Your P&L Is the Last Place a People Problem Shows Up
Oct 07, 2026
Picture the end of the quarter. You're the Managing Director for Asia Pacific. Head office is on the screen. Your numbers come up green. Someone says, "Great quarter, APAC." You say thank you, and you move on.
Now picture the slide nobody put up.
Two of your best team leaders resigned in Manila. Both said it was for a better offer. A bullying complaint has been sitting with HR in Brisbane for three weeks. Your Bangkok team smiles and nods in every meeting, and never raises a problem.
Six months from now, those lines will show up. A delayed project. A lost customer. A claim. A margin that slips, and nobody can explain why.
That's a composite. But if you run a region, I'd bet at least one of those lines sounds familiar.
The second balance sheet
Every MD has a dashboard. Revenue, margin, pipeline, cash. Those numbers matter.
But there's a second balance sheet underneath. It has five lines. Productivity. Absence. Tenure. Claims. Agility.
Here's what most leaders miss. These lines move together.
Gallup's analysis covers more than 180,000 teams. The most engaged teams had 78% lower absenteeism than the least engaged. They had 63% fewer safety incidents. And in organisations with turnover under 40% a year, they had 51% lower turnover. That's not one metric improving. That's the whole second balance sheet.
Now the bad news. Global engagement fell to 20% in 2025. The steepest drop was among managers. Your managers are the engine. If the engine runs on fumes, everything downstream slows down.
So absence, turnover and claims are not HR metrics. They're cost lines and risk lines. As the MD, you own them.
One root cause
Why do they move together? I explain it with the Brain Elevator.
Your people's brains work like a building with three floors. Floor one scans for threat. Floor two is where trust lives. Floor three is where problem-solving and adaptation happen. You can only go up in order.
When floor one detects a threat, people fight, flee, freeze or fawn. Look at your second balance sheet through that lens. Fight shows up as complaints. Flight shows up as resignations and sick days. Freeze shows up as silence. Fawn shows up as agreement that goes nowhere.
Two of those three floors are emotional. You can't strategy-deck your way to floor three if your people are stuck on floor one.
What it looks like in practice
I worked with the Operations division at ASC, the company that builds and maintains Australia's submarines. Safety incidents were costly. Engagement had taken a hit. Those two numbers were moving together.
We didn't run a poster campaign. We ran an emotionally intelligent leadership course. We ran workshops where the team co-created their own strategy. And we coached the managers who were struggling with the people side.
Staff morale went up significantly. Safety incidents went down significantly. Same root cause, so both numbers moved.
Silence is not safety
Running a region adds another layer. Floor one isn't triggered by the same things everywhere.
These are tendencies, not rules. But in Australia, people will often question a decision in the meeting. In Manila, Bangkok or Shanghai, saying no to a senior person can feel deeply uncomfortable. So one region-wide "speak up" campaign can come back glowing in some countries. That might mean the culture is fine. Or it might mean nobody felt safe enough to tell you otherwise.
Silence is not agreement either. So build more than one channel for the truth. Read your survey by country, not as a regional average. And watch the leading signals: absence, resignations, and who has stopped contributing.
Three questions for Monday
- If absence, turnover and claims sat next to revenue, by country, what would your board see?
- Which country's silence are you reading as agreement?
- Who on your leadership team brings you bad news first? And who never does?
None of this is random. It's predictable, and it's preventable.
If you run a region and some of this feels a little too familiar, book a discovery call here. Let's look at what your second balance sheet is telling you.
