How Systems Reinforce Silence (S1E7)

If every person on your team decided today to stop telling you the truth — the quiet version, where people still show up and still do their jobs but stop surfacing what they actually know — how long would it take you to notice?

For six episodes, we've traced organizational silence through the people it affects. Today, the frame widens. Because at some point, silence stops being a collection of individual decisions and becomes something else: structural. Embedded in policies, processes, reward systems, and unwritten rules. And once that happens, no individual leader — no matter how good — can fully overcome a system that's working against them.

In this episode, Dr. Ashley Newcomb introduces a framework for understanding the three types of organizational silence: the Give-Up Silence, the Cover-Your-Back Silence, and the Protective Silence. Each one looks different. Each one feels different from the inside. And each one requires a different response from leadership.

You cannot fix a system problem with an individual solution. And most organizational culture initiatives are individual solutions dressed up as system changes.

🎧 Listen now and grab free resources at inspiredcoaching.net

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Topics covered in this episode:
Organizational silence | Structural silence | Defensive silence | Acquiescent silence | Prosocial silence | Organizational culture | Feedback systems | Leadership accountability | Organizational resilience | Psychological safety | Reward systems | Change management | Employee voice | Workplace culture | Organizational diagnostics

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

I'm Dr. Ashley Newcomb, the founder of Inspired Coaching and Leadership. This is the Resilient Organization. And today we're going to talk about how silence becomes structural and what that means for you and your organization's ability to survive what's coming even when you don't see it coming. So I want to ask you something and I want you to take a moment and think about it seriously before you answer. If every single person on your team decided to stop telling you the truth, what would change? Not the dramatic version where people are walking off the job or filing complaints, the quieter version. The version where people still show up, they still complete their tasks, they still say the right things in meetings, but where they've collectively and privately sometimes made the decision to stop surfacing what they actually know, what they actually think, and what they actually see. How long would it take you to notice? And here's the harder question: Is there a chance that it's already happening on your team or in your organization? Over these past six episodes, we've been tracing organizational silence through the people it affects, these individual followers, specific teams, and individual leaders. And what we found is that silence rarely starts as a system problem. It starts with a person instead, or a single decision, or a single moment where speaking up costs somebody something. And from there it spreads. And unfortunately, sometimes it can spread like wildfire. And you know, at some point, and this is what today's episode is about, silence stops being a collection of individual decisions and starts being something else entirely. It becomes structural, it gets embedded in how the organization operates, in its policies and its processes, its reward system, its unwritten rules. It becomes the very fabric of organizational culture and climate. And when that happens, it doesn't matter how good your individual leaders are or how much your followers want to contribute. The system itself is teaching silence, and no amount of individual effort can fully overcome a system that's working against you. In episodes four and five, we talked about organizational learned helplessness or OLH and Organizational Cinderella syndrome, OCS. These are two patterns that develop inside individual followers when the conditions around them consistently fail to reward their effort or their initiative or their voice. In episode six, we looked at how individual leaders, even well-meaning, highly capable ones, can be the architect of those conditions without realizing it. Today I want to widen that frame because while individual leaders and individual followers are where these patterns begin, they are not always where these patterns live or where they end up. In mature organizational silence, the kind that persists across leadership changes, across reorganizations, across well-intentioned cultural initiatives, the silence has found a home in the structure and the very fabric itself. So think about that for a moment. The truth is that you can replace a leader, you can train a team, you can retrain a team, you can launch new engagement initiatives with a fresh logo, a fresh brand, and a motivational tagline, but and doesn't it feel like there's always a but, if the system, the actual operating infrastructure of your organization is designed in ways that discourage honest communication and punish surfacing of problems or rewarding complaints over contribution, none of those individual interventions will hold. The system's gonna win every single time, and that organizational culture change is actually going to be a big failure. So I want to take a moment to kind of stick something in here right now. Yes, a lot of these terms do appear in research and are actually textbook definitions or textbook concepts, but I'm actually seeing this in real life. I'm seeing this played out in real life organizations that are operational on a daily basis, or at least trying to be operational on a daily basis. What I've personally observed across my work with organizations, what's being reported to me and discussed with me from colleagues of mine, and what the research on organizational silence consistently confirms is that structural silence takes three distinct forms. Each one of these forms looks a little different from the outside, each one feels different from the inside, and each one requires a different response from leadership and followership alike. Understanding which type of silence is operating in your organization is the difference between treating the symptom and addressing the cause. And a lot of times what we see as consultants when we first walk into an organization is that the organization leadership, they're complaining about the symptoms and they don't realize that the symptom is not the actual problem. So today we're going to look at these three types of silence. The first one I call the give up silence, the second one I call the cover your back silence, and the third I call the protective silence. Now, those aren't the exact names that organizational behavior research uses, but sometimes I like to use real-world terminology to get in there and rip off the sugar coating and really call a spade a spade. Now let me walk you through each one of these. But before I really get into these types, I want to make sure that I reinforce something very important here. These are not just casual observations that I've made. This is a framework that I've developed through my research and my work inside of organizations. And I want you to hear it as that. Because once you have this framework, you'll start seeing these patterns everywhere. More importantly, you'll be able to name what you're seeing, which is always the first step toward doing something about it. Type one, we're going to call the give up silence. You'll see it in research as acquiescence silence, but let's be honest, who wants to hear a southern draw talking about acquiescence all day? So the give up silence is exactly that. This is the type of silence of people who have stopped believing that speaking up will change anything at all. Not because they were told to be quiet, not because they're afraid of what will happen if they speak, but because they've tried and they've tried and they've tried again, and the system consistently failed to respond. So they just stopped trying or they gave up. You met the silence before in this season with Elena. She raised concerns repeatedly until the pattern of non-response taught her that raising them was effort with no return. At the individual level, this is organizational learned helplessness, OLH. But when it becomes structural, when it becomes a part of the organizational culture or policies or processes, when it's not just one Elena or one team, but its widespread organizational pattern, it means that the system itself has been consistently unresponsive for long enough that the give up silence has become the default setting. New employees absorb it from the culture before they've even had a chance to try because these long-tenured employees model it without even realizing that they're teaching it. The structural hallmarks of the give up silence include ideas that stop being submitted to suggestion systems that nobody acts on. There are employee surveys with declining completion rates because people learn that the results don't produce change, and meeting cultures where questions are asked and never answered. If your organization has any of these, give up silence may already be structural for you. Our second type of organizational silence is the cover your back silence, which is also called by researchers defensive silence. This is a silence of people who are actively protecting themselves or covering their backs. They're not quiet because they've given up. They're quiet because experience has taught them that the wrong information surfaced at the wrong moment to the wrong person is a weapon that can be used against them. They've learned that being vulnerable inside an organizational setting doesn't pay off and in fact does more damage than good. Let me give you a quick picture of what this looks like in practice. Imagine mid-level manager, let's call her Tammy, who notices a significant error in a project that's a personal priority of one of her senior executives. Himmy knows the error is going to cost the organization big. She has the data to prove it, but she also knows what happened the last time someone brought this particular executive unwelcome news about one of his pet projects. That person was publicly dismissed in a leadership meeting. Their concerns were called disloyal. Their career trajectory in that organization quietly stalled. They were blacklisted. So Teresa made a calculation. She documented the errors privately. She protected herself by creating a paper trail that shows she knew, and then she stayed quiet because in her organization, the cost of speaking has demonstrated clearly enough that silence is the rational choice. Cover your back silence is the most dangerous of these three levels, and I want you to hear why. You see, give up silence means your organization loses voice and initiative. That is costly. But the cover your back silence means your organization is actively losing critical information that people possess and are deliberately withholding. Problems get hidden, errors get buried, risks get managed privately rather than surfaced organizationally. And the only time you find out about them is when they've grown large enough that they can't be hidden anymore, which is usually long past the point where they could have been addressed at a fraction of the cost, the time, the effort, the energy, and the emotional drain to your staff. The hallmarks of cover your back silence are a history of visible retaliation against people who surface problems, a leadership culture where certain topics are tactically off limits, significant gaps between what people say in meetings and what they say in parking lots, and a pattern where bad news only reaches leadership after it becomes a crisis. If your organization's leaders are consistently surprised by problems, if things just feel like they come out of nowhere, cover your back silence might be the reason why. The third and final type of silence that we're going to discuss in this podcast is the protective silence, or something researchers call prosocial silence. This is the most nuanced of the three, and the one leaders missed most often entirely because it comes from a genuinely good place. This is a silence of people who are withholding information because they believe sincerely and truly that staying quiet is the right thing to do. They're either protecting a colleague, they're protecting the organization, they're protecting a relationship that they believe matters more than the information they're sitting on. And here's what it looks like. So there's a team that's been working under enormous pressure for months. Morale is fragile, two members of the team have been struggling, they're not performing at the level the role requires, and their teammates know it. But those teammates also know that surfacing the problem right now while the team is already stretched thin feels like betrayal. So they cover. They quietly pick up the slack, they tell themselves it's temporary, it'll work itself out, it's not their place to say something. Or here's one, it's above my pay grade. Here's another example. Consider a long-tenured employee that knows that a process the organization's been using for years is inefficient, maybe even counterproductive to the organization's mission. But that process was championed by a leader who is well loved and close to retirement. Maybe that leader even has outwardly expressed that they consider that process their legacy. So saying something feels like it would embarrass someone who doesn't deserve to be embarrassed. So the inefficiency continues quietly, protectively. Here's another thing important to understand about protective silence. The intent is good. It's never malevolent. There's never any intention to harm a person or the organization. The people practicing it are not disengaged or self-serving. They are in their own way trying to contribute to the health or the morale of the organization or the well-being of the people within the organization. And that makes it genuinely harder to address because you can't treat it in the way that you treat give up silence or cover your back silence. These people aren't burned out, they're not afraid. They're operating from a misplaced sense of loyalty or protection. The structural hallmarks of protective silence are a culture where being a team player is valued more highly than being honest, pure dynamics that make it difficult to surface concerns about colleagues, and a leadership culture where criticism of longstanding practices feels culturally unsafe, even when it's professionally appropriate. If your organization has a strong family culture, which sounds like a good thing and often is, watch carefully for whether that family feeling is producing protective silence as a side effect. Now that you have these three types, I want to show you how not individuals but actual systems embed them. Because this is the piece of the intervention that most organizations miss entirely. Systems reinforce silence in four primary ways. And I want to walk you through each one of these briefly because I guarantee that at least one of them is operating in your organization right now. The first is the reward system. So the reward system recognizes compliance over contribution. When the people who get promoted, get recognized, get resources are consistently the ones who don't make the waves, who never surface problems, who never push back, who never challenge assumptions, the system is teaching the rest of the organization what gets rewarded. And it isn't voice. Over time, even followers who are naturally inclined to speak up, they're gonna recalibrate. Why would you behave in a way that the system doesn't reward? The second is decision-making structures that exclude people closest to the work. When decisions about how work gets done are made exclusively by people several levels removed from the actual work without meaningful input from the people that are doing the work, the system is communicating something very specific. It's communicating that your operational knowledge doesn't count here. And followers who feel that their knowledge doesn't count, stop offering it. The third system reinforcement is feedback mechanisms that exist but don't function, like employee surveys that nobody actually acts on, or open door policies where the door is technically open, but walking through it has consequences, or town halls where questions are submitted in advanced and curated. And my personal favorite, which I mean with all the sarcasm that's due, are anonymous reporting systems that somehow aren't actually anonymous. Every one of these is a broken feedback loop. And every broken feedback loop teaches followers that the system isn't actually designed to hear them, it just wants to look like it is. And organizational followers can often sniff out insincerity about a mile away. The fourth and final system reinforcement is change communication that is top down and not collaborative. So what I mean by that is that someone that's sitting up in an ivory tower just kind of spews out these directions or initiatives and they don't take into account anybody that actually has to live through the change event. So when these significant events change, new policies, new systems, new directors are consistently announced rather than developed with input, especially from, like I said, the people that are using it. The system is teaching followers that their role is to execute, not shape. And followers who learn that their role is to execute will eventually stop offering the thinking that comes before the execution because nobody asked for it. And after a while, they'll stop believing that anyone ever will ask for it. You cannot fix a system problem with an individual solution. And most organizational culture initiatives are individual solutions dressed up as system changes. Now, this is your reality check. Let me give you a few direct questions to take back to your organization. And I want you to sit with these honestly because the answers may be uncomfortable. And I will tell you, both from personal experience and professional experience, that the most difficult part of change is the vulnerability that we require of ourselves in order to get us to a point where we're capable of changing and analyzing what truly needs to be changed. First, which of these three silence types is most present in your organization right now? Is it the give up silence where people have stopped trying because the system consistently failed to respond? Is it the cover your back silence where people are actively protecting themselves from consequences of honesty? Or is it the protective silence where people are staying quiet because they believe silence is the loyal choice? The type of silence shapes the response. If you don't know which type you're dealing with, any intervention that you launch is essentially a guess. Second, look at your organization's formal feedback mechanisms, your surveys, your open door policies, your reporting systems, your town halls. When was the last time one of those mechanisms produced information that genuinely surprised leadership? So when I say that, when I say genuinely surprise leadership, what I mean is that people stopped coming to give you a heads up. So when a problem actually does surface, everyone's shocked because the early warning indicators failed to serve your organization. When is the last time one of your formal feedback mechanisms led to a visible change? If you're struggling to answer any of those questions, if your feedback mechanisms feel more like a performance than a function, you and your followers know it. And they've adjusted their behavior accordingly. Third, think about the last significant change your organization implemented. How was it communicated? Were the people most affected by it involved with shaping it, or were they just informed of it? Because there's a profound difference between those two things. And your followers feel that difference every single time. Finally, and this is the hardest one, what does your organization actually reward? Not what it says it rewards, not what's in the value statements or the performance review criteria. What does success actually look like here? And here's an important part of it, whose voice is a part of it. Because if the people who get ahead in your organization are consistently the people who don't cause friction, don't surface problems, don't challenge assumptions, you have a reward system that is actively cultivating silence. And no amount of we value open communication. Language will override what people can see with their own eyes. The fixes for structural silence are different from the fixes for individual silence, because you're not just working on behavior, you're working on the system. These three starting points won't overhaul your organization overnight, but they will begin to interrupt the patterns that are embedding silence into your structure. First, audit one feedback mechanism for function, not just presence. Pick one, a survey, an open door policy, a reporting system, and ask honestly, does this actually work? When was the last time something came through that changed something significant? If the honest answer is that you're not sure or that it's been a long time, commit to one visible act of responsiveness tied directly to that mechanism. Not a new initiative, not a relaunch, but one specific visible response to something that was already raised. That single act begins to rebuild the belief that the mechanism's real. Second, find one decision that is about to be made and invite the people closest to the work into the conversation before it's finalized. Not to present the decision to them, but to actually build it with them. The decision will be better for it. I guarantee that. And the signal it sends that the people who do the work get to shape the work is one of the most powerful structural messages a leader can deliver to the followers. Third and final, the next time you recognize somebody publicly, make voice a part of what you're recognizing, not just results, not just effort. Specifically acknowledge someone who surfaced a problem early or who pushed back on an assumption or said something that was hard to say, because what gets publicly recognized in your organization defines what your cultural values are. And I don't mean lip service, I mean something that's genuinely recognized as a valuable contribution to organizational behavior, organizational citizenship, or organizational productivity. And I'll be honest with you, from what I've seen right now in most organizations, voice is not on that list. Starting to put it there is a structural intervention, small, visible, and cumulative. You know, you and I have been together for, this is our seventh episode now. By now, you've probably picked up on the fact that I'm exceptionally passionate about organizational behavior, practice, and theory. It's why I do what I do and why I decided to do this podcast. So I want to say something to you directly before I close today. If you've been listening to this season and you've been nodding along, recognizing your own organization and the stories and the patterns and the questions, that recognition matters. That recognition alone doesn't change anything. And the longer structural silence sits inside an organization without a structured response, the more expensive it becomes to address. Not just financially, although the financial cost is real, and we're going to get to that detail in the next episode. But in terms of the people, the Elenas, the Marcuses, the Shannon and Brysons, the Murphys, the people who are still there, still capable, still somewhere underneath it all, still hoping that the system might become worth their investment again. If what I've described today is already structural in your organization, if you recognized more than one of these silence types operating at the system level, a checklist isn't going to be enough. What you need is a structured diagnostic, a real look at where the silence lives, what type it is, what's feeding it, and specifically what needs to change to break that pattern. That's the work that I do. And if you're ready for that conversation, I'd like to have it with you. You can reach me directly at inspiredcoaching.net. In our next episode, we're going to follow the silence all the way to its financial and human cost. Because one of the most powerful things a leader can do is understand, understand in concrete, specific terms what organizational silence is actually costing their organization. Not just in engagement scores or cultural surveys, but in real numbers, in real losses, and in real consequences that are already showing up somewhere in your balance sheet, whether you can see them or not. That's episode eight. And I think that's going to be one of our most important episodes of the season. In the meantime, the training where followers go quiet, diagnosing hidden disengagement in your organization, and the free resource, Five Signs Your Organization Has Gone Quiet, are both available for download at inspiredcoaching.net. And if today's episode raised something that feels bigger than a download can address, reach out. That's what I'm here for. This has been the Resilient Organization. Thank you for being here. I'll see you next time.