When you use an search engine, your search term informs your search results.

Same thing when addressing an issue. The questions we ask and answer shape the solutions we identify and prescribe.

For too long, the challenge of not being seen, heard, or known was framed as a speaking up problem.

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​Question: How do you speak up?

Answers:

• Be more confident.
• Be more direct.
• Use less umms.
• Show less emotion.
• Wait, show a bit more emotion to prove you care. But not like that.

The range of solutions includes the quiet person needing to take “assertiveness” training. The introvert needing to try improv to be “quicker on their feet.” Essentially, if you’re not getting heard, you need to go fix yourself. After all, if you would just speaker louder, more succinctly, in better English, then you’d get heard – and respected, promoted, and paid.

Framing the issue in this way is convenient, particularly for leaders. Because if it’s a personal problem, leaders can absolve themselves of responsibility and say that it’s not their problem. And if the person can’t address the issue, then it’s on them and we can let them go.

But, asking a different question gets us different answers. And in many cases, a more accurate diagnosis of the problem and range of ways to address it.

Question: Why do we hear some people and not others?

Answers:

• People have learned and been rewarded for staying silent.
• The ways we lead and interact with people silence them – even when we don’t intend.
• The systems we operate in silence certain voices while elevating others – often requiring women and people of color to edit out parts of themselves in order to have a chance to be at the table.

If the problem is that we silence the very people we lead (or in our personal lives, those we live), then the answers are different.

• Leaders need to increase our capacity and willingness to listen across difference.
• Leaders need to normalize different communication and leadership styles so that genius can shine through.
• Leaders need to design workplaces and teams so policies and practices support those that carry the most subordinated identities.

Those answers require more engagement, ownership of our contributions, and willingness to admit the ways we silence each other – even if we identify as good, well-meaning people.

Asking the more accurate question is less convenient than asking the wrong question, but more likely to get us to a world where we actually honor belonging, dignity, and justice for each human.

Are you and your team asking – and answering – the right question?

Elaine

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When you’re ready, here are three ways I can help…

1. ​Connect with me on LinkedIn for tips on leadership, communication, and navigating toxic workplaces weekdays at 9am ET.
2. ​Pre-order my book Unlearning Silence: How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully (Penguin 2024) – for yourself, or for someone you care about.
3. ​Hire me to speak virtually or in person.