Is your reticence to rock the boat with an idea for improvement irrational? Harvard Business School’s Amy C Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization, outlines why people at work so often hold back and fail to speak up
Chances are you’ve had the experience at work when you did not ask a question you really wanted to ask. Or, you may have wanted to offer an idea but stayed quiet instead. Several studies show that these types of silence are painfully common. Collecting and analysing data from interviews with employed adults, studies have investigated when and why people feel unable to speak up in the workplace. From this work we learn, first and foremost, that people often hold back even when they believe that what they have to say could be important for the organisation, for the customer, or for themselves.
There is a poignancy in these discoveries. No one gains from the silence. Teams miss out on insights. Those who fail to speak up often report regret or pain. Some wish they had spoken up. Others recognise they could be experiencing more fulfilment and meaning in their jobs were they more able to contribute. Those deprived of hearing a colleague’s comments may not know what they are missing, but the fact is that problems go unreported, improvement opportunities are missed, and occasionally, tragic failures occur that could have been avoided.
Why employees fail to speak up at work
In an early study of workplace silence, NYU Stern School of Business researchers Frances Milliken, Elizabeth Morrison, and Patricia Hewlin [the latter of which is now at McGill Desautels Faculty of Management] interviewed 40 full-time employees working in consulting, financial services, media, pharmaceuticals, and advertising, to understand why employees failed to speak up at work and what issues they failed to raise most often. When pressed to explain why they remained silent, people often said they did not want to be seen in a bad light. Another common reason was not wanting to embarrass or upset someone. Still others expressed a sense of futility – along the lines of ‘it won’t matter anyway; why bother?’ A few mentioned fear of retaliation. But the two most frequently mentioned reasons for remaining silent were one, fear of being viewed or labelled negatively, and two, fear of damaging work relationships. These fears, which are definitionally the opposite of psychological safety, have no place in the fearless organisation.
What issues employees wanted to speak up about were both organisational and personal. They ranged from concerns that are understandably difficult to raise: for example, about harassment, a supervisor’s competence, or having made a mistake. More surprisingly, however, they also held back on suggestions for improving a work process. In short, as later research would demonstrate more systematically, people at work are not only failing to speak up with potentially threatening or embarrassing content, they are also withholding ideas for improvement. Notably, every individual interviewee reported failing to speak up on at least one occasion. Most had found themselves in situations where they were very concerned about an issue and yet still did not raise it with a supervisor.
A later and larger study conducted in a manufacturing company used survey data to identify very similar reasons for silence. Specifically, employees who did not feel psychologically safe to speak up cited reasons that included fear of damaging a relationship, lack of confidence, and self-protection. In another study, social psychologist Renee Tynan surveyed Business School students about their relationships with a prior boss to gain insight into when and why people do (or don’t) communicate their thoughts upwards. She found that when people felt psychologically safe, they spoke up to their bosses. They were able to ask for help and admit errors, despite interpersonal risk. When they did not feel psychologically safe, they tended to keep quiet or to distort their message so as not to upset their bosses.
The gravitational pull of silence
A few years ago, University of Virginia Darden School of Business Professor, Jim Detert, and I interviewed more than 230 employees in a large multinational high-tech company. We asked interviewees, who spanned all levels, regions and functions, to describe instances in which they did and did not speak up at work to their managers or anyone else higher in the company. Here too, all individuals could readily describe a time in which they failed to speak up about something they believed mattered. Jim and I combed through the thousands of pages of accumulated responses to find out what drove people to speak up – and, perhaps more importantly, what drove them to hold back.
Consider the manufacturing technician in a US plant who told us he didn’t share an idea he had for speeding up the production process. When we asked why, he replied, ‘I have kids in college’. At first glance, a nonsensical reply. But his meaning was clear; he felt he could not take the risk of speaking up because he could not afford to lose his job. When we probed further, hoping to hear a story about someone losing a job related to speaking up, the associate admitted that it really didn’t work that way. In fact, he replied: ‘Oh, everyone knows we never fire anybody.’ He was not speaking sarcastically; he was admitting that his reticence to rock the boat with what he believed was a good idea was irrational, and deep down he understood that. Yet the gravitational pull of silence – even when bosses are well-meaning and don’t think of themselves as intimidating – can be overwhelming. People at work are vulnerable to a kind of implicit logic in which safe is simply better than sorry. Many have simply inherited beliefs from their earliest years of schooling or training. If they stop to think more deeply, they may realise they’ve erred too far on the side of caution. But that kind of reflection is rarely prompted.
This is an edited extract from The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth, by Amy C Edmondson (Wiley, December 2018).
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AMY C EDMONDSON is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Edmondson, recognised by the biannual Thinkers 50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, teaches and writes on leadership, teams and organisational learning.
