In Part 1, I highlighted the overlooked toxicity of benign neglect and the toll it takes on individuals and organisations. In that blog post, I shared that I’d worked somewhere that had an all-pervasive sense of benign neglect. When I think back to my time in that organisation, I remember asking myself a couple of tough questions.
The first was “Why have we all come to accept this neglect as normal?” and the second question was more in relation to my work there as an internal leadership development facilitator: “What can leaders do to break free from it?”.
Why we accept benign neglect
The myth of professional detachment – Workplace culture has long promoted the idea that emotions don’t belong at work. Under that logic, providing care or attention would probably feel unprofessional, yet people don’t stop being human when they walk into the office. Pretending otherwise only widens the gap between what people need and what they receive.
The productivity paradox – All organisations seem to demand productivity from their workforce but many of them undercut the very conditions that make it possible. I’ve experienced firsthand what it’s like when leaders are buried in targets, back-to-back Zoom meetings and deliverables… and treat human leadership as a “nice to have”. The result of this is a vicious circle: neglect leads to disengagement, disengagement requires more firefighting, and then leaders have even less time for meaningful connection.
The autonomy alibi – “I don’t want to micromanage” is often used as a shield for inaction. True autonomy isn’t abandonment; it’s giving people the tools, clarity and support to thrive independently.
The defensive posture – With risk and scrutiny everywhere, some leaders minimise contact, assuming fewer interactions mean fewer problems. I witnessed this last month within a client organisation, where many of the frontline teams looked functional on the surface but were in fact emotionally starved according to employee feedback.
The hidden power dynamic – Neglect can also preserve existing power structures because when people feel unsure about their value, they’re less likely to challenge or advocate for themselves. It’s a form of control through absence and it’s difficult to resist – how do you call out something that isn’t happening?
Breaking the cycle
Benign neglect isn’t inevitable. Change is possible if both leaders and organisations choose to treat attention and care as essential, not optional. Here are some of the starting points that I use in my leadership development work with companies that have had pockets of a benign neglect issue (and those that don’t!):
- Reject the false divide between being professional and being human.
- Treat emotional support at work as part of the infrastructure, not a luxury.
- Measure and reward people development as much as task completion.
- Build systems that give leaders time and space to pay attention.
A call for conscious leadership
Imagine if neglect wasn’t accepted as the background noise of everyday working life. Imagine if attention, feedback and care were as embedded in professional environments as they are in personal ones.
Our workplaces don’t need more plants quietly wilting on desks, they need leaders willing to see that attention isn’t about control – it’s about nurturing people’s potential. They need organisations willing to create the structures that make this attention possible, expected and valued.
Neglect may have become normalised, but it isn’t inevitable. Workplaces can break free by replacing absence with attention and silence with connection. Because while people can survive neglect for a time, they only thrive when leaders truly see them.
