Why Teams Stay Silent and What Leaders Can Do About It with Megan Reitz

Before we even get to techniques, are we somebody that can see the other person, that can really engage in the fact that there is a fascinating, unique individual in front of us that requires respect, that has a story, and that almost certainly, if we listen well enough, we have something to learn from.

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business Podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode, we have Megan Raitz. Have you ever been in an organization and there's an elephant in the room and nobody wants to talk about it. You have communication rhythms, you have weekly team meetings, monthly business reviews, quarterly performance and quarterly planning that you set into motion. Yet there's this thing that nobody wants to talk about. When today's episode, Megan and I talk about all of the different ways that communication and subtle signals that oftentimes we have as small business owners and entrepreneurs that we send out, oftentimes unconsciously, that cause people to lose their voice. How do you want to show up in the relationships inside your business and even personally? We cover that and so much more. You're going to get a ton out of this. It's going to help you in your own leadership development. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Megan Raitz. Megan, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Good to be here. Nice to be here. Thank you.

We love to start with background and origin story. I love to hear about people's journeys, how they got to where they are. Why don't you take our listeners back and bring us to present day, a little bit about what you do?

Mm, gosh, how long have you got? Okay, I'll give you the short story. I— my interest area and research area is in dialogue in organizations. So I'm interested in our habits and how we particularly how we speak up and when we don't. And then especially whether we listen and who we listen to and who we don't. And I've been forming this interest over at least the last 20 years. My first job— don't judge me— was in management consulting. I then had a very interesting time in the internet industry in the '90s and just got fascinated by how we meet one another inside organizational systems, how we have good conversations, how we have the conversations that really matter. And more recently, I'm really interested in why we can't seem to find the space to have the conversations that matter, because many of our systems are what I call pathologically busy. Um, so I'll, I'll, I'll leave it at that, and you can take me down whichever avenue you think is most interesting.

It's funny, we, we just were going over Communication Rhythms playbook. And you're so right. Small business owners are oftentimes running around like a chicken with their head cut off, you know, trying to do a lot of different things, wearing a lot of different hats. And even if they are executing, say, weekly team meetings, maybe running some one-to-ones, even potentially doing the quarterly performance reviews, there is so many things that do get left unsaid, and we don't have the conversations that we need to have. How can entrepreneurs and small business owners, uh, number one, recognize that, and then number two, begin to take some steps to change it?

So we all have habits. So we have habits around what we say, when we stay silent, who we hear and who we don't hear. So the, you know, the first step is just to notice exactly the consequences that those habits have on ourselves and the people that are around us. And I'll just tell you a very brief story that's one of my favorites. And it was an interview with somebody called Ian Wilkie, who's chairman and founder of a charity called 50 Million Voices. And that charity seeks to support about 50 million adults across the globe who stammer. Uh, and Ian stammers. And in the conversation that I had with him, he said Megan, how you're showing up right now in this moment affects my voice. So if you start getting distracted, if I can tell that you're not really interested in what I'm saying, if you're starting to look like you're judging me negatively, whether you are or you aren't, if you're trying to multitask and do your emails whilst we're having a conversation, he said, I'll literally lose my voice. And that is my favorite ever metaphor for leadership. Um, and I'm not talking about leadership as in hierarchy here. So how we show up affects the voices of people around us all the time. And this is as true at home as it is in the workplace. And the number one thing we need to do is notice how we're showing up. And we do that by giving ourselves a little bit of space and probably some people around us that help us open that up and have a look at the impact that we're having and the impact that we really, really want to have. And many of the leaders and managers that I work with have a very positive intention They want to show up well. They want to enable other people's voices. They want to help people to flourish. But my research looks at a number of really quite compelling reasons why that might be their intention, but that's not actually what's happening. So you build up an awareness, that's number one. The second thing is don't go into what I call an optimism bubble. So we've surveyed about 25,000 employees globally now in our research. There's a few very clear patterns. One pattern is that we all think we're better listeners than we probably are. So we all rate ourselves on our intent, we rate other people on their behavior, and there's a gap. So we don't change any of our habits if we think we're already good at it. And that's one of the classic problems actually in leadership development and also in culture change. You know, we're busy pointing at our colleagues going, gosh, I wish they'd change. They're thinking exactly the same about us. So the second thing to just be aware of is, hang on a second, do you actually know the impact that you're having? So know that it's important, and then do you know the impact that you're truly having? And then I would say, you know, create the space, as I said, and create the, create the links with people that are able to open up that space and challenge you. And give you feedback and give you the attention that's required for you to clearly state what you're intending to do and how you want to show up and keep frankly nudging you in the ribs to make sure that you keep doing that.

Oh, I have so many questions. I have so many questions. How do we actually Well, first of all, the comment about we judge ourselves by our intent, we judge others by their behavior. Wow. That is so true. It's probably one of, going to be one of my circle and star. Every time I write notes of an episode, I will circle my biggest takeaways. And if I circle and star something, I'm like, I'm going to, that, that I'm going to, I'm going to remember that one. And that one's for sure. It. But I want to begin to bridge the gap to understand people's also their intent, not just their behavior. And then I'm going to ask it specifically in a second on the context of as small business owners. So there's some things I want to do there, but I want to ask just a fundamental, I would say kind of basic question, but I think you mentioned this earlier, so I want to come back to it. You said that we all rate ourselves as better listeners than what we actually are. What, how can I improve my ability to listen and be present with people? What are some tangible things that somebody listening this can do to, to be able to do that? Not just for today, but over a long period of time. You mentioned at the beginning habits. What were some of those habits and routines that it looks like to become a better listener, first and foremost?

So there's lots of habits and techniques. Before we go down that bit of a rabbit hole though, because I know we all want to know what's the quick fix for this and what's the top 5 tips, 5 max. Listening to others requires real curiosity. So there's something about whether we are, you know, before we even get to techniques, are we somebody that can see the other person, that can really engage in the fact that there is a fascinating unique individual in front of us, that requires respect, that has a story, and that almost certainly if we listen well enough we have something to learn from. Now if you find somebody that has that sort of belief and orientation towards people, you tend to find that some of their techniques and habits just follow suit. It becomes much more tricky if I'm working with a manager that, let's face it, doesn't really care, is always going to make the decision themselves anyway. So they just want to look as if they're listening. They want people to think that they're listening. And that's rather tedious to work with people that are doing it just for the sake of it. So I would emphasize, you know, spending time noticing the other person and noticing whether you want to be the kind of leader that shows up and has a profound impact potentially on the people that are around you is probably the first thing to do. To get somewhat more pragmatic and practical, because I do find that most managers and leaders do intend to listen well, they do want to treat others with respect and to give them space and time. It's just that they kind of forget that intention in the craziness of the day that's demanding the quarterly results be delivered tomorrow, um, and 3 million emails. And suddenly the value of the person that's in front of them has suddenly slipped to sort of point number 10 on their to-do list. Um, so again, you know, I would say I do a lot of work on attention, on something called speed bumps. How do we wake ourselves up during the day So that we remember the kind of leader that we want to be. Um, so that's funnily enough one technique for listening. We had a, we had somebody, we had a leader who had really, really positive intentions actually. She just happened to be very, very busy, you know, multiple meetings back to back. She always used to turn up to meetings a couple of minutes late, and she actually hated turning up late because she just thought it was really disrespectful. So what she'd end up doing is she'd end up sort of piling into the room or, you know, joining on Zoom in a high adrenaline state, you know, with the, with the whole nervous system on edge. And of course, when you're in a position of power, your, your emotional state is rather contagious to others. And so it was putting people into a real anxious state before the meeting had even begun. And what we worked with her on is a speed bump, so that when she had her hand on the door to the meeting room or the finger on the button that said join on Zoom, she just literally took a couple of seconds and said to herself, how do I want to show up? And it was enough of a difference— not all the time, sometimes she forgot, we're only human— it was enough of a difference enough of the time to really enable people's voices and enable her as a leader to hear what she needed to hear. So that's the second thing. And I mean, there's so many I could talk, talk about. I'll talk about one other, and that's we send signals all the time, and our signals help people to speak up, or our signals silence them. And particularly if we're in a position of power We underestimate quite the importance that these signals make. So I have a signal that I suffer from, which is politely called the thinking face. So when I'm like really thinking about something and I'm listening or trying to listen, I can get completely carried away and wear this kind of frown on my face. And gets a lot worse online sometimes because I get closer to the camera and I look really quite intimidating sometimes. And it's a signal that others then find it difficult to speak to. I'm really interested in what they say, but I'm not sending the signals that are really conveying that. So if I'm wanting people to speak and if I'm ready to listen— I once worked with Nancy Klein, who had a great phrase. She said, "Know your face." You know, what is your verbal and body language? What signals are you sending? Are those signals enabling somebody to speak up? Particularly, if I can say this last point around listening, when somebody does speak up and perhaps they don't do it very well because they're quite anxious and they're worried about telling us their idea, or they're worried about admitting that they don't know or they've made a mistake. So when they do speak up, they're probably anxious, probably don't do it very well as a result. The signals that we then send them in the next couple of seconds determine whether that person continues to speak up or whether they determine, "Actually, I'm never going to do that again." they're not actually listening, they're not interested. So our responses and the signals we send are absolutely critical part of listening. As I said at the beginning though, I do prefer it when it's not just done, you know, it's not acting, it's not me simply, you know, learn to nod your head, learn to uncross your arms, or whatever it might be. Those things do have a place, And they particularly have a place when you don't realize that you're using signals that are really off-putting. But the most important thing is for you to know whether you care about what other people are saying. And if you care, can you provide yourself enough space in the day where you remember that you care? And then if you can do that, you'll probably turn up in a way that people want to tell you what you need to hear.

One of the challenges is I was thinking about body language as you were sharing and about how do I see myself. One thing, we're using Riverside, so it's helpful that I can quite literally look at myself. But in other, especially in face-to-face scenarios, you can't read the label from inside the jar.

Yeah.

And so oftentimes I may not necessarily know. I'm tall, tall guy, 6'5", so physically I can, you know, carry a certain presence potentially. What are the ways that I can have someone to give me objective feedback about the way that I show up? Because so much of this I feel is unconscious in some respects, and we're trying to make it conscious. And I'm eventually going to get to the question that you actually opened up a minute ago, which I want to go into, which is how do we pull dialogue from our team members? Every business owner that listens to this episode, they carry— they're the top dog in there. They're the leader. There's a certain amount of power, as you mentioned. That they carry in their organization. If they want to take a Zoom meeting or an in-person meeting offline and off the rails, team's going to generally let them do it. But how do they then pull into to get honest feedback from the team members about a project, a problem that needs to be solved? So that's a two-part question. So I'll let you take that wherever it may be. So part 1 is awareness of our body language. If we don't consciously even know how we're, how we're showing up, you, and then part 2 is how do we begin to actually genuinely pull, you know, commentary and thoughts from our team whenever we do want to be able to hear what they have to say about whatever that may be in a business context.

Well, there's an irony here, isn't there? Because if you're a bit scary because you've got some of the titles and labels like Chief Executive, or if you have— it's potentially even if you have labels like 6 foot 5, you know, they— all sorts of labels can be sometimes regarded as quite intimidating, or they can be regarded as labels that give status and authority in particular settings. And those labels change according to settings. But the irony is, of course, if you're you're a bit intimidating, um, nobody's going to actually give you any feedback, so you'll never actually know that you're intimidating in the first place because everybody's scared of you. So, um, there's, there's a couple of things here. One is to know and to have a few people around you that are prepared to challenge you. So if you are a leader, I'd love to ask anybody listening to this When was the last— I'd like you to think about, like, when somebody really challenged you at work yesterday or the day before. And first of all, if you find it very hard to remember when the last person challenged you, that's a bit of a red flag already. It would indicate that there is something that probably needs to be said, but you're not getting to hear. And there will be a couple of individuals that are able to tell you stuff, particularly around signals that you're sending. So they might be colleagues at work, they might be a facilitator or a coach or a mentor or your spouse or a mate, but you've probably got a couple of people that are willing to say, "You do realize, do you realize that you do this and it has this impact on you?" So make sure that you make some space for those people and then make sure that you ask them brilliant questions. Don't go up to— we are so bad at asking for feedback in organizing. The number of times I hear managers kind of sit down with their team and go, "So, how was that? Is everything, everything good?" Or they say, um, 'And have you got any feedback for me?' And, 'Is there anything I could do that, you know, anything better?' And all of these questions, if you're in a position of power, they absolutely lead somebody in front of you to just go, 'No, you're brilliant, carry on exactly as you are.' So, you know, it's very different if you say to a more junior member, 'Can you give me some feedback?' versus, I don't know, I'm looking at the moment as a leader, I'm looking at improving my listening capacity in meetings and how I help people to talk. Okay, so that's really important to me. I wonder whether I could ask you a favor. I wonder, could you sort of observe me over the next couple of weeks in my meetings? And I wonder whether you could give me a bit of advice at the end of that 2 weeks. What would be 1 or 2 things that I could do even better to really help people to speak up and give them space in the meeting. So you're just asking a very different sort of question. And then the third thing I would say after that— so you've got find the people, ask a good question. Third thing, for goodness' sake, respond well when you get the response, otherwise you can forget about getting feedback ever again. So the third thing is like, you're— even if they say something that you think, no way, I don't do that, A, you probably do, and B, you know, you have to respond in a, in a, in, in a way that's curious and interested. Otherwise, as I say, people learn exceptionally quickly never to give you any truthful feedback ever again. So that's the, the thing about feedback. Um, and the second one, you said, how do you pull kind of dialogue out of your team? So the, the main— I mean, I could talk for hours on that question, but the main thrust of my research is, um, you invite it. And if you find yourself— going a bit back to Ian's comment actually about how you show up affects my voice— if you find yourself thinking that team member needs to speak up more, or I can't— I think they need to be a bit more assertive We need to just pause when we notice that thought because it may absolutely be true. It may be that they need a little bit of advice and feedback and training on how to speak up. But the real question is, what's stopping them speaking up? Why do they have to be so brave to speak up? And that's about how you're showing up as a leader. So if you notice that you're disappointed with what your team is offering you, it probably means first and foremost that you need to do something different. So how can you reduce the perceived risk that they have around speaking up and offering ideas? How can you respond in a way that makes sure that they, they do start experimenting? And if they're not, stop trying to fix the people that aren't speaking up. First try and look at, well, why aren't they speaking up in the first place? So, you know, Again, I could also well easily talk about, well, people speak up if they think you're interested, if they know that you're interested. If you're going through a performance of being interested and you're, as I said, you're the leader that's basically made up your mind already, but you kind of think that you probably need to look like you're interested, people sniff through that in a second. So, you know, Pause. What don't you know that you need to know? What do you need to hear in order to be an even better leader? Whose voice do you need to tune into in order to find that out? What don't you even know that you don't know? Some of the, you know, as a leader, if we can hold some of these questions front of mind that's when people feel invited to speak up. That's when you don't have to sort of pull it as such. People will offer it if they think they're genuinely valued. So again, there's lots of other stuff I could go into, techniques and tools and stuff, but I'll, um, I'll pause there.

What do you believe— there's a— you mentioned titles, CEO as an example. There's a lot of different ones that I'll take and talk about the different hats a business owner will often try to, small business owner will often try to or feel like he or she needs to wear at the same time or switch on and off. But there's one that some people will say, no, this is also one of your titles and it's CPS, Chief Problem Solver. And so one of the— admittedly, this would be like a challenge that I have, whether it's with team members or whether it's with clients. And so there's something in front of us, there's a customer complaint, a customer issue, or maybe even an opportunity. It doesn't always even have to be a negative. Situation and a client or a team member offers this up. And in the moment I am listening, I'm there. And then as they continue on, I'm hearing them, but I'm actually going into problem solving mode.

Mm-hmm.

I'm thinking about what's the solutions. I'm thinking about who do we need to pull in? What's the resource? How am I gonna respond? You know, to this. I'm curious about your thoughts around do we silence, do we work to silence that and allow them to share and finish, then take the moment and process it? What's the right way so that I don't lose the context? I mean, because admittedly I've done this before. I mean, I just said I did it earlier with you. You mentioned and I immediately went into body language. I was thinking, what's she going to think about body language and other things? So how do we listen actively to then listen, then formulate our response as opposed to, well, now I'm just listening, waiting for my turn to respond. I caught the first little bit of it, but then I've kind of blanked out for the rest. What are your thoughts?

Well, you're pointing towards one of the biggest challenges I think that many people in managers and management and leadership roles have. They've been promoted there, or they've started the company because they have a strong idea and often have experience. And so they have very clear ideas about what they want to do. Um, and so obviously that comes in, and they very often quite quick thinkers. Um, now I'm afraid the answer to your question is it depends. It depends on the context and what your intentions and what demands your attention most. You know, if you are in a moment of utter crisis and you honestly think that you have the best solution, then you might have to give it. We're often not in those situations, actually. So if it's a situation where the other person can benefit through you coaching them, and in that process you are developing the expertise in your team, then you need to, you need to remember that that is an overall priority that's at least as strong, if not stronger, than the resolution of this particular problem in the moment. So again, this is kind of demanding from you as a leader. It's demanding you to have the space and the time to think about, hang on, what What impact am I having? And what, what is my attention mostly on? There's also— dare I go back to curiosity again? Because the leaders that I meet that do this really well really do have a sense of humility and a sense of curiosity. So although they might jump to a, right, this is what we need to do, They are also interested in what they don't know and whether they might learn to do it differently. And so they've always got that bit in their mind that says, "Yes, but I might not know the full context. This person might have a better grasp on it." So there again, there's that— can you keep that humility? Very often, you know, we often say that we expect more senior people to speak up than junior. Employees, but it's our junior employees that are where the action is. It's our junior employees that are with the customer, they're on the manufacturing line, they're with the patient. They see stuff, they see opportunities, they see mistakes, yet they are the least likely— actually, they're the least likely group to speak up because they expect the most negative consequences. So as a leader, can we remember that, A, we might not— actually, we might not know the story, the full story. There might be other consequences, might be other things going on that we don't know, but that person does. And then also there's the much broader but surely vital role of a leader, which is, you know, what impact are you having on the people that are around you? And How do you want to develop the people around you? And that demands that we don't jump to immediate solutions as well. I mean, a sort of final thing is obviously there are some challenges that are, you know, it's suitable that there is a kind of answer or a solution that's probably the best one to follow and it comes from experience. But there are plenty of what we call adaptive challenges. Which are much more complex, they don't have a lovely neat solution actually. So if you've just come up with a neat solution on an adaptive challenge, you're probably closing down an awful lot of knowledge and potentially innovation that would be needed to address the issue. So it is, you know, it's pretty contextual, but it is something that I know, you know, many leaders struggle to kind of hold their tongue a bit and realize that other people, you know, good grief, they might learn if they just give other people some time to come up with something that they've never even thought of, perhaps. So quite contextual.

I would be remiss if I didn't ask this question. There was a situation with one of my clients, and of course I'll remove the details in particular, for who they were, but they were having a leadership planning meeting recently. One of the leaders in that organization really wanted to address something regarding the teams. Okay. And so the agenda gets sent out. This topic is not on the agenda. But to him, it's an elephant in the room. This has been talked about previously, but they've never come to a solution about it. They get to the meeting, they have the meeting. People have flown in for this meeting, okay? This is not just a people are together. I mean, there's people spending time away from, you know, their families, etc., to be able to fly in for this meeting. And this big elephant in the room, so to speak, does not get addressed at all. It doesn't even get brought up, even though it's not, it's not an unknown. This is a known thing. And I just have to share and really ask to your very first and kind of closing the loop from start to finish. When you mentioned about people in organizations not having the conversations, that they actually need to have. And so they have the communication rhythm set up with certain, you know, cadence of meeting in person, a cadence of meeting, you know, together once a month, say on Zoom or something like that. But yet this, this thing never got brought up. And this leader became, as you can imagine, resentful that it didn't get, didn't get brought up and felt like, what are we going to do? Just we're going to skirt around this whole issue. That we're not going to talk about. What, what, what goes on there? What, what happens there? And how do we get to a place to where we create the space that when there are difficult things we need to talk about— and boy, this, this could certainly be the case in personal relationships too, right? Mm-hmm. How do we do— how do we go about in, in cultivating the right environment for those?

Yeah, it's a huge question. Look, the two top reasons why we don't speak up is that we're afraid of being perceived negatively, and we're afraid of upsetting or embarrassing or angering the other person. So we are social beings, and if we're worried that speaking up is going to damage the relationship, we'll often stay quiet, even if staying quiet actually ends up damaging the relationship far more over a particular period time. So, um, I frequently— good grief— frequently encounter teams that have a huge elephant in the room and they're not willing to talk about it. Um, and it sort of depends a little bit on status and authority in the room. So recently I worked with a team who were virtually too scared to have a meeting about psychological safety. So they were kind of— I mean, it was too worrying even to bring up the topic of what it was worrying to bring up, if you see what I mean. But the reason why it was, is it was really laid at the responsibility of the chief executive. And when we're in a position of power, we need to, A, know that we may not know that there's an elephant in the room. And people may be too scared to tell us about it. So it's ever such a good idea again to ask some far better questions about that and to make sure that you've got conversations before a meeting and probably some external voices in there to just alert you to it. And then, you know, another thing is you might not be the person to bring this up, and it might be that some sort of external person is a better person to kind of bring tricky conversations up and to manage it in an appropriate way. And I like to think that a lot of teams can manage it themselves and that people can bring up the elephant in the room and sort it out. But very often, if it's a particularly large elephant, as it was in this last case that I'm referring to, it's sometimes a good idea to bring somebody in that just says, look at the elephant, there's an elephant here. But obviously somebody that's going to do that in a, what I might call, a tempered radical, after Mason and Scully, tempered radical manner. You know, it's not so radical that the whole team goes into shock and can't speak to one another again, but it's not so tempered that everybody's wondering, sorry, I think there's an elephant, but I've got no idea where it is or what it looks like. You've got to kind of do that sort of course through it that means that you start to tackle things. But I am a big believer of stop the absurdity of meetings where everybody knows that there's something blindingly obvious that needs to be discussed, but everybody's avoiding it. As a leader in the room, particularly, sorry, the responsibility is yours to take and, and to open up the space where that topic can be discussed. And if you need help to do that, get some help in, but don't continue to ignore the elephant. And make sure you know if there is an elephant in the first place.

Mm, so good. Megan, people want to learn more about your work, connect with you. Where would you point them to?

I have a website called meganrates.com, so you can go there. I am on LinkedIn, uh, it's about the only thing I am on, uh, but do connect with me there as well, and I'd be very happy to point you to various, um, sources of information. A lot of what I've talked about is in a book which is called Speak Out, Listen Up. Um, so if you can get your hands on that copy of that book, um, I'll— you'll see that I go into a lot more depth on some of the points that we've talked about.

I've learned a ton. I think that a couple of things that I circled— how you show up affects my voice. I want to positively affect other people's voices, whether that's clients or my team. I think one of the things I'm going to potentially do is, for me, I'm going to grab a Post-it note and have it on my computer as a reminder. How do I want to show up? I think I love that because I'm on Riverside and Zoom quite a bit. I think that's a great trigger or cue. I think The word cue is something from Atomic Habits. And so that can be a great cue for me. So really, I love that. You know, I want everybody else to judge me on my intentions. I was just in this type of a personal relationship, just very much in this. Like, my intent was good. Okay. Your behavior was bad. Okay. So that was, that's, that was great. And then I think the last one and the third one, just of the biggest ones, was, you know, genuine humility and curiosity to hear from, from other people. I think in some context I personally do a very good job of listening to people, and then others I do an incredibly poor job of genuinely listening. I think depending on the context and depending on the person and that sort of thing. And I want to improve that. Megan, it was great to have you come on the podcast. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you for inviting me.

I really genuinely loved that episode. The part where she mentioned again how you show up affecting voices, intent and behavior, and how do I simply want to show up and then having genuine curiosity. Absolutely gold. In your own quest to develop as a leader. These are some specific ways that she shared to be able to do that. And one thing, if you're watching this on YouTube, I thought Megan did an incredible job in the way that her— even, even her body language of being receptive. You could tell she was genuinely listening to the questions, which, believe it or not, has often not always been the case. And it really impacted me to make sure that I was putting off the right vibe and understanding so that I was actually listening to her in that conversation. I hope you got a lot out of that. Connect with Megan Raitz on LinkedIn, and then we'll put a link to her book, Speak Out, Listen Up, down below. Hope that served you well. Big shout out to our podcast partners, DirectClicks, Coach B Consulting, Autopilot Recruiting. If you want to continue to develop and grow this year in 2026 with your marketing, you have to make a certain amount of investment. And DirectClicks has some of the best of the best account managers. At the end of the day, you're getting a company that has put a lot into the product that they have and the softwares that they use. But at the end of the day, your, your account, who you actually work with as your account manager, matters tremendously. And at DirectClicks, they have some of the best of the best, some of the most well-trained, knowledgeable people that are not just reciting certain best practices is they actually know what works in your business. Go to directclicksinc.com/above-the-business. directclicksinc.com/above-the-business. As your organization grows, you need to hire more people, number one, and you need to develop those people. Autopilot Recruiting can help you to recruit those people. And Coach B Consulting can help you to develop them. They— Coach B, they're going to put you in an environment with other small business owners, other insurance agency owners, and their team members learning from one another peer-to-peer to help them grow and develop. But it takes also having incredible A players. That's where Autopilot comes in. Some of the best of best. You're gonna get an assigned recruiter, effectively an account manager, for your recruiting efforts. Look, you want to have time on your calendar to recruit, and I want you to be able to do that too. But the part of recruiting that most people hate is the top part, the top of the funnel part of your candidates. Autopilot Recruiting can help you. Autopilotrecruiting.com, coachpconsulting.com. All right, everyone, till next time, lead well and go be great.