Being Silenced and Silencing Others: Developing the Capacity to Speak Truth to Power Megan Reitz, John Higgins

Summary

The imperative for transparency that drove this report was initially twofold. Firstly, from 2014 to 2016, the world watched as a number of corporate scandals brought household names into disrepute and in some cases to their
knees. Examples included emissions at VW, accounting at Toshiba and doping at the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). In all these cases individuals inside these organizations had information that, if it had been told to and listened to by those in leadership positions, might have mitigated the negative consequences, if not eliminated them altogether.

Undoubtedly the next few years will see more organizations failing through falling into the trap of someone knowing something but not speaking up about it, or not getting heard. Within the finance and health sectors in particular, the issues of transparency and improved connection up, down and across organizational hierarchies are being explicitly highlighted as being of critical importance.

Secondly, competitive pressures are leading to an ever-growing need to innovate quickly and harness the ‘collective intelligence’ of employees. Yet those at the ‘top’ of organizations might be the least able and/or willing
to hear the opportunities. They are inevitably isolated since they are in positions where people often report to them only what they think will be politically acceptable.

Those in the ‘middle’ and at the ‘bottom’ of organizations will often stifle their ideas to avoid risking their career prospects or their sense of fitting in and being accepted by colleagues. The result? Organizations working at a fraction of their capabilities.

Adding to these two issues is the current debate on the ‘post-truth’ society. There are mounting concerns about ‘post-truth’ political and corporate realities being shaped by the emotional appeals and personal beliefs espoused by powerful and charismatic individuals. This triumph of the will undermines truth that is grounded in reality, which can only be achieved through rigorous debate and the search for perspectives that challenge the consensus of the powerful.

When dominant leaders begin to see themselves as unquestionably right, when those around them feel they can only say what is safe to say, then we have a perfect storm in which leaders who are disconnected from the day-to-day can persuade others through their own powerful rhetoric that their perspective of the world is reality. Alternative understandings and experiences are stifled with potentially disastrous consequences, as robust and informed decision-making becomes impossible. This is publicly visible in politics across the world right now and it is of equal relevance in the corporate world.

Addressing all three of these issues lie in the ability of people in positions of power and authority to make it easy for people to speak to them. Effective dialogue is a critical organizational capacity if ideas and challenges are to flow freely up and down hierarchies and across organizational siloes, none of which can be achieved by executive decree. This need for dialogue has led to the proliferation, in management books and training programs, of ‘conversational leadership’, encouraging leaders to be more accessible and relationally oriented towards employees.

While signaling a valuable addition to modern leadership capacities, we argue in this report that there is a danger of underestimating (or deliberately ignoring) the complexities and consequences of how truth gets spoken to those in power – and how different forms of power determine what counts as truth. Simply asking people to ‘speak up’ and encouraging leaders to ‘engage in conversation’ without thoroughly appreciating the impact that power differences – and prevailing social and cultural norms – have on what can be spoken, and what is heard, is naïve at best. At worst it leads to organizational cynicism, as an issue of critical practical importance becomes trivialized into ritualized listening, consultation and training exercises.

This report presents findings from a two-year project into ‘speaking truth to power’ in organizations.

We discovered, through our interviews, organizational studies, workshops with groups of senior executives and our comprehensive research into our own experiences, that ‘speaking truth to power’ stimulated people to reflect
on experience from two perspectives. The first related to times where the individual had themselves made a choice to speak up to others they regarded as more powerful, or had remained silent. The second related to times when individuals, recognizing they may be perceived as being more powerful in the eye and experience of others, had attempted to enable others to speak up to them, or had inadvertently or purposefully acted to keep others silent.

Across both of these perspectives we identified five intertwined issues, which are all navigated together when speaking up (or staying silent). The first two, the ‘conviction’ to speak or listen and ‘risk awareness’, the awareness of the consequences of speaking up (or being spoken up to), are put first as they decide, as one research participant noted: “Am I going to move or not move?” The latter three, ‘political awareness’, ‘social awareness’ and ‘judgement’ relate to the skill of assessing the political and social conditions in a specific context, and then having the capacity, or ‘nous’, to judge how to say things, or invite things to be said.

We have developed, and present in this report, a practical diagnostic that allows individuals and groups to explore their capacities in each of these areas as they relate to the specifics of their organizational and personal context. But these issues do not exist in a vacuum and we have also identified a framework for exploring an organization’s overall truth-to-power culture (or cultures), which sets the context within which voicing
ideas and challenge takes place. The four ‘archetypal’ cultures (directive, perspectives, firstly whether power is exercised ‘over’ others or ‘with’ others, and secondly whether ‘truth’ is considered to be singular, i.e. there
is one view of the way forward, or whether it is accepted that there are multiple ways of perceiving what should be done, none of which are ‘right’ in any objective sense. More than one of the four cultures may exist within an organization and each of them has its own developmental priorities and opportunities.

Finally, while not wanting to trivialize or over-simply the highly situation specific reality of speaking or not speaking truth to power, we identify a number of distinct areas of development activity for both individuals and organizations. Through continuous learning from our consulting practice, along with ideas generated from those we interviewed, we suggest these activities may enable more conscious, choiceful and transparent decisions to be made about speaking up and hearing others.

This has never been a more pressing imperative.

Authors

Megan Reitz, John Higgins

Paper

•  Speak Up Express our opinions frankly and openly