Every organization has them. The rules nobody wrote down but everybody follows. Don’t show too much emotion. Don’t talk about where you came from. Don’t let them see you struggle.

These aren’t the rules in the employee handbook. They’re the ones passed down through culture ie. family culture, corporate culture, the culture of whatever room you had to learn to survive in before you got to this one.

And according to Denise Soler Cox, they’re the most expensive rules your organization is paying for right now.

Denise is an award-winning filmmaker, keynote speaker and author of the forthcoming Simon & Schuster book What Will They Say? She has spent a decade studying what she calls the cultural norms that teach us we can’t tell the truth about who we are and how those norms quietly kill belonging, performance and trust on teams.

“The deepest barrier to belonging,” she says, “is a cultural norm that teaches us that I can’t tell you the truth about me.” That insight, featured by Meeting Professionals International, sits at the center of her keynote work with Fortune 500 companies, Latina leadership organizations and high-performing teams across industries.

What makes Cox’s approach distinct is that she doesn’t treat belonging as a feeling to be manufactured. She treats it as a performance problem to be solved. When people can’t tell the truth about who they are at work, they spend enormous energy managing the gap between who they are and who they’re pretending to be. That energy leak is what’s actually driving burnout, disengagement and turnover in organizations today.

Her keynote gives audiences a name for the unspoken rules running their workplace, and a framework for what happens when those rules finally get examined out loud.

Organizations that have experienced her work include L’Oreal’s SalonCentric, where she spoke to 4,000 employees, and Lean In Latinas, among dozens of corporate and nonprofit partners.

What Will They Say? publishes August 18, 2026 with Simon & Schuster’s Primero Sueño imprint and is available for pre-order now.

Editorial Team, denisesolercox.com