Building a Culture Where Employees Feel Free to Speak Up

Sep 4, 2023

In this episode, Tim and Junior discuss the challenges of building a speak-up culture and the importance of psychological safety. They explore separating worth from worthiness, loyalty from agreement, status from opinion, and permission from adoption. They also highlight the benefits of speak-up cultures such as improved safety, compliance, decision-making, and innovation. The hosts emphasize the need for inclusivity, establishing an inclusive culture, harnessing collective intelligence, and learning the art of disagreement as a leader. Lastly, they discuss the importance of picking battles and investing in creating a culture of speaking up.

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Introduction

00:00 • 1min

Creating a SpeakUp Culture: The Challenges and Responsibilities of Leaders

01:30 • 20min

The Problem with Worthiness Tests and the Importance of Inclusion

21:48 • 4min

Creating an Inclusive Culture

25:55 • 9min

Separating Status from Opinion and Harnessing Collective Intelligence

34:42 • 6min

The Art of Disagreement and Modeling it as a Leader

40:53 • 2min

Choosing Battles Wisely

42:47 • 7min

Creating a Culture of Speaking Up

49:36 • 3min

In this episode of Culture by Design, we're talking about building a culture where employees feel free to speak up. This episode comes to you from an article Tim published recently on HBR with the same title. You can't just speak a speak-up culture into existence. Doing so in the absence of psychological safety is actually an abdication of leadership and an admission of failure. Tim and Junior talk about the four separations presented in Tim's article that create the conditions to give all employees a voice and motivate them to use it. They are: (1) separate worth from worthiness, (2) separate loyalty from agreement, (3) separate status from opinion, and (4) separate permission from adoption.

What's the opposite of psychological safety and speak-up cultures? (03:11) Rhetorical reassurance in the absence of true psychological safety is an abdication of leadership and an admission of failure.

Why do we want speak-up cultures? (10:21) Tim and Junior explain how speak-up cultures improve safety and compliance, improve decision-making, and increase innovation.

Why are speak-up cultures hard to create? (11:57) Speaking up is a highly vulnerable behavior. We gathered 50,000 data points on people's experiences with vulnerability at work. Tim and Junior explain the significance of the data in the context of challenging the status quo.

Separate worth from worthiness (17:36) Worth is based on your intrinsic inherent worth as a human being. Tim and Junior explain why speaking up is not a matter of worth, and how separating worth from worthiness helps us create a foundation of inclusion.

Separate loyalty from agreement (28:39) When loyalty becomes contingent on agreement, it produces manipulated conformity, which isn’t loyalty at all. True loyalty, which refers to genuine concern for and dedication to the best interests of an institution and its people, must not only allow, but encourage, independent thought.

Separate status from opinion (34:53) Smart people don’t make a smart team unless they can harness their collective intelligence. We harness collective intelligence by inviting and processing dissent. How do you do this? Teach and model the art of disagreement (both how to disagree and how to be disagreed with).

Separate permission from adoption (43:29) Some people mistakenly believe that to be heard is to be heeded. Of course, in organizations, this is not possible. The organization can’t say yes to everyone. It has to constantly make tradeoff decisions in the allocation of its resources. Remove the misconception that permission to speak up somehow translates into an obligation to adopt the suggestion. And, in the absence of adoption, emphasize recognition.

Important Links:
HBR Article: Building a Culture Where Employees Feel Free to Speak-Up
The Ladder of Vulnerability Data