Do You Know What Your Associates Think?

From HBS's Working Knowledge, in an article entitled "Do I Dare Say Something?"

"Perhaps most surprising to us has been the degree to which fear appears to be a feature of modern work life. Whenever we talk with others about this work, such as on airplanes with strangers, we get a similar response—"Oh yeah, I can relate to wanting to speak up but biting my tongue."

"It's really a shame how much apparently untapped knowledge there is out there and how much pain and frustration results from this silence. That, too, has been somewhat surprising—that people are genuinely hurt and frustrated about their silence. This suggests that employees aren't failing to provide ideas or input because they've "checked out" and just don't care, but because of fear."

If you're remotely like me, doesn't this strikes you as a compelling reflection of tragic reality in too many firms?

Let's try to get behind the causes of this and propose some remedial measures.  And as we do, I'd like to suggest you keep in mind the peculiarly intense need for feedback and engagement from your youngest associates, the famous Gen Y'ers. 

Here's the background to the kick-off quote:  Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson and Penn State professor James Detert explored the challenges employees face speaking up to internal authorities.  They coined the term "latent voice episodes" to describe moments when someone considers speaking up—with the emphasis on "up," as in up to someone higher on the organizational food chain—and they surmise that whether or not an underling chooses to voice their observation, insight, or suggestion, depends on: (a) innate personality differences and (b) context.

So far, no surprise.  Some people are naturally more extroverted than others, and therefore more likely to speak up, and organizational context matters tremendously as well:  Do senior partners walk around and engage associates and staff spontaneously?  Are there regular and formalized ways of sharing information about the firm?  Videoconferences from the Managing Partner or executive committee, quarterly "all-hands" memo's, or regular departmental meetings, with Q&A?

Our good professors also speculate thus:

"Even from an evolutionary point of view, it seems we're all hard-wired to overestimate rather than underestimate certain types of risk—it was better (for survival) to "flee" too often from threats that weren't really there than to not flee the one time there was a significant risk. So, we've inherited emotional and cognitive mechanisms that motivate us to avoid perceived risks to our psychological and material well-being."

I wouldn't go quite so far, at least in attributing risk-aversion to evolutionary selection.  (Truth be told, as life-altering an experience as it was to read The Selfish Gene 25 years or so ago, I now have come to the view that mapping every human behavior back towards our experience on the primordial savannah is a bridge way too far.)

But:  As far as individual proclivities along the spectrum ranging from the instinct to speak up or to stand silent, lawyers are surely at the extreme end in the stand-silent crowd.  We are, after all, taught to be risk-averse, and if you say nothing, you can't be criticized.  (Well, it's a lot harder, in any case.)  Associates have done this cost-benefit in their head, consciously or subconsciously, and placed their bets.   Can we do anything about this?  No, in a word.

And before we let partners off the hook, consider that any conversation involves at least two interlocutors.  Partners who are abrupt, truculent, holier-than-Thou, or simply—and in my experience these are the most subtle and most devastating offenders—so sublimely trained in the adversarial arts that they can't resist any opportunity, however inappropriate, to "win" a conversation do far more to short-circuit these potentially valuable opportunities for subordinates to speak up than any associate's hesitance possibly could achieve.

What we can do is work on changing the cultural context, to encourage more speaking up. How do you change a culture?  The professors readily confess, "It's difficult!", and confirm that they've yet to encounter a single organization in their research that "has fully transformed itself from one of fear to one in which most employees would rate the organization as open or conducive to speaking up."

Is this the Managing Partner's job?  Yes, but it's the job of all of senior, visible management.  The most important single factor influencing cultural openness to speaking up is:  Leader behavior.

"Our lawyers are our greatest asset?" "Our firm's culture provides its distinctive strength?" "You'll have the opportunity of your life to grow and contribute?"

It's time to make these promises real. Let the answer to "Do I Dare Say Something?" be an unequivocal yes.