meetings. “What are we not saying out loud yet.” Do not let the conversation move on until at least one uncomfortable topic is on the table. Protect the people who bring it. Make it career enhancing to be the person who raises the inconvenient truth early, not the hero who cleans up the mess late.

Then instrument it. Workplace can track who speaks in key forums, how often dissent shows up, how often decisions get reopened, and where hedge language spikes. When dissent disappears and hedge language rises, you know this sentence has left the building and performance risk has walked in.

How To Treat Candor As Your Real Engagement Metric

Here is the uncomfortable truth.

Your company does not need more enthusiasm. It needs more people who care enough to tell you when something smells wrong.

Engagement that cannot survive conflict is not engagement. It is compliance with better branding.

The leaders who win the next decade will measure something sharper. They will ask a harder question than “How engaged are our people.”

They will ask “Where have we made it unsafe for our most engaged people to tell us the truth.”

Then they will act on it.

They will hard code dissent into meetings. They will put fairness on paper instead of posters. They will make capacity a weekly topic, not a private crisis. They will use tools like Workplace to track the living language of their culture so they can see when candor is rising or retreating in real time.

Do that and something powerful happens.

People stop performing engagement and start practicing it.

They say “I don’t think this will work” and you listen. They say “this feels unfair” and you fix it. They say “what problem are we solving” and you sharpen it. They say “I’m at capacity” and you protect them. They say “can we talk about what we’re not saying” and you lean in, not away.

That is what real engagement sounds like.

Not volume. Not smiles. Not perfect scores.

Truth, spoken by people who still care enough to say it.