David Maxfield, a New York Times bestselling author and leader of research at VitalSmarts believes that a culture of silence eats away at your organization.
Let’s say a long-time employee has created a hostile work environment—but everyone ignores it. Or a project plan has fatal flaws everyone knows about, yet no one takes concerns up the chain of command. Or no one addresses the anxiety employees feel when the long-time CEO suddenly leaves or dies. Or … (I’m sure you can think of examples from your own experience.)
Mr. Maxfield notes five areas where people stay silent: adversarial colleagues, strategic errors, lazy and incompetent coworkers, bullying bosses, and chaotic management. Instead of speaking up, they complain to others (78%), do extra work (66%), chew over the problem (53%), or get angry (50%).
What are the costs of looking the other way and not speaking up? Some 90% of nurses don’t speak to a doctor when they know a patient is at risk. Some 93% of respondents believe their organization is susceptible to a workplace accident because people are unwilling or unable to speak up. The average person wastes seven days complaining, doing unnecessary work, ruminating about a problem, or getting mad. Forty percent of Mr. Maxfield’s respondents said they wasted two weeks or even more. And that doesn’t address the financial hit to an organization.
What to do?
Unsurprisingly, a culture of silence must be addressed from the top down. Leadership must model four key behaviors:
- Reverse your thinking by considering the risks—financial, organizational, and emotional—of not speaking up.
- Change your emotions. As Mr. Maxfield puts it, “Try to see others as reasonable, rational, and decent human beings—a practice that softens strong emotions and ensures you come across more agreeably.”
- Make others feel safe. Assure the other person involved of your respect and positive intentions. My thought: don’t assume they know you respect them and have their best interests at heart. This can go a long way toward making it easier to talk about something unpleasant.
- Invite dialogue. My thought: don’t do that unless really you mean it. Nothing breeds cynicism more than squashing dialogue by discounting the other person’s ideas, not listening, or offering a diplomatic-sounding non-response.
Mr. Maxfield ends his article by saying, “Cultures of dialogue are not only full of happier, more engaged employees — they also reap the kind of bottom-line results that can mean the difference between success and failure.”
What kind of experiences have you had with a culture of silence?
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