Why don’t employees speak up to senior leaders?

Most senior leaders have had a version of this moment. It’s unsettling, because you don’t think of yourself as someone people are afraid of. This post is about why people stay quiet with the people above them, why it gets worse the higher you go, and what you can do about it.

Why don’t employees speak up?

Because speaking up feels risky, pointless, or both. People rarely stay quiet because they have no view. They stay quiet because they’ve weighed the cost of saying it against the chance it will make any difference, and silence won.

The research on this is clearer than you might expect. In a study of employee silence, Frances Milliken, Elizabeth Morrison and Patricia Hewlin interviewed 40 employees across industries such as consulting, financial services and pharmaceuticals. They found that 85% (34 of the 40) had at least once felt unable to raise an issue with their bosses, even though they thought it was important. Only 6 people said they had never felt that way.

The reasons were telling. The most common was “the fear of being viewed or labeled negatively”: as a troublemaker, a complainer, someone who isn’t a team player. Next came worry about damaging relationships people relied on to get their jobs done. Then came futility, the feeling that speaking up “would not make a difference”. Fear of losing a job or a promotion came up too, but less often than you might think.

That matters if you lead. Most of what keeps people quiet isn’t dramatic fear of being sacked. It’s quieter than that. It’s the sense that raising the problem will cost them something with you, and gain nothing.

Why is it worse for senior leaders?

Because every layer between you and the work is another chance for the news to be softened. By the time it reaches an executive, it has passed through several people, each of whom rounded it off a little.

Psychologists have a name for the basic reluctance to pass on bad news: the MUM effect, from keeping mum. The same study notes that a hierarchy seems to “intensify the mum effect”. Telling a peer something unwelcome is uncomfortable. Telling your boss is harder. Telling your boss’s boss, or the CEO, is harder still.

Amy Edmondson and James Detert make a related point in an interview with HBS Working Knowledge. Their research found that features of the moment itself, such as “the size and formality of the venue and level of hierarchy present”, affect whether people speak. A town hall with the executive team on stage is about as large, formal and hierarchical as a venue gets. It’s also where many senior leaders ask, “Any questions?”

There’s a second problem that comes with seniority. The more senior you are, the more your casual reactions carry. A raised eyebrow from a team leader is a raised eyebrow. A raised eyebrow from the CEO can travel round the building by lunchtime. People learn to read you closely, and they adjust what they bring you to match.

Isn’t no news good news?

No. At senior levels, silence is more often a sign that the news is being filtered than a sign that all is well.

Edmondson and Detert put it plainly: “no news is not good news, from the point of view of senior management”. The people closest to the work and the customers are the ones best placed to spot problems early. If what you hear is mostly good, it’s worth asking whether that’s because things are good, or because good news is the only kind that travels easily to you.

The silence also tends to be shared. In the Milliken study, 26 of the 34 people who had held back (74%) said colleagues knew about the issue and were also uncomfortable raising it. So when one person stays quiet, it often isn’t a private judgement. It’s a group that has collectively decided the topic is not safe to bring upward.

Detert and Ethan Burris open their Harvard Business Review article on this with a line worth reading slowly: “Chances are, your employees are withholding valuable intelligence from you.” Not might be. Chances are.

What makes people decide it’s worth speaking up?

Two beliefs: that it’s safe, and that it’s worth it. If either is missing, most people stay quiet.

In the same interview, Edmondson and Detert describe these as the two preconditions for speaking up to someone more senior: the belief that you won’t be harmed, and the belief that you aren’t wasting your time. In their words, voice “must be seen as both safe and worthwhile.”

Many leaders work hard on the first and forget the second. They say they want to hear bad news. They thank people for raising issues. Then nothing visibly changes, and people quietly conclude it wasn’t worth the effort. The Milliken study found futility was one of the most common reasons for silence, so a polite reception with no follow-through can still teach people to stop.

In our experience, the filter around a senior leader tends to form in three places:

• Who brings you bad news: whether problems reach you from many people or only a trusted few, and how early.
• How you react to it: what happens in the first few seconds, and what happens to the person afterwards.
• Where you look outside your circle: whether you seek out views from people who don’t report to you, don’t agree with you and don’t need anything from you.

What does a truth gap look like in practice?

Here’s a hypothetical example. A chief executive of a business with around 600 people is well regarded, approachable and proud of an open culture. Here’s one quarter.

• Month one: at the leadership meeting, the sales director reports that a large renewal is “progressing well”. Two account managers below her think the customer is close to leaving, and have told her so. She plans to raise it once she has a recovery plan. (Who brings you bad news.)
• Month two: a junior analyst points out in a review meeting that the cost model behind a new product assumes a price no customer has yet paid. The CEO replies, “We’ve been through this,” and moves on. It takes about four seconds. The analyst says nothing else in that meeting, and nor does anyone else. (How you react.)
• Month three: the CEO spends most of the quarter with the executive team, the board and two long-standing advisers, all of whom see the business much as he does. He hasn’t spoken to a frontline customer or a recent leaver in months. (Where you look.)

The renewal is lost at the end of the quarter. The CEO is genuinely surprised. Several people in the business are not.

Nothing here is a failing of character. No one lied. The sales director wanted to arrive with a solution. The CEO was short on time. The advisers are experienced and well meaning. But at each step the news got a little thinner, and by the time it reached the top it had no edges left.

The moves are small. Ask the sales director for the renewal she’s most worried about, not the overall picture. Go back to the analyst after the meeting and ask her to walk you through the price assumption. Book one hour a month with someone who has no reason to tell you what you want to hear.

How do you get people to speak up to you?

Make it safe, make it worth it, and go and get the news rather than waiting for it to arrive. Here are habits that tend to help most at senior levels.

Ask specific questions. “Any concerns?” invites a polite no. “What’s the weakest part of this plan?” or “Which customer are you most worried about?” gives people permission to say the hard thing, because you asked for it.

Watch your first reaction. The moment someone brings you bad news is when everyone in the room learns whether it’s safe. Thank them before you respond to the substance. If you need to push back, do it on the facts, later, and in a way that leaves the person glad they spoke. If you find your reactions are the problem, the post on taking feedback without getting defensive has practical steps.

Close the loop. Because futility is such a strong reason for silence, people need to see what happened next. When someone raises a problem, tell them what you did about it, even if the answer is “we looked at it and decided not to change course, and here’s why.” Then say it in public, so others see that speaking up led somewhere.

Shrink the room. Large, formal settings with lots of hierarchy present are where people are least likely to speak. Ask your hardest questions in small groups, one to one, or without the people’s own managers present. Skip-level meetings are one way to do this well.

Go to their ground. An open door asks people to come to you, on your territory, carrying the risk. Walking the floor, joining a customer call or sitting in on a team meeting puts you where the news already is.

Widen your circle on purpose. Your executive team and advisers are filtered too, through no fault of their own. Seek out people who see the business differently: frontline staff, recent joiners, customers who left, people who turned down an offer. For a wider look at the people around you, finding out what your team really thinks is a useful next read.

Can you ever get the whole truth?

Probably not, and it’s worth being honest about that. Hierarchy creates some distance on its own. Even in organisations that welcome challenge, Edmondson and Detert note that people can still be afraid to speak up to their own boss.

The aim isn’t a perfect picture. It’s a smaller gap: hearing about problems while there’s still time to act, from more than a handful of people, before they become crises. A leader who hears bad news a month earlier than they used to has made a real difference, even if some things still never reach them.

It also helps to accept that some filtering is reasonable. Not every grumble needs to reach the CEO. What matters is that the important things, the risks, the mistakes and the disagreements about direction, get through.

How thick is the filter around you?

Most senior leaders have one or two areas where the filter is much thicker than the rest. Knowing which ones tells you where to start, so you can change one habit well instead of trying to fix everything.

The Echo Chamber is a free self-test built for this. It takes about 4 minutes, needs no sign-up, and your answers stay in your browser. You answer 12 questions across three areas: who brings you bad news, how you react to it, and where you look outside your circle. You get a truth gap gauge, from unfiltered to heavily filtered, and the two areas where the filter is thickest, each with one move to try.

It’s a read on your habits, not a verdict on you. Because you rate yourself, it shows how things look from your seat. If you want the view from the other side, Shadow 360 is the team-rated companion.

For a wider read on how you lead, including whether you’ve recently changed your mind because of something a junior person said, try The 42 Test. You’ll find the other tests and posts for this stage on the CXOs page.

People don’t stop telling the truth all at once. They stop one reaction at a time. The good news is that they start again the same way, the first time someone brings you something hard and is glad they did.