Why Good People Stop Speaking Up

A conversation I have fairly regularly with leadership teams centres on communication.

Not whether communication is happening, but whether people are saying what they really think.

Most organisations contain people who spot issues long before they become serious problems. They notice when a process is no longer working as intended, when a decision is creating unintended consequences or when a customer concern is becoming more common. The information exists within the organisation. The challenge is whether it reaches the people who need to hear it.

Over the years, I have become less concerned by disagreement inside leadership teams and more concerned by the absence of it.

When everybody appears to agree all of the time, it is worth asking whether genuine agreement exists or whether people have simply decided that raising concerns is not worth the effort.

This is not a new idea. In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments that explored how people behaved when the majority opinion was clearly wrong. What he discovered was that many people would go along with the group, even when they knew the group was mistaken. However, the presence of a single person willing to offer a different view changed things significantly. Once one person challenged the consensus, others became much more likely to do the same.

Although the experiment took place in a laboratory, the principle is familiar to anyone who has spent time in organisations: People often look to each other before deciding whether it is safe to speak.

Professor Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety reached a similar conclusion from a different direction.

Teams perform better when people feel comfortable asking questions, admitting mistakes and raising concerns.

Not because these conversations are always easy, but because important information is less likely to remain hidden.

The practical leadership question is straightforward.

What happens in your organisation when somebody raises a concern, challenges an assumption or points out a problem?

If challenge is welcomed, more challenge tends to follow. If concerns are dismissed, ignored or viewed as inconvenient, people quickly learn to keep them to themselves.

Most leaders would rather hear about a problem early than late. Yet organisations sometimes create conditions where people feel safer staying silent than speaking honestly.

The consequence is rarely immediate. Businesses usually continue functioning. Targets continue to be met. Meetings continue to happen. The issue is that valuable information gradually stops flowing to the people making decisions.

By the time a problem becomes visible to everyone, it has often been visible to someone for quite a while.

The strongest leadership teams I encounter are not necessarily those that agree most often. They are the ones where people are prepared to challenge each other's thinking, raise concerns and contribute different perspectives in service of making better decisions.

That culture does not appear by accident. It is created by leaders who consistently show that speaking up is worthwhile.