Someone on your team works up the nerve to bring you something hard. An experience with a coworker. A pattern of behavior that's wearing on them. Something they've been sitting on, deciding whether it's worth the risk of saying out loud.
And you, trying to make sense of it, say: "I don't see them doing that."
Usually, the intent is innocent. You're not trying to shut anyone down. You're trying to reconcile two pictures that don't fit- the person you think you know, and the behavior being described. You're thinking out loud.
But listen to what the other person hears. In one sentence, the conversation stops being about what happened to them and becomes about whether it happened at all. The focus shifts from their experience to their credibility. They came to share something real, and now they're on trial for it, being asked, without anyone quite saying so, to prove their own account against yours. That's not a burden they signed up for when they worked up the nerve to speak.
And most people won't carry it. They won't marshal evidence and press their case. They'll decide it was a mistake to say anything, feel a little embarrassed for having tried, and go quiet. You'll have taught them, in the gentlest possible way, that bringing you a problem means having to defend it. Next time, they'll keep it to themselves, and you'll lose the early warning you most needed to hear.
The error underneath the sentence is simple, and worth naming plainly. Not having witnessed something is not the same as it not having happened. You see a fraction of what goes on, and the parts you don't see are exactly the parts people are least likely to perform in front of the boss. Treating your own limited line of sight as the measure of what's real quietly tells your whole team that anything you didn't personally observe doesn't count. That's how a leader goes blind, by training their own staff to stop reporting.
The fix isn't to pretend you saw something you didn't. It's to separate two things that the reflexive sentence collapses together: validating the person, and confirming the claim. You can do the first without the second. You can take someone's experience seriously without certifying that every detail is exactly as they perceived it.
In practice, it's small. Instead of "I don't see them doing that," you can simply say, "I hear you." You can say, "Thank you for telling me. I know that wasn't easy." And if you genuinely need to note that it doesn't match what you've seen, you can hold both at once: "I haven't seen that myself, but I take your experience seriously, and I want to understand it."
That keeps the door open. It costs you nothing. And it refuses to make the person prove they're worth believing.
The last time someone brought you a concern about another person, did your response make them feel heard or quietly put them on trial?
Until next time,
Avi