This is an episode of The Passionate Workforce Podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here and grab the bestselling book on Amazon. These conversations are also available on YouTube.
Being “nice” can sometimes mean avoiding a conversation that ought to be had. Being “kind” should mean having it respectfully.
That distinction sits underneath most of what goes wrong with emotional safety in small companies, and it’s where Nichole DiLoretta started when defining these terms in the context of company operations. “Nice” avoids conflict and keeps the peace. “Kind” means understanding why someone feels the way they do and dealing with it. One of those solves problems, while the other covers them and hopes they go away.
Nick Capman sat down with Nichole to talk about what small companies lose when leaders misread emotional safty, and what it costs before any performance metric moves.
Nichole is Vice President of Quality at Sterling Pharmaceutical Services, with nearly two decades in life sciences across quality and operations. She has run sites, served as the buffer between executive management and site leaders across multiple locations, and worked as a GxP compliance consultant inspecting pharma, medical device, and laboratory operations.
Before Sterling she was Chief Quality Officer at Apertus Pharmaceuticals, and she held a series of roles at DYNALABS including Senior Director, Site Director, and Vice President of Operations. Earlier in her career she was a quality consultant at Pfizer and a quality engineer at bioMérieux.
She also became a laboratory manager six months into her first job out of college, which shaped how she thinks about all of this.
Sterling has spent his career coming up through regulatory and quality from the ground level, across companies large and small, through major submissions and the kind of pivots that change a company’s direction. His take on where leadership actually gets tested is simple. The good times are easy. The tough times are where you find out what leadership is really about.
Key insights from the discussion
Nice avoids the conversation. Kind has it. Nichole’s framing is that being nice usually means dodging conflict to keep the peace, which doesn’t solve anything. It papers over the problem. Kind means understanding the empathy underneath, why someone feels what they feel, and dealing with the actual root. Nick’s version: if someone asks how they look before something important and they’re wearing a tutu to an executive meeting, nice says “you’re fine” and lets them embarrass themselves. Kind says something.
Communication is the root of most of it, and everyone thinks they’re better at it than they are. Nichole returned to this repeatedly. Nobody feels safe when they can’t communicate and don’t feel understood. That’s the foundation everything else sits on.
Trust comes before conflict, and conflict isn’t arguing. Nick folded in Patrick Lencioni’s model: leadership teams have to trust each other before they can have productive conflict. Conflict here means being able to hold and voice a different opinion. People without emotional safety don’t raise important information, because they’re calculating the anticipated negative consequences.
Believe people about themselves. This was Nichole’s sharpest practical instruction. If someone tells you they aren’t trained, believe them. If someone says they don’t understand something, believe them. If someone says they aren’t comfortable doing a task, believe them. Why would they raise it otherwise? Yes, a small percentage of any workforce is angling to avoid work, but building your leadership approach around that minority costs you the majority.
Dismissiveness is the lighter shade of disbelief, and it does nearly as much damage. Nick added this. You might believe someone was trained, so when they say they still don’t feel comfortable, you say “you’ll be fine.” You listened, but you didn’t hear them. Do that repeatedly and the employee concludes that speaking up is banging their head against a wall.
Being good at the work doesn’t make someone good at leading. Nichole applies the bench scientist comparison to small-company leadership generally. Someone who was expert at a specific technical thing gets promoted and is suddenly assumed to have the nuance of good leadership and emotional safety. Those are different skill sets, and nobody handed them the second one.
No control without measurement. Nick’s contribution, and one that lands with a life sciences audience. If you aren’t measuring the mindset of your employees, you don’t know it. You might have a good instinct and you might even be right, but you don’t know until you validate it.
Hallway conversations are not data. Small companies run on informal check-ins, and Nichole flagged the problem with them. When the person asking “do you like it here?” has complete control over your job and job functions, you’re going to say you’re fine. The leader hears what they wanted to hear, doesn’t dig, gets no examples and nothing measurable, and walks away with a false assumption that everyone loves it.
Nobody quitting doesn’t mean everything is fine. Job searches take a long time, and quiet quitting doesn’t get announced. Absence of a mass exodus is not evidence of health. Neither is the absence of complaints, because if emotional safety isn’t there, people aren’t bringing you complaints anyway.
Even in a safe company, there’s a veil between levels of power. Nick made a point worth sitting with. You can build the most emotionally safe organization possible and there is still a barrier between you and anyone whose job you control. When someone weighs radical candor against their family’s financial security, candor doesn’t always win. Leaders should understand that veil exists rather than assume they’ve eliminated it.
By the time someone comes to you, the frustration has been building. Nick’s advice is to probe rather than wait, and he framed it in terms his audience knows: this is root cause analysis applied to people rather than deviations. On the spectrum from passion to resentment, a person who finally raises something has usually drifted well toward resentment, which means the odds of losing them are already higher than you’d want. As he put it, tell me if you don’t like the coffee or the color of my shirt, because problems are much easier to handle when they’re small.
The first sign is that people go quiet. Nichole named this as the number one indicator, and she’s watched it happen in environments she was in herself. You see the passion drain. People stop offering ideas because they’ve been shut down, mocked, or had it make the rounds as inappropriate. They stop taking the reins on projects, not because the work won’t be appreciated but because one small mistake out of a hundred good things will be the one that gets highlighted. And when someone’s ideas get brought up as silly after they leave, everyone still there learns not to be that person.
Watch for the quiet ones who start talking back. A less obvious signal Nichole flagged. People who rarely spoke suddenly making comments, with resentment audible in them. Also worth noticing: consistent Monday call-ins.
Hive mentality means the gap has opened. When people who never collaborated before start clustering together, that’s a group finding safety with peers because they aren’t finding it above them. Nichole described it as a widening gap between leadership and everyone else, and it takes real attentiveness to catch, since you can’t see it from a tower looking down.
Your best low-maintenance performer is carrying hidden workload nobody assigned them. This was the most useful stretch of the conversation. The high performer who doesn’t cause ruckus becomes the neutral ground people go to. Am I crazy for thinking this? What’s your read on that? They absorb it, they don’t complain, and they hide the struggle because they’re known for not creating tension. Then they take it home. And because they’re “fine,” nobody checks on them.
That burden has to be addressed, not admired. Nick asked whether it genuinely needs fixing. Nichole’s answer: yes, because the cup always runs over. She compared it to emotional burnout in social work and veterinary medicine. The person absorbing it usually doesn’t have the authority to change it. The leader does. That makes it the leader’s job, and if a leader can’t recognize it and step in, Nichole isn’t sure they should be in leadership. Even acknowledging it goes a long way.
No HR department is not an excuse. For an eight to ten person company with no HR function, Nichole is direct: it’s the owner’s job. If you’re not good at it, that requires the humility to say so, and then go get the training. Bring in an outside consultant monthly or weekly, use fractional positions, run real leadership training. It isn’t especially expensive. Burying your head costs more, in good people and in the ideas you never hear.
Not every complaint is valid, and here the advice flips. Nichole named this as the deliberate opposite of everything else she said. When someone makes a factual claim about themselves, believe them. When something is emotionally charged and rests on their perspective of a situation, don’t believe the first thing you hear. There are probably ten sides to every story, not two, and not even the classic three. It takes an investigative posture, probing others close to the situation and forming a view rather than accepting the first account. She also noted the layoff example: employees who ask why they weren’t told often have a fair emotional point and an unworkable request at the same time.
Saying no is fine. Not having the conversation is not. Even when a complaint isn’t actionable, sit down and explain why. Small companies expect people to work as a group and then avoid group conversations. Have it, and it may not come up again.
The costs are real and mostly hidden. Turnover is the visible one, and every HR and finance team knows replacement costs more than retention. The larger loss is innovation. People who don’t feel empowered don’t offer ideas, and Nichole strongly believes that diversity of background is where the best innovation comes from. If everyone came from the same place, everyone does it the way it’s always been done. Nick’s addition: experience is what helps you avoid pitfalls, so silence costs you the pitfalls you would have missed.
Three changes leaders can make quickly. Start with communication, including the humility to say the approach hasn’t been right and to ask people for their ideas on fixing it. Nichole guarantees staff go home thinking leadership actually wants to listen. Second, invest in training, less because it teaches something entirely new than because it brings what you already half-know back to the front of your mind and makes you practice it. Third, ask for anonymous feedback with pointed questions rather than “How do you feel?” Ask whether the open-door policy is real. Ask whether people feel supported in their ideas. Then listen to the answers instead of guessing who wrote them.
You don’t have to fix all twenty problems. If you survey twenty people, Nichole’s expectation is that most of the answers are rooted in a few similar places. Fix one thing at a time. Nick’s version, borrowed from What About Bob?, is baby steps, with the reminder that this is a journey that never ends and that leaders already understand what compounding 1% improvements does.
One thing to bring back to your team
Think about who in your organization everyone goes to.
Not the person on the org chart. The one people actually walk over to when they want a sanity check, when they’re frustrated, when they need to know whether they’re crazy for thinking something. That person is doing work nobody assigned them, they probably aren’t reporting it, and they’re likely the one you check on least because they seem fine.
Then ask:
When did you last ask them how they’re doing, rather than what they’re working on?
Do you know what they’re absorbing on your behalf?
Who has the authority to change it? Because it almost certainly isn’t them.
And the broader version: has anyone on your team gone quiet lately who used to have ideas? That’s the signal Nichole watches for first, and it shows up long before anything appears in a performance metric.
For leaders looking to take this further, Nick Capman’s book The Passionate Workforce: How to Create and Maintain Maximum Employee Engagement expands on creating high-trust cultures where ideas and people can thrive.
Drawing from practical strategies, real-world examples, and proven methods, Nick provides actionable insights for leaders at every level. Whether you’re refining your leadership style, implementing engagement initiatives, or preparing your team for the future, this Amazon #1 bestseller equips you with the tools to transform your organization from the inside out.
If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, it’s an invaluable resource for any leader serious about maximizing employee engagement and creating a workplace where passion and performance are inextricably linked. Grab your copy on Amazon.
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