Leaders can’t make sound decisions based on skewed data. And yet, when the costs of speaking up are high, people go quiet, and leaders find themselves operating on incomplete, distorted information without realizing it.
Many leaders expect people to speak up. Others tell their teams, “Tell me what you think.” Very few solve for the fact that, however well-intended, their own behavior consistently disincentivizes the transparency they’re asking for and that is required for them to make sound decisions.
From compliance to client feedback to internal negotiation, we need people to offer their perspective, insight, and expertise. The traditional approach — investing in communication skills training that teaches people how to speak up or coaching people to be more assertive — yields few results while burning professional development dollars and valuable organizational capacity because it focuses on the wrong topic.
The Missing Factor
Whether people speak up isn’t a matter of courage, confidence, or capacity. It depends on the role silence plays within relationships and the organization.
Silence – defined as the withholding of self for the comfort or convenience of others – undermines our aspirations for proactive communication. Failing to understand silence and how it shows up in organizations means we will continue to solve for the wrong underlying factors.
Silence shows up in three ways
- Self-silencing – habits individuals have about whether or not it is worth it to share their thoughts, insights, and expertise
- Social – the behaviors we incentivize through our actions and reactions
- Systemic – how policies and practices support or undercut employee voice
Silence is a rational response to environments that don’t reward candor. It is also a default response when it is unclear whether psychological safety exists.
If staying in a leader’s good graces and getting promoted means toeing the company line, it doesn’t make sense to offer a different perspective. If feedback seems to disappear into a void with no acknowledgment or response, there’s no incentive to keep offering it. If the people who advance are the ones who don’t challenge the status quo, that’s the behavior that will be repeated.
What we reward becomes the rule.
Why Our Cost-Benefit Analysis Is Flawed
When deciding whether to speak up, most people fixate on two questions:
- What are the costs of speaking up?
- What are the benefits of staying silent?
The costs of speaking up feel immediate and concrete: the time and energy required, the risk of triggering someone’s defensiveness, the possibility of retaliation. Against that backdrop, the benefits of silence seem attractive — avoid the conflict, don’t rock the boat, preserve the relationship.
But this analysis is incomplete. It ignores two equally important questions:
- What are the costs of staying silent?
- What are the benefits of speaking up?
The costs of silence are real: nothing changes, there’s no opportunity to course-correct, and leaders continue operating on skewed information. The benefits of speaking up are equally real: problems get surfaced, issues can be addressed, things can actually change.
For individuals, this is an invitation to factor in the answers to all four questions above before defaulting to silence. For leaders, it’s a call to actively create conditions that make speaking up worth it — to reduce the costs of candor and stop inadvertently rewarding silence.
To do that, Leaders need to be aware of the ways they unintentionally incentivize silence.
Three Ways Leaders Reinforce Silence
Here are three specific leadership behaviors that reinforce silence, undermining the transparency and engagement necessary for effective collaboration and sound outcomes.
1. Assuming everyone thinks the way you do.
If a leader would speak up in a given situation, they often implicitly assume their team members would too. This is power blindness — forgetting that the power differential between a senior partner and a junior associate, or between a supervising attorney and a paralegal, shapes what feels safe to say.
Leaders see their own flaws and imperfections clearly. Their teams often don’t — or they see something else entirely: someone whose approval matters, whose reaction carries consequences.
If you want candor, you have to explicitly invite it. A 30-second level-set can shift the dynamic meaningfully: “I need your honest input. If you have a question, a concern, or a different read on this, I want to hear it — email me any time.”
2. Requiring people to speak up on your terms.
Human beings are all wired differently. Some communicate most effectively by typing rather than talking. Some do their best thinking slowly rather than quickly. Some are morning people, others are not. Unless we intentionally design the way we communicate, we default to the communication patterns and preferences of the people with the most hierarchical power – the leaders.
Requiring people to communicate on your timeline, in the format you can most easily process, or in fully-formed, polished arguments rather than preliminary thinking creates barriers to speaking up.
Broadening what counts as “speaking up” — to include written notes, quick emails, asynchronous messages, first drafts — increases the flow of information to you. It removes friction for people who think on paper, need processing time, or aren’t comfortable raising something in the moment.
Does it require experimenting with different ways of working? Yes. Is it worth it to get essential information earlier? Absolutely.
3. Penalizing the people who do speak up.
This is the most consequential pattern, and it’s often the least visible to the person doing it.
Even when leaders intellectually understand that they need input, asking a question can slow down a conversation. Raising a concern means reworking a project plan. Dissenting can come with relational risk. Perspectives can be inconvenient — and our defensiveness, frustration, or impatience, rather than genuine appreciation, sends a clear message about what we actually want.
The disconnect between what leaders say they want and how they respond when they get it undermines trust, credibility, and the flow of communication. People notice. They adjust accordingly. And they go quiet.
The Organizational Stakes
This isn’t only a leadership challenge. It’s an organizational one.
Organizations run on judgment, and judgment depends on good information. When silence is the rational choice for team members, the information that reaches decision-makers is filtered, softened, or missing. The partner who believes their team is aligned may simply have a team that has learned not to push back.
At every level, silence carries a cost. For the paralegal who spots an error but doesn’t feel safe flagging it. For the associate who sees a risk in a deal but assumes it’s above their pay grade to raise. For the senior attorney who assumes their team would tell them if something were wrong.
A Lever, Not Just a Risk
The leaders who create environments where people feel safe to speak up — and who respond in ways that reinforce rather than punish that behavior — gain something their peers don’t: access to what’s actually true. That is a strategic and competitive advantage.
If we are genuinely looking for input, candor, and expertise from the people we work with, we have to make it worth their while to offer it. That starts with recognizing that right now, for many people, it isn’t.
Silence is a professional risk. It is also a lever for professional and organizational development. Which will you make it?
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Originally published in Practicing Law Institute Chronicle (June 2026).
