The Pebble in Your Shoe Is Telling You Something

Tell me if you’ve experienced this before. One of your best people asks if you have a few minutes. They close the door. And before they finish the first sentence, you already know they’re leaving.

What stings is what comes next. As they walk you through why, you realize none of it is new. The purchase that needed three signatures. The schedule change nobody bothered to explain. The system that never quite worked. Not one of those things was a crisis. Together, they were enough.

I call these pebbles in the shoe. A shoe full of them changes how you walk. And eventually, it changes whether you keep moving with the organization at all.

Here’s the part I want every leader to sit with: your people already know exactly where the pebbles are. They’ve known for months. The information exists. The only question is whether it reaches you while you can still do something about it.

We keep asking the wrong question

For most of my career, the answer to “how are our people doing?” was the annual engagement survey. I’ve run plenty of them. People answer honestly, the results show up months later, someone writes an action plan, and not much changes that anyone can see. The next year, fewer people bother to respond. Can you blame them?

Pulse surveys sped up the cycle, however they didn’t fix it. If nothing happens between the questions, asking more often just means you’re measuring the silence more frequently.

And this is getting harder, not easier. Gallup’s latest research shows engagement has dropped two years in a row, and the steepest slide is among managers themselves. Teams are getting bigger. Layers are getting thinner. AI is reshaping the work underneath everyone, and most HR leaders will tell you their people are worn out by change. We’re asking managers to carry more with less, and then we hand them another dashboard.

The lesson that stuck

When I was Chief People Officer at ATB Financial, the lesson that mattered most was a simple one. People don’t keep speaking up because you ask them to. They keep speaking up because they see something change when they do.

That’s the whole game. Not the question. The follow-through.

How to go pebble hunting

You don’t need a new system to start. Try this with your team:

Change the question. Stop asking “how engaged are you?” and ask “what’s getting in your way?” People can actually answer that one, and the answer points straight at something you can fix.
Keep it small and regular. A one-minute check-in every week beats forty questions once a year. Pebbles are small. You find them by checking often.
Fix one where people can see it. You won’t remove every pebble, and you don’t need to. Pick the one that matters most this week, deal with it, and close the loop out loud: “You told me this was slowing you down. Here’s what we did.” That sentence is worth more than any action plan.
Remember everyone has a part. Your people need a voice that actually leads somewhere. Managers need one clear priority, not twenty. Executives need an early warning before friction shows up in turnover, safety, or results.

This is the thinking behind the Culture10 Elements framework we’ve built at Rubis & Co., shaped by decades of leading organizations, teaching executives, and sitting with leaders who genuinely wanted to get this right. The principle underneath it is simple: build for candor, not surveillance.

We’ve been working on ways to make this easier at scale, and I’ll share more soon.

One question for your next team meeting

What pebbles are your people carrying right now, and how would you know?

If you try this, I’d love to hear what you find.

Think Big, Start Small, Act Now,

Lorne

Garrett’s View: I’ve been on so many walks when it’s inconvenient to remove a pebble from a shoe. Or maybe you just tough it out? I mean, shouldn’t we build those calloused summer feet that can just walk on rocks, anyways? When it comes to our organizations, we don’t want the barefoot lifestyle, we want smooth, comfortable, pebbleless footwear.

- Garrett

AI Response: Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report backs up Lorne’s argument closely. Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity, and this is the first time global engagement has dropped for two consecutive years. The manager point is especially strong: manager engagement declined from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, while non-managers dipped only slightly from 20% to 19%. Gallup says lower manager engagement accounts for most of the recent downturn, and manager engagement declines with larger spans of control, though manager talent and training can offset this effect, which supports the “bigger teams, thinner layers” line. There’s also a hopeful counterpoint: within best-practice organizations, 79% of managers were engaged, nearly quadruple the global average. On change fatigue, a 2025 HRMorning article says 73% of HR leaders say employees suffer change fatigue, and nearly 75% say managers are not equipped to lead that change effectively.

The Pebble in Your Shoe Is Telling You Something

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