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Why Great Teams Talk to Themselves Differently with Luisa Hogan
17 Plays5 days ago
Every team has a second voice.
Not the one you hear in meetings, strategy sessions, or company values—but the one running underneath it all. The quiet collective self-talk that determines whether people speak up, stay silent, take ownership, avoid risk, or trust each other when things get hard.
At The Second Voice, we explore the inner conversations leaders rarely say out loud.
If this episode resonated, it is likely because the second voice is active in your leadership too.
Hosted by Luisa Hogan, leadership resilience strategist and founder of Vermelho Consulting.
Luisa works with founders, executives, and senior leaders who carry real responsibility and want to lead with steadiness, clarity, and self-trust under pressure.
Her work focuses on nervous system regulation, leadership identity, and the inner dialogue that shapes how leaders show up when things are hard.
Work With Luisa
If this episode sparked reflection, here are ways to go deeper:
• Leadership resilience workshops and advisory
• Keynotes and curated live experiences
• The Steady Leadership framework and private sessions
Learn more at: vermelho.com.au
Stay Connected
Follow along and join the conversation:
• Instagram: @thesecondvoicepodcast
• Instagram: @luisahoganhq
Subscribe, rate, and review The Second Voice to help more leaders find these conversations.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Second Voice Podcast
00:00:01
Luisa Hogan
Every team has a second voice and it's not the one that you hear in meetings or in strategy sessions or in your company values, but it's the voice that everyone has running underneath it all. And it's the quiet collective self-talk that determines whether the people speak up or stay silent or take ownership or avoid risk or trust each other when things get really hard.
00:00:27
Luisa Hogan
Welcome back to the second voice podcast where we uncover the conversations that leaders don't have out loud. I'm your host Louisa Hogan. And today I thought I would take a little solo episode. We call these the second take where I reflect on conversations that I've had with leaders on this podcast and also reflect on some of my experiences over the last 10 years of working with executives and leaders and founders and leadership
Impact of Internal Dialogue on Team Culture
00:00:54
Luisa Hogan
teams. through my own business practice, Vermello Consulting Practice.
00:00:59
Luisa Hogan
And today i want to talk about the second voice of teams because we talk a lot about the individual second voices here on ah the Second Voice podcast. But I want to talk about what if culture is actually not just a set of values on a wall, we actually know that that's not what culture is, but it's also the collective conversation a team has its with itself every single day internally, because whether you're aware of it or not, your team is constantly talking to itself and that conversation is shaping everything that you do.
00:01:35
Luisa Hogan
So I'll tell you a little bit about my experience. My practice, Vermello, has worked with teams and culture, doing culture change programs for the last 10 years because Vermello is focused on building steady and resilient leaders going through pressure and change. So we very often couple a change management program with a steady leadership or resilience program. And what I found doing culture assessments throughout all of those 10 years is that very often people on your team have got this internal dialogue going on about what they think about your business or your organization. And it's very often not anything that they've shared with anyone else.
00:02:15
Luisa Hogan
And it's so similar between people when I go in to do culture assessments, how there's there's very often a common thread. And sometimes that has not even been shared with anyone else.
Official vs. Internal Conversations
00:02:27
Luisa Hogan
They all have that similar experience.
00:02:31
Luisa Hogan
And a team's second voice is the, there's the two conversations. You have the official, the the official talk that teams have that they have in meetings or that they say during performance appraisals. And then they have that internal monologue that is kind of like this unspoken agreement about how things actually work around here.
00:02:55
Luisa Hogan
And culture, as you know, is the broad system of norms and values. And the collective self-talk is running commentary inside of that system. And it's the narration that people have that interprets the events around them.
Drivers of Low Team Morale
00:03:14
Luisa Hogan
And then we also have morale, which is the temperature reading, And compared to that, self-talk is the thermostat. So it's the mechanism that sets the morale. So when morale is really low, you'll find that the self-talk is probably driving that.
00:03:32
Luisa Hogan
So some of the examples that I've found, the stories that people and teams tell themselves that has been driven by their self-talk are things like, we're actually the ones that get things done around here. Management does nothing.
00:03:47
Luisa Hogan
or senior leadership makes the decisions, there's no point in me saying anything because we don't get to make any decisions around here. And then they tell us what to do and it's impossible. And they tell us to implement it and we have to clean up the mess.
00:04:03
Luisa Hogan
Or it could be things like being visible is far too risky. I just need to deliver my work. I just need to do my job and stay quiet. Because if you stick your head up, you're going to get your head chopped down.
00:04:14
Luisa Hogan
And that's the internal narrative that people on teams have that starts to shape the culture. So yes, we each have individual self-talk, but when that self-talk in a team starts to have a common thread, it starts to shape the culture of your business and your organization.
00:04:32
Luisa Hogan
Now, where does the self-talk come from? Well, as you've heard in multiple guests on this podcast, and this is my reflection, like our self-talk is driven by our experiences, by our past, our history, our motivations, and it's no different to how a team develops their self-talk that has a common thread. And it comes from their experiences working for that business or that organization.
00:05:01
Luisa Hogan
It comes from how a manager responded to the last thing that was a mistake. it Comes to how managers respond to who gets promoted and who has to go through performance reviews.
00:05:14
Luisa Hogan
It comes through how ideas either get shot down or ideas get taken up within a business. It comes through if a idea was put forward and it's just disappeared into ether.
00:05:30
Luisa Hogan
And teams build a shared interpretation framework from all of those collective experiences. And every time something happens that is similar to the last time, it reinforces that experience.
00:05:45
Luisa Hogan
So you as a leader, andleart unknowingly creating the inner dialogue that your team has.
Leadership Influence on Culture
00:05:53
Luisa Hogan
And leaders are the most watched signal in every organization. I've said this so many times to people that are mental, that the higher up you go on the chain, the less likely you are to watch yourself and be self-aware because so you're watching everybody else and you're watching everything that's going on in your business. But the closer you are watched by everybody around you.
00:06:17
Luisa Hogan
And that's a real... juxtaposition because you should be watching yourself more clearly and being more self-aware because everybody else is watching you so closely and being the most watched person in the organization, people are constantly reverse engineering what is actually true from your leadership behavior.
00:06:41
Luisa Hogan
And under pressure, teams learn everything from you. When deadlines slip, does the leader look for somebody to blame or do they talk about what got in our way and assess it with everybody and work through why something worked out the way it did rather than blaming people?
00:07:04
Luisa Hogan
When a team member brings up bad news to the leader, does the room go quiet with tension or does this leader say, okay, good, let's, I'm glad I found out you've told me this. I'm glad I know early, what are we gonna do about it?
00:07:20
Luisa Hogan
Because those moments under pressure are disproportionately memorable to the moments that were actually good, those bad moments, and they teach people what's real and how leaders react for real. Because when leaders aren't under pressure and they feel relaxed, they respond in something one way. But when they're under pressure, that their tone changes, they react badly. And then that becomes the indicator of how we need to be as a team to survive pressure.
00:07:54
Luisa Hogan
And those things get marked safe or unsafe. And when they get marked safe or unsafe by your team, Slowly but surely they have this internal mechanism, this internal self-talk that's driving the culture within your organization about how they deal with pressure, how they deal with change, how they deal with things that are going badly.
00:08:16
Luisa Hogan
So a poster. And a value statement and a strategic document and all the right words and having your change management communication about all of that is all lovely, but how leaders respond in those high pressure moments is what's actually driving that internal dialogue.
00:08:40
Luisa Hogan
through conflict, through pressure, through change, because people believe what they see, not what they're told in documents and on posters and on emails and in memos.
00:08:54
Luisa Hogan
So the common narrative that quietly limits performance, here are a few, and see if you recognize any of these within your organization. First one is don't make mistakes around here, all right?
00:09:07
Luisa Hogan
So if people are saying to themselves, it's impossible to make mistakes, don't make a mistake because your head will be on the chopping block. People stop taking risks. Decisions get over-processed or deferred.
00:09:20
Luisa Hogan
and innovation dies. So if you're seeing those symptoms where the innovation is not happening or people don't take risks or decisions take a long time to get made, you probably have people's self-talk saying, don't make mistakes around here.
00:09:35
Luisa Hogan
And then you've got to reverse engineer that and say, why is it not safe for people to make
Consequences of Negative Self-Talk
00:09:40
Luisa Hogan
mistakes? What in my leadership or in my leadership team is driving that? So another one,
00:09:47
Luisa Hogan
leadership won't listen. The symptoms of the self-talk that says leadership won't listen are people shift from contributing ideas to just being compliant.
00:10:01
Luisa Hogan
And people go through the motions in workshops. They go through the motions in um strategic sessions or planning sessions, and then revert immediately after to doing exactly what they used to do.
00:10:14
Luisa Hogan
And there becomes like this collective internal eye roll over, we're doing this workshop to, facilitating this workshop to find out what you think. But if leadership won't listen, they just go back to performing compliance and not actually contributing any ideas. And it's like this bobblehead syndrome. So that's probably the narrative that's going on if you're seeing those symptoms and then you've got to ask, why why is that happening?
00:10:42
Luisa Hogan
The next one is keep your head down. Got to keep my head down. And it's this notion of individual survival is way more important than collective success.
00:10:53
Luisa Hogan
And the behaviors that you'll see here are people do exactly what's asked of them, nothing more. There's never any extra, no going above and beyond, no contributing anything new.
00:11:04
Luisa Hogan
And it starts with frontline staff. I don't know, I've had, I've gone into businesses where they're like, you know, our frontline staff, they literally just turn up for work. And unless I tell them to do something else, they just tick the box and go.
00:11:21
Luisa Hogan
and there's never any real camaraderie or motivation around excelling or doing really well at work. And that might be coming from the keep your head down narrative. The other one is that's not my job.
00:11:35
Luisa Hogan
internal narrative of, well, that's not my job, I'm not doing it. And that's when there's some serious silos happening. So if you have silos in your business or in your organization, you are going to be probably having that, that that's not my job, internal narrative in your teams and silos happen because there is no motivation to think across teams and or to, and and there's also this feeling of if I work across teams, I have to do extra and I'm not doing anything extra. I'm just, my team's the most important part of this business.
00:12:11
Luisa Hogan
And then you've got to think what in leadership is driving that? And then another one that comes up very often is nothing ever changes around here. This internal self-talk of nothing ever changes. And what people end up doing, the symptoms of that is people conserve their energy at work. They, um, initiate, they never initiate proposals or never initiate any ideas because they feel like it's just going to, they're skeptics about it. They just feel like it's going to be not heard.
00:12:44
Luisa Hogan
And then change fatigue happens, but it masquerades itself as realism. Well, we're just being realistic because nothing actually ever changes around here. And that's a big one because ah I'm often called into organizations to fix multiple changes that have been implemented badly.
00:13:02
Luisa Hogan
And I am faced with this one a lot. Nothing ever changes around here anyway. So why should I do anything to help move this change along?
Benefits of Healthy Self-Talk
00:13:13
Luisa Hogan
So what does healthy collective self-talk sounds like? It sounds like, let's figure this out. We can have difficult conversations, mistakes or failures, data.
00:13:27
Luisa Hogan
We own this problem together. It's safe to challenge ideas around here and it's safe to challenge my leader. And the way that narrative starts to change performance is decision-making speeds up.
00:13:41
Luisa Hogan
There's less political maneuvering, more honest input. People are feel safe enough to talk about what's gonna work and not gonna work.
00:13:52
Luisa Hogan
Innovation increases because the cost of bad ideas drops. People don't feel like a bad idea is a bad idea. They just feel like it's information, it's data, and we're all here to learn and fail excellently.
00:14:08
Luisa Hogan
And also resilience goes up because resilience, how you talk to yourself has a huge impact on your resilience and your ability to stay steady under pressure.
00:14:20
Luisa Hogan
And if you can see setbacks as temporary and solvable, that means your resilience is high. People who are performing resilience think that setbacks are permanent and not solvable, but pretend that everything is okay.
00:14:36
Luisa Hogan
And that's the difference there. So if you want to identify your team's hidden hidden voice, you can't survey it because they're not going to tell you if the trust is low. But what you need to notice in meetings, who speaks and who doesn't?
00:14:51
Luisa Hogan
Do people build on each other's ideas or wait for you to validate resilience? before they engage. How quickly does the room move to agreement? Because fast consensus, people think our fast consensus is a positive thing. It's actually not always because sometimes it's suppressing conflict, suppressing, disagreeing with the leader to keep themselves safe.
00:15:20
Luisa Hogan
And you've also got to listen out for repeated language. That's just how it works around here. Oh, we've tried that before. Or it depends on who you ask, or I don't wanna rock the boat, but.
00:15:32
Luisa Hogan
So that is often a symptom of deeper internal self-talk that's going on within your culture.
00:15:41
Luisa Hogan
And when things go wrong, do people explain or justify or like point to somebody and blame them? Or do they ask, what could we have done better?
00:15:55
Luisa Hogan
is the first response to fix the problem or is the first response to find blame? And after meetings end, are there conversations around the water cooler or in the corridor or behind closed doors? I've seen it so often where there's a meeting, we have a meeting and the minute the meeting ends, people walk out the room and then they pair off or go into little small groups, they go for a coffee, or they go into an office and shut the door. And that's where the real conversations are happening because the internal self-talk they've had during that meeting is what they're now going to potentially share with others. And they won't even share it all if they don't feel safe.
00:16:35
Luisa Hogan
So if you want to help your team rewrite the collective self-talk, you need to understand that language comes first, doesn't come from announcements.
Changing Unhelpful Narratives with Trust
00:16:44
Luisa Hogan
Culture doesn't come from announcements. It only changes when people use ah the language internally and externally to describe the reality.
00:16:55
Luisa Hogan
And you've got to have curiosity over judgment. You can't get defensive over all of this stuff. You've got to ask, why is that happening? Why is that the narrative? Why are people thinking those things? What is causing it?
00:17:09
Luisa Hogan
And then you've also got to name those unhelpful narratives openly. So if somebody does say those things like, well, nothing ever changes around here. You say, well, I've noticed we tend to say that in this team. I'm curious where that comes from and if it's still going to serve us moving forward and start analyzing that with people. But that doesn't come until you have started to develop trust within your team and small moments matter to build trust because culture isn't built on the big offsite meetings. It's made in the 30 seconds after somebody delivers bad news.
00:17:48
Luisa Hogan
It's made in the 30 seconds after somebody's employed their first day of work and they meet somebody. It's made in the 30 seconds where somebody comes into your head office and says hello to the receptionist and how they're treated in that moment.
00:18:00
Luisa Hogan
That is where culture is built. And culture is stories we repeatedly reinforce internally. And you've got to ask yourself, which stories are you strengthening through your actions? Which stories are you rewarding? And you've got to make sure that you are very self-aware. And I know it's hard because the higher up you go, the more difficult it is to
Self-Awareness in Leadership
00:18:22
Luisa Hogan
be self-aware. but You've got to be very self-aware about how you are accidentally strengthening or rewarding the inner dialogue that's creating your culture.
00:18:36
Luisa Hogan
So, going to end with this point here. If somebody talented joined your team tomorrow, what would they quickly, without explicitly being told, come to believe about how this place works?
00:18:53
Luisa Hogan
So imagine yourself, you are a new, talented, high-performing person, and you walk into this team What is the thing that they will believe straight away about how this place works just from experiencing their day in this new place?
00:19:13
Luisa Hogan
What would they learn to say? What would they learn to never raise? What would they eventually start doing to fit in?
00:19:24
Luisa Hogan
And that is the curriculum that they go through, not your culture documents, not your values, not your mission. That is the curriculum that they get to learn about the culture in your business, your organization, wherever you are.
00:19:40
Luisa Hogan
And it it gets taught without you even being aware of it. So thank you for joining me today on the Second Voice Podcast. Always enjoy talking to you. Until next time, take care.