Why Speak-Up Culture Starts With Listening

Every organisation says it wants a speak-up culture. Town halls are opened with the line, 'We want to hear from you.' Leadership decks promise psychological safety. Surveys are circulated. And yet, in most companies, the loudest signal employees receive is silence — the silence that follows the last person who actually spoke up.

A speak-up culture is not built by encouraging people to talk. It is built by leaders who prove, repeatedly, that they can listen — especially when what they are hearing is uncomfortable, inconvenient, or critical of their own decisions.

Listening, in this sense, is not a soft skill. It is a structural commitment. It means slowing down the meeting when a junior voice hesitates. It means resisting the urge to defend a decision before the concern is fully on the table. It means rewarding the messenger long after the message has been delivered.

Leaders often confuse access with safety. An open door is not the same as an open mind. People do not measure your culture by what you say in the all-hands. They measure it by what happens to the colleague who raised a hard question last quarter — and whether that person is still in the room.

Listening Changes What People Are Able to Say

For a long time I assumed listening was a collection device. You listen carefully, you get better information, you make a better decision. Useful, but essentially passive.

Research by Guy Itzchakov and Avraham Kluger suggests something considerably more interesting is happening, and it made me rethink what a meeting actually is.

Across four laboratory experiments, they varied the quality of listening people experienced while speaking — attentive and non-judgmental in some conditions, distracted or evaluative in others.

High-quality listening reduced the speaker's social anxiety. Lower anxiety reduced their defensiveness. And with defensiveness lowered, something unexpected happened to the content of their thinking.

They became more able to see contradictions inside their own position, and their views became less extreme — without the discomfort that usually accompanies noticing you hold two conflicting things at once.

Read that again, because the direction of causation is the surprising part.

Being listened to well did not merely reveal what someone thought. It changed what they were capable of thinking while they spoke.

A leader who listens properly is therefore not just collecting better data. They are raising the quality of the thinking taking place in front of them — including the thinking of the person who came in certain and leaves less so.

And the reverse follows, which is the part I find sobering. When you listen badly — checking a device, formulating your reply, waiting for the pause — you are not simply missing information. You are actively making the person in front of you more defensive and more entrenched than they were when they walked in.

You are manufacturing the rigidity you will later complain about.

Years ago I came across a study that stuck with me. A Harvard researcher named Amy Edmondson had been looking at hospital teams, trying to work out why some made more errors than others. It turned out the 'better' teams weren't making fewer mistakes at all — they were just willing to admit them. The teams that looked worse on paper were actually the safer ones to work on. Google ran into something similar years later, when they spent two years studying nearly two hundred of their own teams trying to find the secret to high performance. They expected to find it in who was on the team. What they found instead was whether people felt safe enough to say what they actually thought.

What stays with me most is a number Edmondson turned up in later research: something like 85% of people admit to holding back a concern from their manager at least once, simply because they weren't sure what would happen if they spoke. That number never shows up in a quarterly review. It shows up later — as the risk nobody flagged, or the person who quietly stopped trying.

The leaders I respect most have one quiet habit in common: they treat dissent as data, not as disloyalty. They do not need to agree with every voice, but they need every voice to feel heard before a decision is made. That is the difference between a culture that performs openness and a culture that practises it.

What This Looks Like on a Tuesday

None of this requires a programme, which is fortunate, because programmes are how organisations avoid doing it.

It means letting a silence run three seconds longer than is comfortable, because that is roughly how long it takes someone to decide you actually meant it.

It means asking a second question about the thing you disagree with, before saying anything about the thing you disagree with.

It means not answering the objection while the objection is still being made — which is the single most common way senior people signal, without intending to, that the conversation ended before it began.

And it means being willing to be visibly changed by something you heard, at least occasionally, in front of people. That is the evidence everyone is actually waiting for. Not that you listened. That listening ever altered anything.

If you want people to speak, listen first — and listen long enough that they believe you.