Episode 2: Are you safe to work for?

She is a director now. When she sat across from me, she did not lead with her title. She led with the story she had been carrying for years.

“Sharon, I cannot explain this, but I knew by my manager’s footsteps what kind of day it was going to be.”

She had learned to decode the sound of his walk the way you learn to read weather. Heavy and fast, stay away. Light and quick, maybe today is okay. She spent three years like this. Three years of her career shaped by one person’s unregulated emotional state.

“I don’t know how I survived him as a manager.”

And then she paused.“But it forced me into a reset. One of those moments where you think – why me? And then later you are grateful it happened.”

I told her: it is interesting how the nervous system works. What we unconsciously teach ourselves. How we scan every room for safety without even realising it. It is not only the words. It is the energy.

And that is exactly what the science confirms.

The Data Most Organisations Are Not Acting On

We talk about psychological safety constantly. In workshops, strategy sessions, engagement surveys. And the numbers have barely moved.

• 50% of people quit because of their manager. Not the job. Not the salary. The manager. (Gallup)

• 63% of all job exits in 2024 were preventable. Management was a direct cause. (Work Institute, 2025)

• When a manager is disengaged, their team follows. 70% of the variance in team engagement comes directly from the manager. (Gallup, 2026)

• Only 20% of employees worldwide are genuinely engaged. 80% are going through the motions — or already checked out. (Gallup, 2026)

Could the reason 80% of your team is disengaged be sitting in the manager’s chair? Most managers do not know they are the cause. That is not a defence of bad management. That is the reality of what happens when people are promoted into leadership roles without the tools to understand their own impact.

What HeartMath Institute Confirmed

When she told me she could feel the energy in a room she was not being spiritual. She was describing something that has been measured in a laboratory.

HeartMath Institute has been researching the connection between the heart, the nervous system, and human performance for over 30 years. Their findings are published in peer-reviewed journals.The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body approximately 100 times stronger electrically than the brain. That field extends several feet outside the body and can be detected by instruments.In a peer-reviewed study, two people sat facing each other five feet apart with no physical contact. One person’s brain waves synchronised to the other person’s heartbeat.

Your team feels your emotional state before you speak. Before you enter the room. Before the meeting starts.Not because they are perceptive. Because the nervous system is a biological scanning system, built for survival.

When a manager walks in stressed, overwhelmed, or emotionally dysregulated the team’s nervous system responds. Creative thinking switches off. Threat detection switches on.

That is not a morale problem. That is a biology problem. Trust Is Not Built in Words. It Is Built in Behaviour.

She rebuilt herself during the years that followed that toxic manager.

“I lost the course of my value. Deeper than my why. I had to understand them again. That was a process.” (want to understand what your values are?)

She spent months sitting still. Not working. Reconnecting with who she actually was. A girl from a Turkish family, told she would not amount to anything. The rebel. The people pleaser. The one whose body eventually said: enough.

“The only thing I care about is living according to my values.”

When she came back, she came back different.She became a manager. And she was determined to do it differently.

But here is what she did not expect.

She thought she was protecting her team. She was absorbing pressure from above and shielding them from directives she did not believe in. She was holding the whole thing together. Her team had no idea how much she was carrying for them.

Then she ran a session on awareness. The next day she went to work, she ran into the meeting room, she was 5 minutes late. Sharon, she said, the moment I walked into the meeting room, the energy felt so cold. This was the first time I was actually aware.

“Here I thought I was doing an amazing job. But the room felt so cold.”

She gathered her courage and asked out loud:

“It feels really cold in here. Am I right?”

Her team agreed. Yes

“But why?”

She gave them the space to speak. And they did.

Poor communication. Not sharing the full picture. Which had led to a lack of trust. To agitation. To a team that was, in her own words:“Surviving me.”

She had been so focused on protecting them that she had forgotten the most important thing.Trust is not built in good intentions. It is built in consistent, transparent behaviour.Her team was not scanning for her words. They were scanning her behaviour. And her behaviour even well-intentioned was not giving them what they needed to feel safe.

The Moment Everything Shifted

When she understood her own values again really understood them, not as abstract words but as lived principles something changed.

“When you realise your value, it is like your kryptonite. It made me feel invincible. I was not afraid to lose anymore.”

From that moment, her career changed. She is a director now. A woman from a Turkish family who was told she would not amount to anything. She did it. But more importantly, she did it without losing herself.

What This Means for You

If you feel like you are in a similar place carrying too much, disconnected from what actually drives you, leading from exhaustion instead of clarity the starting point is the same as hers.

Understand your values.

Because when those are clear, everything else follows. Boundaries. Confidence. The ability to lead without losing yourself. And if you want to understand where your team is right now whether they feel safe or whether they are surviving you start with the most important question: What energy are you bringing into the room?

Watch the full episode of The Rewired Leader and follow us: https://www.youtube.com/@hellonewleadersmovement

Take the values assessment: https://value-nlm-reset.netlify.app/

Sources

HeartMath Institute. Energetic Communication. https://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/energetic-communication/

Gallup (2026). State of the Global Workplace. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

Work Institute (2025). Retention Report.