Every leader, at some point, stands in front of a room of people and says some version of the following: “I want this to be a place where people feel safe to speak up. My door is always open. There are no bad ideas.” They mean it, in the moment, with whatever sincerity the moment allows. The people in the room nod. Some of them write it down. Everyone then returns to their desks and proceeds to behave in accordance with the actual incentive structure of the organisation rather than the stated values, because the actual incentive structure and the stated values are, in most organisations, not the same document.
The gap between them is where most well-intentioned leadership efforts go to die quietly and without fanfare, and it is worth understanding exactly what creates that gap, because it is not, despite what most leadership development programmes would have you believe, primarily a communication problem. It is a structural problem. And structural problems require structural solutions, not better messaging.
Here is what a genuinely speak-up culture actually requires, stripped of the inspirational poster language.
It requires that the people who speak up do not experience negative consequences for doing so. Not occasionally. Not usually. Consistently and predictably, across the full range of what speaking up looks like: raising a concern about a project that someone senior is attached to, flagging a process that has quietly been failing people for years, saying in a meeting that the consensus is wrong and here is why. These are not comfortable things to hear. The leader who says their door is always open will discover that what they meant, on reflection, was that their door is always open for good news and solvable problems. The genuinely open door is significantly rarer, and it is only established through repeated demonstration over time rather than announcement on a Tuesday afternoon.
It requires that the organisation’s response to mistakes is diagnostic rather than punitive. This is the piece that most organisations believe they have and don’t. A diagnostic response to a mistake asks: what conditions allowed this to happen, and how do we change those conditions? A punitive response asks: whose fault is this, and what consequence is appropriate? The punitive response is faster, more emotionally satisfying, and completely useless for preventing the next mistake, because it locates the problem in an individual rather than in the system that produced the conditions in which the mistake was possible. You can replace the individual. The conditions remain.
It requires that neurodivergent employees, and more broadly anyone whose processing style, communication pattern, or social presentation differs from the dominant mode, are treated as sources of information rather than management challenges. This is not a diversity statement. It is an epistemological position. An organisation that has access only to the perspectives of people who are socially comfortable in the dominant culture, who have absorbed its basic assumptions without friction, who communicate in the expected register and notice what everyone else notices, is an organisation operating with a significantly impaired early warning system. The people who notice things differently are not inconvenient. They are, in the specific technical sense, the canaries. The wise response to a canary is not to manage it more effectively. It is to find out what it knows.
And it requires that the people at the top are willing to be wrong in public. Not performatively. Not in the managed, carefully scripted way that gets written up as “vulnerability” in business publications. Actually wrong, actually visibly, with actual consequences absorbed rather than deflected. This is the hardest one, because it runs directly against every incentive that got them to the top of the hierarchy in the first place, and it requires a level of security that most leadership development programmes don’t build because they’re more interested in building confidence than in building the thing that makes confidence actually useful, which is an accurate picture of your own limitations.
None of this is complicated in the sense of being difficult to understand. All of it is difficult in the sense of requiring things that most organisations and most leaders are not currently arranged to provide. The gap between knowing what a good organisation looks like and building one is not an information gap. It is a courage gap, and a structural gap, and a willingness to sit with discomfort long enough for it to tell you something useful rather than immediately resolving it in the direction of the familiar.
The organisations that get this right tend to have a specific quality that is difficult to name precisely but easy to recognise when you encounter it. They feel like places where the actual work is the point. Where the performance of the work has been stripped back to a minimum. Where a person who is genuinely good at something and genuinely strange in other ways is more likely to be valued for the first than managed for the second. There are not many of them. There could be considerably more.
If you’re building something and you want it to be different, start with the structure, not the statement. The statement is the easy part. Anyone can write a values document. The hard part is designing an environment in which those values are the natural outcome of behaving rationally within the system rather than a constant act of will against it. That’s the work. It’s worth doing.
References
Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Prentice Hall.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.
Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2018). Humble leadership: The power of relationships, openness, and trust. Berrett-Koehler.
Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Psychological safety. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_safety
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