Why people don't speak up, and what it costs execution

Think about your last leadership meeting. The one where a decision was made, and everyone nodded....

Then three people had a different conversation in the corridor afterwards. About what they actually thought. About the risk they could see. About what they would have said if it felt safe to.

That corridor conversation is where the real information lives. And it never made it into the room where the decision was made.

Most of the conversation around psychological safety focuses on how people feel. Whether the environment is supportive. Whether people are comfortable.

In execution, the question is different. It is about the quality of information flowing through your organisation.

And when it is low, your leaders are making decisions on half the picture.

I have seen this play out more times than I can count.

A risk is spotted on the frontline. It gets softened by the time it reaches a team lead. Reframed as a minor concern by the time it reached senior leadership. And by the time it reaches the executive table, it has disappeared entirely. The decision gets made without it.

Nobody lied. Nobody hid anything deliberately. The system just taught people, through a thousand small signals, what was safe to raise and what was not.

In my research, 73% of senior leaders (from organisations with over 100 staff) reported that avoidance, the reluctance to have direct, honest conversations, had a high to extremely high impact on their ability to execute their strategy. 

Not because people lacked opinions, but because the culture had made it easier to stay quiet than to speak up.

One respondent described it bluntly: “Psychological safety did not exist in the business. There was no full liberty to disagree and carry on. It had a political impact.”

That word matters. Political. 

People were not staying quiet because they were weak. They were staying quiet because they were smart. They had learned what happened when someone spoke up. And they had adjusted accordingly.

In an earlier post, I explored this at the leadership level. Whether leaders can be candid with each other at the top table. 

But the cost of silence does not stop at the exec table. It cascades. And by the time it reaches the people closest to the work, the ones who see the risks first, it has become the culture.

Here is the question worth sitting with: Are your leaders making decisions based on what people actually think? Or based on what people think is safe to say?

The gap between those two is where execution risk hides.

Those signals are designed, whether anyone meant to design them or not. That's the work in Leadership: building the conditions where the risk gets named in the room rather than the corridor.

This is part of lever 6 (Performance & Commitment) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model.
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Written by Rebecca Reti, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.

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