CHAPTER 9
Stepping Up by Speaking Up
The world is waiting to hear your voice.
Sometimes, just speaking is a form of stepping up and often one of great consequence. That is, the act of bringing up an idea that may be unpopular or challenging the status quo with your words is a powerful form of stepping up. Josh Blair, a former executive vice president at TELUS, put it this way: “Stepping up is often about having the courage to go to an uninvited place.” That uninvited place could be challenging your company, giving feedback to a colleague or friend, or breaking the silence to speak up for something you believe in.
The idea of stepping up and speaking up in an uninvited way brings fear to most of us. In our personal lives we fear that we might damage our relationships with friends, colleagues, or family members by speaking an unpopular truth. The prospect of speaking up seems even more daunting in the workplace, where we all know that kissing up and getting with the program is the path to success, no?
I do not pretend that speaking up involves no risk. Whistleblowers are often ostracized, friends and colleagues don’t always want to hear feedback (even if it will help them), and at some workplaces speaking up is neither rewarded nor welcome. Yet it also must be noted that those who do speak up often have a profound influence on others and on their organizations, while failure to speak up can have devastating effects on a society, a company, or a life.
The Myth of Kissing Up
Let’s begin by exploring a popularly held myth that in the world of work, those who kiss up and keep silent are more likely to get ahead. When I interviewed senior executives and CEOs for this book, I asked them this question: how do you feel about people who speak up and challenge things? To a person, they all talked about how valuable such people are, how much they improve the organization, and how little they admire yes people. Of course, many bosses really do want to be surrounded by people who won’t challenge things, but my experience has been that this attitude is not the norm.
One clue to unraveling this myth can be found in the work of the late Dr. Dominic Infante and Dr. William Gorden, two retired professors of communication studies at Kent State University in Ohio. I owe Dr. Infante a personal debt of gratitude because he directed my doctoral dissertation and will be forever one of my favorite people. That’s because during the oral defense of my competency exams, he asked, “Would you like a hint?” when he saw that I had no clue as to the answer to an important question. A rather hard-nosed colleague scornfully looked at him and said, “A hint.” Dr. Infante merely smiled and said, “Yes, a hint,” and proceeded to give me a big hint.
Dr. Infante spent a good deal of his career studying two constructs called argumentativeness and verbal aggression. Simply put, people who are high in argumentativeness like a good debate, tend to speak up with their ideas, and challenge things. Verbal aggressiveness has to do with finger-pointing and blaming, people who tend to use a great deal of you language and often put down others with their communication. Years of research by Dr. Infante showed that managers routinely rated employees much higher who were high in argumentativeness. Ironically, those most likely to speak up were rated highest, not lowest. On the other hand, those who were high in verbal aggression were consistently rated the lowest by managers. Perhaps surprisingly, research has shown that argumentative people actually have better marriages but being verbally aggressive won’t help your love life.
In fact, Dr. Infante did a whole series of research studies and journal articles on argumentativeness, and many of these can be accessed on the internet. My dissertation explored similar themes, and I discovered that not only are those who speak up rated more highly at work but that employees also are more committed and engaged in workplaces where speaking up is encouraged. Employees deemed low in argumentativeness were actually rated lower by their supervisors, so argue away, keeping in mind one huge caveat: not all workplaces or all managers want someone to speak up. So beware, or, better yet, find another boss if yours prefers silence.
The moral of the story is simple. People who step up and challenge things are actually more likely to get ahead, but only if they do so in a way that is not perceived as finger-pointing and blaming. If you believe that all your complaining over the years was a form of stepping up, I beg to differ. Complaining, usually characterized by lots of you and they language, is a mask for not stepping up. Like verbally aggressive people, complainers are neither respected nor promoted.
Speaking up in a positive way means challenging things but focusing on what we all need to do to make things better. Here is a surefire way to know whether you are speaking up or complaining: If your talk frequently uses the words you and they, you are probably complaining. If you are using lots of I and we, you are probably speaking up in a positive way.
The Power of Breaking the Silence
Stepping up by speaking up can have real, positive effects both for your company and your career. At one of my large clients, friends and colleagues often approached a woman who worked in benefits about a problem with the services of her company. Talking to other colleagues, she realized that this was a common occurrence and that her fellow managers and employees often felt powerless to solve customer complaints that came to them directly. Even though it was not her area of responsibility, she chose to speak up at a company town hall meeting. She suggested that the company needed a method for all employees to get issues resolved when customers brought them directly to the employees, something better than suggesting the customers call customer service. She said that this inability to act was bad for the brand and left employees feeling powerless. It was a bit of a risk, speaking up and raising what could be an unpopular issue.
Yet her speaking up encouraged two other leaders to step up. Those two leaders spearheaded an effort to create a problem resolution system where a customer issue brought to the company by an employee or manager could be resolved in forty-eight hours. The system was implemented and became a great success but likely would never have happened if this one woman had not spoken up at a town hall meeting about an issue far from her area of responsibility. She did not say you need to fix this, she said we need to fix this.
Breaking the silence is an important kind of stepping up, a willingness to say what everyone is thinking but no one seems willing to say. It is no accident that in the monarchies of the past, the court jester was a very powerful position because the jester could often say things that everyone else was thinking but no one else dared say (hence the well-known saying “there’s many a true word spoken in jest”).
Being the one who breaks the silence can be nerve racking, yet this kind of stepping up is often critical. In one of my client companies there was a gathering of middle and senior leaders. Over the preceding year, as the company grappled with a recession, senior leaders had become tighter and tighter about controlling expenses, often leading to micromanagement by leaders throughout the organization.
The word on the street was that middle managers did not feel trusted. Many felt that the senior people needed to tell middle managers what needed to be done and trust their judgment to do so, instead of tying their hands with procedures. At this gathering, managers were dancing around the issue until one manager raised his hand.
“Look,” he said, “no one seems willing to say it, but the real problem is that you guys are acting like control freaks.” You could hear a pin drop. He had said what probably everyone in the room was thinking, but he had actually said it! In fairness, he had used some you language, but he had done so in a very constructive way. He went on to say, “We need you to trust us and hold us accountable, then we need to step up and prove we deserve it.”
His speaking up created some helpful dialogue in the moment, but there was also nervousness and defensiveness. As when Jerry McGuire (the character in the movie of the same name) put his mission statement in colleagues’ inboxes, people cheered outwardly, but some wondered if he would pay a price for speaking up. What happened later at my client’s is most instructive.
One of the senior leaders who had been named a control freak by this man told me that he got to thinking later that night about what the manager had said. As the financial crisis abated, the CEO had let loose some of the controls on the senior team, but the senior team had not done the same with its people. He realized that the manager who spoke up was correct; these leaders were acting like control freaks. His speaking up helped loosen the controls, and that senior manager told the story over and over again for the next year. This stepping up story became folklore and a catalyst for positive change across the company
Stepping up by speaking up can mean defending someone at school when others are making fun of him, it can be challenging the scheduling of an after-hours meeting in a company where work-life balance is out of control, it can mean being the one who says, “Let’s have the gossip stop here instead of spreading it,” and it can often simply mean a willingness to be unpopular in the moment just because it is the right thing to do. In the age of Me Too, it could mean confronting a sexist comment and speaking up to call out inappropriate behavior.
If You Don’t Have Something Nice to Say
My mother is a native New Yorker although Canadian by descent. Her family raised her to be polite and speak only when you have something nice to say. But if you want to step up and make a difference, there are times when you have to speak up, even if it may not be popular.
A few years ago my mother was sitting at lunch with a group of colleagues, including a young coworker who had just moved back into her parents’ home after living with a boyfriend for two years. The young woman was complaining about how controlling her dad was and how, after being on her own for two years, she resented being told when to go home and being asked where she was going. The situation had gotten so bad that her mother and father were no longer speaking to each other as they disagreed on how to handle the conflict with their daughter.
The rest of the lunchroom gang listened and lent support, even though in her absence they remarked that she was, after all, at her parents’ house. My mother listened to the daily rant but finally had enough and decided to speak up. She did not do it to look good or to show up her young colleague. She said, “Look, I have to say you have some nerve. You move out and then move back into your parents’ house. You are living off of them, and now you resent that they want some say? For God’s sake, now your mother and father are not even talking to each other! Do you think that is right? Maybe you’d better look at yourself.” My mother left the table.
A week later, the young colleague came to my mother. “Irene, I have to tell you that it bothered me when you said what you said at lunch last week,” the young woman remarked. “But later that day, I started thinking about what you said. I went to my father and apologized, and we have worked things out. My mother and father are talking again. Thanks for saying what you said.”
Speaking up can also take the form of challenging our colleagues to do better. Years ago, I was staying at a Ritz-Carlton outside of Atlanta, Georgia. The hotel chain is known for having great customer service, and I was standing at the front desk receiving that great service from a young front desk associate. While she was helping me, another guest came up to the front desk where two Ritz employees were talking to each other about a ballgame they had seen the night before. They continued talking as the guest waited to be served. The young woman serving me turned her head ever so gently keeping her eyes on me and whispered to her colleagues, “There is a guest present.” Immediately they ceased talking and turned their attention to the guest. It was subtle but immensely profound.
The woman at the front desk had stepped up. She had broken a code of silence that often exists between people. The code is something like, “I won’t challenge you if you won’t challenge me.” But in breaking that unwritten code, she stepped up and changed things. I can’t be sure how her colleagues reacted. Knowing the Ritz, they probably appreciated it, but the key is that she had spoken up, taken responsibility not just for her guest but for the other guests.
Now I can’t guarantee that every time you speak up, the company will solve a problem and you will become a folk hero. I can’t even guarantee that if you speak up, your career will be better. But I can guarantee you that when people step up by speaking up, real problems often get resolved. I can tell you that years of research by Dr. Infante and others suggest that stepping up by speaking up is a great way to raise your profile as long as you are not just complaining.
What’s more, when we don’t step up by speaking up, the consequences can be catastrophic.
The Consequences of Not Speaking Up Can Be Catastrophic
If you want to see the consequence of not stepping up by speaking up, watch the award-winning documentary Inside Job, about the run-up to the financial collapse of 2008–2009 when the sale of complex derivatives and loose mortgage standards nearly brought about a Great Depression (and still is having far-reaching consequences). Surely, lots of people knew that these practices were dangerous, irresponsible, and at times unethical. But very few people spoke up loudly and challenged the prevailing paradigm. For some, their failure to speak led directly to the destruction of the very companies they worked for and were supposed to defend.
Think about the Boeing 737 Max disaster, which has cost the airplane manufacturer and the airlines who purchased the airplane hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. Not only that, but in the case of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, 346 lives were lost and thousands of friends and family members were impacted. Some engineers and employees did try to speak up to challenge the lack of training for pilots and the making of safety features “optional.” But far too few spoke up, and when they did their voices were not heeded. Imagine now the positive benefits that would have accrued and even the lives that would have been saved if more people had courageously simply broken the silence. This is not to say that breaking the silence is easy or without risk, but it is at the very heart of stepping up. It is part of the very essence of being 100 percent responsible.
There is one more very personal reason to speak up. Most all of us have had a time in our lives when a friend or family member spoke up to challenge us in a way that made a positive difference for us. This happened for me recently when I was working on a previous book, a book that had grown out of a personal crisis. After two missed deadlines, a good friend finally spoke up: “I know you have invested a good deal of time into this project but the truth is that you don’t want to write this book. It is time to let it go. In this case admitting you made a mistake will open up the space for the book you really want to write.”
The next day I called my publisher to pull the plug on the book. It was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made. Three months later I went to Uganda for a month and the idea for this book you are reading was born. If not for the courageous feedback of a friend, I might still be struggling to write a book I did not really want to write.
Speak Up—Your Life Is on the Line
In the end we also speak up because, as one man I interviewed said, your life is on the line. You see, every time we decide not to step up or to speak up a part of us dies.
We have all had the experience of remaining silent and regretting it. When I was a young minister, my second assignment was at an all-white church in Youngstown, Ohio. They were good people, but there was also a strong racist streak among some members. Before the monthly meeting of the elders, a few members often told jokes about black people with offensive phrases like “porch monkeys.” As a young minister who had grown up in a family with friends of all races and where people were judged by the content of their character, I found these jokes offensive. The fact that they were spoken before a meeting of elders in a church that professed themselves as followers of Jesus made for a profound (and disturbing) irony.
For months I put up with it in silence. I even laughed nervously from time to time to “fit in.” Then one day I finally spoke up. I knew my life was on the line—not my physical life, of course, but my psychic life, my sense of myself as a person. In the middle of one of the jokes I merely said, “You know this is the house of God, not just the house of the white God.” The jokes stopped. I offended a few people. A few elders took me aside afterwards and said, “Thank you.”
But most of all, I felt good about myself. It may not have changed anyone’s mind, but that is rarely the point of speaking up. There were risks as there are always risks in doing the right thing. But truth be told, we may get further ahead by speaking up than by remaining silent, and even if we don’t, we will sleep well at night.
Ways to Step Up
Be constructive. Starting today, make a commitment to stop being a complainer and to stop being a yes person. Complaining is finger-pointing, not a form of speaking up. Make it your mission to come up with ideas on how things can be better. Be the one who says what others are thinking in a constructive way.
Challenge your colleagues at work. Even better, start challenging your friends and family members too. Do what the woman did at the Ritz-Carlton: make it your mission to speak up and make others better, but do it in a respectful way.
Break the silence. Enron, the financial disaster of 2008, and many other negative situations might have been avoided if people had been willing to speak up before problems escalated. The world needs courageous people who will challenge the status quo. Doing so may involve breaking the silence about an unethical business practice or challenging a racist comment. Make no mistake, speaking up is a powerful form of stepping up.