Article 5: Why do we keep putting the responsibility for speaking up on the person with less power?

There is something slightly uncomfortable about the way we talk about speaking up at work. We tell employees to raise concerns, challenge decisions, give honest feedback, disclose when they need support and have the courage to address problems rather than allowing them to continue. We encourage people to be assertive, authentic and willing to have difficult conversations, and when they hesitate, we often focus on what might help them become more confident or capable of speaking.

There is nothing inherently wrong with encouraging people to have a voice. The ability to raise concerns, challenge poor practice and talk openly about what we need is important for individuals and organisations. What I increasingly question, however, is why so much of the responsibility for making these conversations happen appears to sit with the person who may have the least power within them.

If an employee needs to tell their manager that their behaviour is causing a problem, we ask whether the employee can communicate it constructively. If somebody needs an adjustment because of a disability or health condition, we encourage them to disclose and clearly explain what they need. If someone witnesses something they believe is wrong, we tell them about the importance of speaking up. If an employee disagrees with a senior decision, we encourage constructive challenge.

Again and again, the person experiencing the problem is also expected to initiate the conversation that might resolve it.

I think we need to look much more closely at the other side of that exchange.

Speaking up is not a neutral act

It is easy to describe voice as though it is simply a communication behaviour: somebody has information, an opinion, a concern or a need, and they communicate it to somebody else. But workplace conversations do not happen between people who necessarily have equal status, resources or influence.

Telling a colleague that something they did upset you is one thing. Telling the person who evaluates your performance, allocates your work and influences your progression that their behaviour is affecting you is another. Raising a concern about organisational practice with a peer is different from challenging the senior leader responsible for that practice. Asking for support from somebody you trust is different from disclosing something deeply personal to a manager you barely know because organisational procedure requires you to do so.

The words might be similar. The psychological experience is not.

Power changes what is at stake because the person speaking may be thinking not only about whether they will be understood, but about what the recipient can do with the information afterwards. They may be considering their reputation, relationships, career opportunities, employment security or how they will be perceived. When the conversation involves health, disability, identity or wellbeing, they may also be exposing something about themselves that they have previously chosen to keep private.

Yet much of our advice still concentrates on whether that person can find the right words.

We spend a lot of time preparing the speaker

Think about the resources available for difficult conversations. There are countless models for structuring feedback, preparing what you want to say, staying calm, using appropriate language, separating behaviour from the person, managing emotion and being assertive without becoming aggressive.

We are very interested in preparing people to deliver difficult messages well.

I am less convinced that we invest the same effort in teaching people how to receive them.

Receiving something difficult requires its own set of psychological and interpersonal skills. It requires being able to hear criticism without immediately defending intention, tolerate discomfort without shutting the conversation down, remain curious when somebody's experience conflicts with our own and resist the urge to explain away something we do not particularly want to hear.

For managers and leaders, it may also require recognising that their reaction carries more weight than they realise. A facial expression, an immediate rebuttal, a dismissive comment or a defensive explanation may seem relatively minor to the person with greater power. To somebody who has spent weeks deciding whether to raise the issue, it can confirm every concern they had about doing so.

Perhaps difficult-conversation training has focused too heavily on delivery and not enough on reception.

“Speak up” can quietly become “take the risk”

This becomes particularly important when organisations encourage employees to speak up as evidence of a healthy culture. On the surface, the message is positive: tell us when something is wrong and we will listen.

But embedded within that invitation is an action the employee must take. They must identify the issue, decide it is worth raising, work out who to tell, initiate the interaction, articulate what has happened and manage whatever response follows. If the subject is sensitive, they may also need to regulate considerable emotion while doing it.

In other words, the person who may already be experiencing the consequences of a problem is also asked to carry much of the work involved in making that problem visible.

This is especially uncomfortable when the issue involves structural inequality or marginalisation. We can unintentionally ask the person experiencing exclusion to educate colleagues about inclusion, the disabled employee to repeatedly explain why an adjustment matters, the person experiencing inappropriate behaviour to confront it, or the junior employee to challenge the powerful person whose behaviour everybody else has also noticed.

There will inevitably be situations where an individual does need to initiate a conversation. Organisations cannot identify every concern before somebody raises it. But there is an important difference between recognising that reality and constructing a culture in which responsibility for challenging problematic conditions consistently flows towards the person most affected by them.

The receiver has responsibilities too

Perhaps we need a much stronger idea of conversational responsibility.

If somebody brings us something difficult, particularly when we hold more power in the relationship, our responsibility is not simply to allow them to speak. It is to consider what made speaking difficult in the first place and how our response might affect their willingness to do it again.

That does not mean agreeing with everything we hear. Psychological safety cannot mean that every complaint is upheld, every request granted or every interpretation accepted without question. Difficult conversations often involve genuinely different perspectives, competing needs and situations in which there is no comfortable resolution.

But disagreement and receptiveness can coexist.

A manager can disagree with an employee's interpretation while still taking their experience seriously. A leader can explain why a decision cannot be changed without making the person who challenged it regret asking. A colleague can hear that their behaviour caused harm without immediately centring their own intention. An organisation can investigate a concern fairly without treating the individual who raised it as an inconvenience.

The quality of a difficult conversation is therefore not simply determined by how skilfully the person raises the issue. It is co-created by what happens when the issue reaches somebody else.

Power creates a greater responsibility to listen well

This is where I think leadership carries a particular responsibility. The more power somebody holds within a conversation, the less they can rely on other people simply telling them when something is wrong.

Senior leaders often receive filtered versions of organisational reality. Employees choose their words carefully around people who influence their careers. Managers may hear less criticism precisely because they have greater authority. People may laugh at something they find uncomfortable, nod at a decision they have concerns about or remain quiet when invited to disagree.

The absence of challenge can therefore be strangely reassuring to the very people who should be most curious about it.

This creates a responsibility not simply to invite voice but to make challenge easier to offer. That might mean asking more specific questions rather than “Any concerns?”, actively seeking perspectives from people who have not spoken, responding thoughtfully when someone disagrees, acknowledging your own defensiveness when it appears and demonstrating through repeated behaviour that uncomfortable information will not damage the person who brings it.

It also means recognising that sometimes people will still choose not to speak, and that this does not automatically make them responsible for what happens next.

We need to stop admiring courage without questioning why it was necessary

We often celebrate people who speak up in difficult circumstances, and understandably so. It can require enormous courage to challenge something when the personal consequences are uncertain.

But I sometimes wonder whether our admiration for courage allows us to avoid asking a more difficult question: why did this conversation require so much courage in the first place?

If somebody had to spend weeks preparing to tell their manager they needed support, perhaps we should be interested in why the disclosure felt so risky. If an employee is praised for courageously challenging behaviour that many other people had witnessed, perhaps we should ask why responsibility reached them. If somebody risks their professional reputation to raise a serious organisational concern, perhaps celebrating their bravery is not enough.

Courage is valuable, but an organisation should not depend upon extraordinary individual courage for ordinary organisational problems to become discussable.

There is something deeply uneven about systems that create risk and then praise individuals for being brave enough to navigate it.

Perhaps speaking up needs to become a shared responsibility

I do not think the answer is to stop encouraging people to speak. Quite the opposite. Organisations need challenge, disagreement, feedback, disclosure and honest conversations. Without them, problems remain hidden and learning becomes difficult.

But perhaps we need to broaden our understanding of what enables those conversations.

Instead of asking only whether employees have the skills and confidence to speak, we could also ask whether managers have the skills and humility to receive what they say. Instead of measuring whether people know the channels through which they can raise concerns, we could examine what happens after those channels are used. Instead of telling people to bring their whole selves to work, we could ask whether the workplace has demonstrated that those selves will be treated with dignity when they arrive.

Most importantly, perhaps we need to recognise that the responsibility for a difficult conversation does not begin and end with the person who initiates it.

There are at least two people in the interaction, and around them sits an organisation that has shaped the power, expectations and potential consequences each person brings into the room.

If we genuinely want people to speak, then creating better speakers is only half the work.

We also need to become much better listeners, receivers, leaders and organisations.

Because the person with the least power should not continually have to carry the greatest responsibility for making the difficult conversation possible.