Executive Summary
It’s widely recognized that companies benefit when employees speak up to contribute new ideas or signal problems. Many try to encourage these behaviors. But research shows that encouraging idea contribution and problem signaling require different approaches. Giving managers a voice (contributing ideas) requires rewarding people and letting them share in the benefits their ideas will bring. Getting people to raise problems and concerns requires providing psychological safety.
To implement new processes, solutions, and ideas, someone needs to voice them, bring them to managers’ attention, or get the idea or problem noticed. If people do not speak up, change doesn’t happen, which is why leaders and organizations try to encourage people to speak up and contribute their ideas.
Underlying many of these efforts, though, is an intuitive yet misleading assumption, which is that speaking up is the same as not keeping silent. The expectation, therefore, is that if you encourage people to speak up and contribute their ideas and opinions, no one will remain silent when they have an idea you haven’t considered or a problem you haven’t spotted.
Although the assumption seems reasonable, the findings of our latest research project, published in the Academy of Management Journal, suggests that it isn’t true. From our meta-analysis of multiple studies involving thousands of survey respondents from many different contexts, we find that the extent to which or how often a person speaks up with constructive ideas or issues at work (voice) is almost completely independent from the extent to which or how often they intentionally withhold ideas or issues (silence). In fact, in several studies and organizations included in our meta-analysis, we saw that people quite often volunteered ideas in order to help their teams even as they silenced their fears.
Why does that happen?
We conducted a follow-up study with 405 employees of different companies over a six-month period. What we found is that people are motivated to speak up if they believe their contribution will have an impact on the organization and that they will be rewarded for that contribution. By contrast, whether people fail to signal a problem or idea to the boss mostly depends on whether they think there will be repercussions for doing so — will they get shunned or even fired?
We also found that people keeping silent was a lot more damaging to their wellbeing than people not chipping in with ideas. We looked specifically at burnout, which is defined as an intense form of work fatigue characterized by emotional exhaustion and withdrawal. If not speaking up was the same as staying silent, they each would produce the same amount of stress and burnout.
They did not. Employees who reported not contributing their ideas (low voice) but also did not stay silent if they felt it necessary to signal an issue or problem (low silence) did not experience nearly as much burnout as employees who reported self-silencing (high silence) about problems, even if these people also spoke up frequently (high voice). And that makes sense when you think about it some more: people can more easily live with lethargy or a lack of enthusiasm (not being encouraged to contribute) than with fear (worrying about calling out a problem).
What should you do about it?
Start by noticing and observing how people interact when ideas are communicated or problems are raised. Also, ask your people through anonymized surveys how much they speak up or remain silent in specific scenarios. This can help you identify the different types of issues that people choose to voice or remain silent about.
Going forward, you should adopt distinct approaches for managing voice and silence in the problematic situations you’ve identified. Voice management should focus on enhancing people’s perceived impact, their sense that speaking up is going to make a difference. Silence management should focus on creating psychological safety, ensuring that there are safe spaces to bring up tough and sensitive issues. Here are some basics to get you started:
Managing voice
- Consult: Ahead of meetings, explicitly invite people to come with ideas, suggestions, and concerns. Asking for their input signals that you care and would likely take action, but a surprising number of leaders avoid soliciting input.
- Consider: Asking for ideas and then ignoring them, can backfire; people understand that not every idea will be implemented but they want to know their voice was heard. Do you tell people that you paid attention to what they voiced?
- Communicate: Follow up to let people know what eventually happened to their ideas. You can even make this a routine event or communication, which is also a good way to hold leaders accountable for providing this feedback.
Managing silence
- Monitor: How you and others react to ideas or problems raised helps determine people’s sense of safety. Watch out for negative interpersonal behaviors, from scoffing to shutting people down. Set a good example and stop others behaving that way.
- Protect: In many firms, people are on the hook for the ideas they suggest. That encourages silence and breeds frustration. You must protect people from suffering if they make a reasonable suggestion that you choose to act on, and which then goes wrong. The originator of a failed idea is often not the only source of the failure.
- Ritualize: Place and process can reinforce or destroy a sense psychological safety. For example, have certain meetings in a different space, outside of the office, or in a non-formal arrangement, to signal that this is a time to bring up issues people might not usually bring up. Indeed, research has highlighted how creating a symbolic new space for interactions that might be challenging can foster safer and more respectful dynamics for organizational teams.
- Frame and reframe: Experimenting with different framings of questions signals it is safe to speak candidly. Research on premortems, in which people are asked to prospectively imagine that a negative event had already occurred, and explain why that happened (instead of trying to imagine what might go wrong), suggests that it leads to people raising worries and concerns that are usually withheld. As another example, research suggests that simple changes in the framing of a question from: “what could we do” to “what should we do,” can produce significantly different responses.
Leaders can no longer assume that people who speak up frequently are not withholding other issues; and similarly, if someone says little, you cannot assume they are deliberately withholding issues. As our research documents, outward behavior (voice) is often misaligned with private ideas, suggestions, and concerns that remain unspoken (silence). This means leaders must better understand the unique drivers of voice and silence and create mechanisms that ensure that ideas, suggestions, and problems are all communicated.
"Idea" - Google News
June 04, 2020 at 08:33PM
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You Might Not Be Hearing Your Team's Best Ideas - Harvard Business Review
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