Your Team Learned to Stay Quiet Before They Met You

I’ve had that said to me, and I’ve also heard it many times from clients. The moment when someone comes to you after a meeting or a conversation, maybe even at the dinner table, and they tell you: “Oh, you should have said this...”

The comment itself isn’t the issue; the problem is that they didn’t feel comfortable bringing it up during the conversation. We believe we have created a safe space for people to speak up about anything, or have that “open door” policy; but they see it differently and don’t feel it’s okay to raise that point.

This is much more common than we realize. In one study of a leading tech company, half the employees said it wasn’t safe to speak up. And what they held back most wasn’t problems. It was ideas for making things better. Hostile bosses were rarely the reason.

More often, vague perceptions of the environment held people back. As the researchers summed it up, the unspoken rule was “When in doubt, keep your mouth shut.” (Detert and Edmondson, Academy of Management Journal, 2011.)

The reasons can be traced to five unwritten rules that are in people’s minds:

The boss owns this idea, so any suggestion sounds like criticism.

Don’t speak up until you have solid data or a finished solution. (Most common)

Don’t go over your boss’s head, even in a shared meeting.

Never embarrass the boss in front of others.

Speaking up will cost you your career.

And again, these aren’t spoken out loud, but they linger over everyone and become part of a culture. In other words, silence in the organization already exists because of these ideas, and what people sense overshadows how they operate.

How does this happen?

People bring the rules with them, learned from parents, teachers, and every boss before them. For example, from a young age, you may have understood who ranks above you. Your behavior as a boss is only part of it. And once they are in place, the rules survive contrary evidence, and people rarely test them. That’s why an open-door policy isn’t enough.

In my book, I speak about the inheritance we are never meant to leave to our children. A client named Sam told me a story that stayed with me. He was having dinner with his adult son (a successful manager at a tech company) when his son got a call from work. Sam watched as his son’s entire demeanor changed, his tone sharpened, and the words came out fast and cutting. By the time the call ended, Sam was stunned. “That’s exactly how I sound,” he later told me. “That edge. That impatience. That ‘I don’t have time for this energy. I heard myself in him, and I hated it.”

His son had never worked for him, never even sat in one of his meetings, but he’d watched his father handle work calls at home for years and had absorbed his patterns without realizing it. Sam called it “the inheritance I never meant to give him.”

Maybe you have had a similar moment; maybe you, too, have heard your tone come out of your kid’s mouth, say when they were managing a sibling. Or maybe you’ve looked around your team and noticed that the ones with that natural intensity, the ones who need to be in charge, were leading like mini-versions of you. And each of them is teaching their own team the same five rules.

So while you might not be directly creating the silence, your style can confirm it.

Speaking up has always come easily to me. I’m quite assertive, and I know people with assertive tendencies don’t hold these rules the same way. In fact, we often can’t understand why others don’t speak up because, for us, it’s easy to share anything without overthinking it, which also makes us read silence as agreement.

So what we create is that people tend to defer to the assertive ones because it’s easier than risking getting it wrong (tapping on rule 2 above: don’t speak up unless you have your facts ready). That wasn’t our intention, and yet we create a culture where quiet happens. And the quieter they get, the more we take over, and consequently, the quieter they get – creating that reinforcing loop.

So what is there to do?

Name the five rules out loud, share them with your team, and ask which ones resonate with them. You’d be surprised how many apply to them.

Be clear that you want to hear their concerns, even if they don’t have a solution yet, and that they should speak up no matter who’s in the room, including bosses.

Reward the first person who disagrees in public. Others will hear and see that, and they learn more from how you treat that person than from anything you say.

Pay attention to those who don’t speak up, and engage them, gently. Something as simple as, “Hey Oliver, you’ve had some interesting points in the past, what do you think of …?” Use first names to engage them, ask open-ended questions, and allow space for silence so they can gather their thoughts and share. If you do that often enough, they understand that you want to hear from them, and that they might be asked to share.

The question with all this isn’t whether you are intimidating; it’s whether you are aware of the silence in the room and actively breaking it.

People don’t only go quiet at work. They go quiet before anyone asks them to, everywhere. Historians have a name for that, and it’s the subject of the next issue.

But in the meantime, if you want to know how much this is happening in your team, take the free Brilliant But Difficult Assessment, for yourself or for a leader you work with.

Roberto

A Letter to My Exes: How I Learned to Lead Without Being a Tyrant, available on Amazon.

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