The Cost of Neglect - Ethics, Leadership, and the Brand Value of Treating People Right

Reflections from the ELA webinar held on October 8, 2026

During a departmental restructuring, Adriana Macontre learned that a role on her team was being eliminated. Although she managed the person affected, she had not been consulted about the decision. She believed the employee had made valuable contributions and could continue to do so with the right support. She offered to coach them, develop their capabilities, or explore a move to another team.

The response she received was brief: “We don’t have time to train people.”

What stayed with Adriana was the belief behind those words. Development was being treated as an inconvenience, and a manager’s willingness to invest in someone carried little weight. An organization asking people to deliver results had decided that helping them become more capable was something it could do without.

That story opened ELA’s October 8 webinar, The Cost of Neglect - Ethics, Leadership, and the Brand Value of Treating People Right. Together with Emily Lemon and Olivier Lazar, Adriana explored how operational decisions change people’s contributions, their trust in leadership, and their experience of the organization.

For Adriana, leadership begins with recognizing the privilege of being responsible for other people’s development. A leader can help someone undertake work they could not previously do, find confidence in their judgment, and contribute to a purpose larger than their individual role. Accepting that responsibility means paying attention to what people need to grow, including when time and resources are under pressure.

New technologies and workflows make that responsibility more consequential. People need to learn, yet the demand for change can arrive alongside reduced support. Adriana’s account exposed the tension in asking a team to transform while treating its development as optional.

Emily approached that tension through systems and incentives. Leaders may have good intentions while working within structures that push them toward different behavior. A manager encouraged to protect an established process or produce an immediate result may find little institutional support for questioning whether that process still serves its purpose. Over time, people can become attached to the boundaries of their roles and the routines that define them.

Olivier connected this to organizations losing sight of the people and purposes they exist to serve. When maintaining the process becomes the overriding objective, activity can continue while the organization drifts away from the value it was meant to create.

When people learn to stay quiet

The consequences, Adriana observed, often appear well before someone resigns. A person who once volunteered ideas begins saying less. Questions disappear from meetings. Conversations with a manager become something to navigate carefully. Energy that could have gone into the work is redirected toward deciding what is safe to say or finding a way around obstacles that remain unresolved.

From above, this change can be easy to miss. People still attend meetings, complete assignments, and submit reports. The visible obligations are being met. What has diminished is the contribution beyond those obligations: the initiative to identify a problem early, challenge an assumption, or offer an idea that could improve the work.

Emily described the burden of continually editing oneself to fit an organization’s expectations. An employee may arrive ready to contribute openly, then discover that questioning an established decision carries consequences. Each subsequent conversation requires more calculation. In her account, this erosion of authenticity consumes attention and can eventually make departure seem preferable to continued self-suppression.

She called this “manufactured attrition.” The term challenges an organization to look beyond the administrative category of a voluntary resignation. Someone may choose to leave, while the conditions that made staying difficult were shaped by repeated leadership decisions. Understanding the departure requires examining those conditions and the concerns that preceded it.

Emily’s example of a reporting system showed how the same pattern can develop through an apparently reasonable management request. Senior leaders want greater visibility into a successful team, so they introduce a system to capture its activities. The people doing the work must now spend time describing it in a format that offers them little practical benefit.

Once the reports become part of management’s routine, further requirements can follow. The system grows harder to question because other decisions depend on it. Meanwhile, the people entering the information become less invested in a process they experience as a burden. Emily’s concern was that leadership could end up relying on information whose quality and relevance were being weakened by the way it was collected.

Olivier described an “illusion of mastery”: the reassurance of having more indicators while becoming less connected to what is happening. The discussion encouraged leaders to examine whether their measurements help the organization learn and act, and whether they listen to the people whose experience gives those measurements meaning.

Jennifer Graham, participating as an attendee, added a useful qualification to the discussion of responsibility and accountability. She emphasized the value of clear ownership and escalation paths, while arguing that the people doing the work must be actively involved and accountable for their commitments. A designated lead can provide clarity without removing others’ responsibility for the result. She also stressed the importance of recognizing the people who have done the work: taking credit while overlooking their contribution can undermine motivation.

The culture behind the brand

Adriana brought these internal experiences back to the webinar’s question of brand value. People carry their experience of an organization into conversations, professional networks, and public reviews. A brand’s promises are therefore tested by decisions that may never appear in its marketing: whether a manager listens, whether development receives support, and how someone is treated when they challenge an established practice.

Olivier linked this to congruence, the alignment between beliefs, words, and actions. Trust becomes difficult to sustain when the organization’s stated commitments and people’s daily experience move apart. Emily emphasized that incentives belong in this examination. Expectations of responsible leadership need to be supported by what the organization rewards and by the authority it gives people to act.

She also questioned the pressure to turn an early answer into a permanent foundation. A decision made with limited information can become embedded in processes, reports, and subsequent decisions. Revisiting it then becomes increasingly difficult. Leaving room for uncertainty and changing one’s mind when better information emerges was an important part of her argument for organizations that can continue learning.

That concern carried into the discussion of AI. The panelists described their regular use of the technology and its value in their work. Emily nevertheless drew a firm boundary around decisions affecting people. She argued that hiring, promotion, development, and dismissal require human judgment and responsibility, even where technology assists with information gathering or administrative work.

Jennifer also described realizing, during an interview, that the questions were being asked by AI rather than a person. The lack of advance disclosure concerned her; when subsequent invitations explicitly proposed an AI interview and sought her consent, she declined. Olivier considered what that encounter communicates to a prospective employee about the organization’s willingness to invest human attention in them. The process itself becomes part of the candidate’s experience of the brand.

For leaders, this raises questions about the process being automated and the responsibility attached to it. An existing weakness can become more consequential when reproduced at scale. The discussion called for attention to the quality of the underlying decisions, the opportunity for people to question outcomes, and the individuals who remain answerable for the consequences.

Making attention an organizational choice

Toward the end of the webinar, an audience member asked how ethical leaders can influence boards whose expectations center on immediate financial results. The question brought the conversation back to the difficulty of making neglected human contributions visible in the language used to make organizational decisions.

Emily explained that she is developing a model to examine the costs of suppressed contribution and organizational friction. The work remains unfinished. Its purpose is to investigate what an organization loses when its own structures make it harder for people to contribute effectively.

Another audience contribution distinguished the pressure to keep performing from the space needed to learn. Organizations that expect intelligent adaptation need to give people opportunities to question an approach, acknowledge uncertainty, and reconsider a decision.

Adriana closed with the idea of a “return on attention”: attention to people, to how they are treated, and to whether the culture holds under pressure. This gives leaders a practical place to begin. They can ask where their teams have become less willing to speak, what support has been withdrawn, and which obstacles people have learned to work around because raising them has achieved little.

The response matters as much as the invitation to speak. Listening has practical value when concerns lead to an examination of decisions and someone has the authority to remove barriers. Protecting time for development, involving people in changes affecting their work, and allowing a well-founded challenge are choices leaders can make visible in everyday practice.

Adriana’s opening story remained a useful test of those choices. When an employee needs support to succeed, the response reveals what the organization’s commitments mean in practice. Those repeated experiences help determine whether people can continue trusting the organization with their contribution, judgment, and development. ELA members can watch the recording of the webinar here.