Why your best engineers stay silent in meetings
It's not that they don't have questions. It's that you've made asking them too expensive.
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Every engineering leader has sat in a meeting watching heads nod along to something that made no sense. You’ve done it yourself. The architecture diagram that seems to have three impossible arrows. The product requirement that contradicts itself in adjacent sentences. The technical explanation that assumes knowledge nobody in the team actually has.
And here’s what happens next: nothing. Everyone leaves the meeting, everyone pretends they understood, and two weeks later you’re debugging a system that was built on a foundation of collective confusion.
This is a leadership problem, not a comprehension problem.
