Speaking Truth to Power: Are We Getting Better at It?

A couple of weeks ago I caught up with an ex-colleague who'd worked with me for a while.

I'd recently given her a reference and one of the things I'd highlighted was her ability to speak truth to power even when what she had to say was difficult or simply wasn't what people wanted to hear.

It got us talking. And it got me thinking.

Because that's a quality I've always valued enormously. But how easy do organisations really make it?

Then I came across a passage in Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People. She recalls Sheryl Sandberg saying:

“The greatest threat to Facebook is us, it's all of us.”

Wynn-Williams describes Sandberg worrying that as they became more successful, they might become overconfident and that people might eventually stop telling her the truth, bringing her bad news or challenging her.

I can't independently verify the conversation happened exactly as recalled. But the thought stayed with me.

How would you actually know if people had stopped telling you the truth?

Nobody announces: “I've decided it's no longer worth challenging you.”

We just learn.

Which subjects are safe. Which battles are worth having. Which leaders genuinely welcome challenge and which welcome it until you actually disagree with them.

And it made me wonder whether this is getting worse.

We're rightly more conscious of language and how what we say affects other people. But we're also working through economic uncertainty, job insecurity, geopolitical tensions and increasingly polarised debate.

Are we becoming more reluctant to say the difficult thing?

I expected the research to give me an answer.

Surprisingly, it doesn't.

There has been lots of research into whether employees speak up or stay silent. But when researchers recently looked across more than 250 studies, they found we still know remarkably little about whether our willingness to speak up is actually getting better or worse over time.

But they do know something else.

Where you sit in an organisation seems to change how safe you think speaking up is.

Research by Megan Reitz and John Higgins found that senior people were much more likely to believe people could speak openly than those further down the organisation.

In one UK study, almost half of junior employees thought that if they raised a problem they were likely to be ignored. A third thought they might actually be suppressed.

At the same time, 97% of senior people believed they listened to their colleagues' ideas.

That's quite a gap.

And perhaps that's partly why our own perspective changes during our careers.

When you're junior, speaking truth to power is about:

“Do I dare say this?”

When you become more senior, perhaps the question should become:

“Would anyone dare say it to me?”

Because history gives us some fairly uncomfortable examples of what happens when challenge stops getting through.

Boeing. Volkswagen. The Post Office. Mid Staffordshire.

Very different organisations and circumstances, but with something in common: people somewhere knew there was a problem. Information existed. Concerns were raised.

But somehow the truth didn't travel upwards strongly enough to change what happened.

Maybe speaking truth to power isn't getting better or worse.

Maybe power has always changed what people are prepared to say and what those with power are prepared to hear.

And perhaps we've put too much responsibility on employees to be “brave” enough to speak up.

Maybe more of the responsibility belongs with those of us with the power to listen.

Because saying “my door is always open” isn't the same as people believing they can walk through it.

And asking people to challenge you isn't the same as being comfortable when they do.

So perhaps the better question for leaders isn't:

“Do I encourage people to speak up?”

It's:

“What happened the last time somebody told me something I really didn't want to hear?”

Because everyone else was watching.