How To Build A Culture Where People Speak Up

Have you ever tried to speak up and it didn’t go well? Did it backfire or fall flat? How did that experience impact your sense of self-worth and engagement at work?

The Risks When Employees Don’t Speak Up

When employees don’t speak up, for whatever reason, it causes big problems. Real issues don’t get surfaced, problem-solving is stymied, and potential risks go unnoticed for too long. Investigations into airline crashes often discover that somebody knew something critical, and tried to speak up, but was ignored or dismissed.

Why Don’t Employees Speak Up?

Creating a culture where people are willing to speak up and are taken seriously is a challenge. Megan Reitz and Amy Edmonson recently explored this issue in an article published in the Harvard Business Review. They identified several factors that get in the way of people speaking up.

One barrier is that leaders are oblivious. People who are in a position to make a difference aren’t aware of the problem. The solution is to listen differently and pay attention to the nuances of what’s going on. Moving from oblivious to aware requires a new kind of listening.

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Another barrier is self-doubt and internal dialogue. When people speak up and get a negative response, they might question their own value or tell themselves counter-productive stories about what happened. They might feel unsafe or lack the confidence and skills to follow-up and check the accuracy of their assumptions. Or they might blame others, believing they aren’t responsible for what happens next. Moving from self-doubt to assertiveness requires a new kind of communication.

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Do You Want Comfort, Or Results?

The third barrier described by Reitz and Edmonson is that leaders are too busy and focused only on short-term, task-related conversations. As a result, they don’t prioritize the kinds of conversations that can build psychological safety, trust, and healthy accountability. Moving from short-term task focus to a balanced focus on results AND relationships requires a new kind of conflict.  

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How To Build Cultures Where Employees Speak Up

Understanding the dynamics is great, but what do we do about it? How do we change things? The authors offer a few basic guidelines for how to have better conversations that help people speak up. But, like so much of what’s being put in front of leaders these days, it focuses more on identifying the problems than how to solve them with real-world application. Real change requires learning and applying new behavior, consistently, within an accountable community.

The real solution to building healthy, thriving, inclusive cultures is teaching leaders a new kind of listening, a new kind of communication, and a new kind of conflict. When leaders learn to listen, communicate, and engage in conflict in more productive ways, things start to change.

Our solution is Compassionate Accountability; the practice of demonstrating that people are valuable, capable, and responsible in every interaction. We have a proven method to help leaders learn and apply the skills where it matters most. 94% of our clients say our method is superior to any other conflict/communication model they’ve tried.

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