For years, people said “ugh” when I told them what I did for a living.
I managed complaints—discrimination, retaliation, harassment—filed through channels outside the organization’s walls. The kind where the concerns land on a desk, spelled out on letterhead, with a clock already running on the response.
The sympathy was misplaced. There was a need. I met it. Most of what crossed my desk resolved cleanly, in a way both sides could live with and move forward. However, sometimes situations required remediation, and that was within scope, too.
Insights that Shape
But here’s what more than two decades of that work actually taught me.
What you see is not always an accurate picture.
The complaint was rarely the full story. Typically, a closer look revealed something underneath it: a pattern of leadership behavior that, on its own, never would have risen to the level of a formal claim.
Picture a composite – not one team, not one company: A manager who is painstakingly fair on paper, who follows policy and hits every deadline— but defers a little more to one voice in the room than another, lets certain comments slide that would draw a correction for anyone else, or becomes silent at the moment a correction is needed. There is no clear policy violation. Instead, the room learns who matters most. Months later, someone files a complaint that has almost nothing to do with any single incident, but everything to do with the temperature that pattern set.
That pattern is the focus. This isn’t an article about leadership teams or culture in the abstract. It’s about the culture you shape as the team’s leader.
If you lead people, you don’t just observe the temperature in your organization. You set it.
Every meeting you run.
Every email you let sit unanswered from someone who reports to you.
Every time you laugh off a comment instead of naming it.
Every deadline you enforce for one person and quietly forgive for another.
None of that shows up on a letterhead complaint. Yet all of it teaches the people in your sphere what’s actually true, regardless of what the employee handbook says or what the company values display.
Thermostat, Not the Thermometer
That lesson creates the uncomfortable part of being a thermostat, not a thermometer. A thermometer merely reports what’s already there. A thermostat sets the temperature everyone else calibrates to, whether they intend to or not.
This article isn't about instilling fear of being in leadership, but awakening to the influence you have as a leader. With two decades behind me, I have watched performative leadership behavior slowly fine-tune a room into complaints, turnover, and people quietly protecting themselves instead of doing their best work.
A Closing Thought
So, what temperature are you setting today? Not the one you intend, but the one your team would actually describe if you asked and they were being honest.
If this hits close to home, reach out. You don’t have to sit with it alone.
Lillian Davenport, SPHR, SHRM – SCP, MGSCC, Principal, End View LeadershipSM
