Building a Culture Where Employees Feel Free to Speak Up

The Leader Factor

In this episode of Culture by Design, we're talking about building a culture where employees feel free to speak up. This episode comes to you from an article Tim published recently on HBR with the same title. You can't just speak a speak-up culture into existence. Doing so in the absence of psychological safety is actually an abdication of leadership and an admission of failure. Tim and Junior talk about the four separations presented in Tim's article that create the conditions to give all employees a voice and motivate them to use it. They are: (1) separate worth from worthiness, (2) separate loyalty from agreement, (3) separate status from opinion, and (4) separate permission from adoption.

What's the opposite of psychological safety and speak-up cultures? (03:11) Rhetorical reassurance in the absence of true psychological safety is an abdication of leadership and an admission of failure.

Why do we want speak-up cultures? (10:21) Tim and Junior explain how speak-up cultures improve safety and compliance, improve decision-making, and increase innovation.

Why are speak-up cultures hard to create? (11:57) Speaking up is a highly vulnerable behavior. We gathered 50,000 data points on people's experiences with vulnerability at work. Tim and Junior explain the significance of the data in the context of challenging the status quo.

Separate worth from worthiness (17:36) Worth is based on your intrinsic inherent worth as a human being. Tim and Junior explain why speaking up is not a matter of worth, and how separating worth from worthiness helps us create a foundation of inclusion.

Separate loyalty from agreement (28:39) When loyalty becomes contingent on agreement, it produces manipulated conformity, which isn’t loyalty at all. True loyalty, which refers to genuine concern for and dedication to the best interests of an institution and its people, must not only allow, but encourage, independent thought.

Separate status from opinion (34:53) Smart people don’t make a smart team unless they can harness their collective intelligence. We harness collective intelligence by inviting and processing dissent. How do you do this? Teach and model the art of disagreement (both how to disagree and how to be disagreed with).

Separate permission from adoption (43:29) Some people mistakenly believe that to be heard is to be heeded. Of course, in organizations, this is not possible. The organization can’t say yes to everyone. It has to constantly make tradeoff decisions in the allocation of its resources. Remove the misconception that permission to speak up somehow translates into an obligation to adopt the suggestion. And, in the absence of adoption, emphasize recognition.

Important Links:
HBR Article: Building a Culture Where Employees Feel Free to Speak-Up
The Ladder of Vulnerability Data