Kamila Sip, Ph.D., is a social and cognitive neuroscientist who studies how to apply insights from brain science to achieve lasting behavior change. She serves as Director of Neuroscience Research at the NeuroLeadership Institute, where she helps organizations build cultures in which employees feel safe and empowered to express ideas, concerns, and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution.
Dr. Sip joined us recently to discuss how to speak up in the most productive way possible.
NLI: So you’ve been thinking about speaking up. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Kamila Sip: We often think about speaking up as a relatively easy thing to do. Yet the majority of people don’t speak up, even if they observe or are on the receiving end of behavior that is troubling, outrageous, or even toxic — like inappropriate behavior, cutting corners, or being unethical. The same goes for sharing our own ideas or questioning people’s decisions.
NLI: What do you mean by “speaking up”?
Kamila Sip: Speaking up is a type of communication that’s intended to address a troubling issue, whether that issue is on an interpersonal or a process level. Speaking up often means literally speaking up to somebody who has power over you or your colleagues.
Speaking up or having a voice is not the same as complaining, airing grievances, or looking for an argument. Rather, it’s the first step to helping change or course-correct behavior so it doesn’t happen again — or letting someone know their actions may not have come across as they intended. It’s about noticing that something happened that makes you or someone else uncomfortable.
NLI: What do you mean when you say “something happened”?
Kamila Sip: Imagine you have an idea you want to share, but you’ve been talked over in past meetings. The idea of trying once more to share your idea may feel uncomfortable and threatening. Or say you notice that your boss is making decisions based on incorrect data. Or, most challenging, let’s say you overhear an off-color joke at a happy hour and you notice a coworker become visibly uncomfortable.
In other words, we view speaking up as a function of an increasing level of threat you can experience on a continuum that can range from feeling like we can’t share our ideas, to challenging others’ opinions, and all the way to calling out unethical or troubling behavior. So when we talk about speaking up, we’re talking both about the small stuff and the big stuff. If people don’t feel they can speak up about the small stuff, they’re unlikely to speak up about the big stuff. That’s why we need to work on creating cultures of speaking up.
NLI: Why is this important to talk about now?
Kamila Sip: It’s relevant to allowing people to feel heard, safe, and included. People often feel like they can’t speak up because there isn’t enough psychological safety to be able to raise their voice.
Also, we tend to believe that our own decisions are objective and accurate. But that means we can’t catch ourselves being biased in the moment. Creating a culture in which people can raise their voice and call out bias or other issues that can arise in a workplace — without feeling like they’re crossing a line or fearing retribution — can result in better decision making and better outcomes.
NLI: What is it that people in organizations could be doing better?
Kamila Sip: A few things come to mind. Often, there may be an unspoken assumption in organizations that they already have a culture of psychological safety and that employees can speak up easily. However, there are at least three types of threats that can stand in the way of deciding to speak up: fear of retribution, diffusion of responsibility, and uncertainty about whether what we’ve seen or experienced is something we should speak up about.
NLI: So what’s the solution? How do we get people to speak up — or how do we at least make them feel empowered to speak up if they want to?
Kamila Sip: First, we need to create a culture that allows for psychological safety. That means specific, clear, and explicitly articulated boundaries of behavior, and processes and steps that help enable people to raise the issue without fearing repercussions.
On the flip side, there needs to be a process that accounts for the fact that sometimes, especially when we’re dealing with questionable or ambiguous behavior, the “actor” may not be aware of how their behavior is coming across. This means we need to equip both parties — the person who raises an issue as well as the “actor” — with tools that help them make sense of what they’re experiencing.
NLI: What can science tell us about all this?
Kamila Sip: The concept of diffusion of responsibility has been studied for decades. What we often forget is that the more people there are, the less likely it is that somebody will act to speak up — because we think someone else will do it for us. “If I’m not the only person observing this, someone else will do it.”
Another way science informs how to speak up productively is to understand the intention-impact gap. This is an experience we all face while interacting with others: We say or do something intending X to be understood. But the way our behavior occurs for the receiver may be very different, or even opposite, to what we intend.
Let’s say you try to give somebody a compliment, saying they look like a famous actor. But what if the actor is someone the person dislikes or finds unattractive? Such tribute may, therefore, land very poorly, and you may not even understand why. The resulting unintended intention-impact gap happens because we all have bias, we’re not nearly as good at perspective-taking as we think, and we unconsciously assume that our good intentions are apparent to others.
NLI: What other science is relevant here?
Kamila Sip: A vast set of psychological and neuroscience findings are encapsulated in the NeuroLeadership Institute’s SCARF® Model, which offers a tool to understand what drives behavior in five domains of social threat and reward.
SCARF® stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. For example, a status threat may show up as “I’m afraid of the career consequences for the other person or me if I speak up.”
We also need to remember that the same status domain may come up for the actor of the behavior. They may experience their own status threat in the form, “I’m afraid my reputation will be ruined if I cannot clarify this.”
One way to mitigate that status threat and the emotional reactivity associated with it is to assure the actor that you’re not assuming malicious intent, and that this is just about the behavior and not about them as a person.
As an actor, when you’re on the receiving end of speaking up, you can address the status threat by thanking the person who’s sharing this feedback with you, and by assuring them that their status and position is not in jeopardy for having had the courage to speak up to you.
NLI: What advice do you have for leaders?
Kamila Sip: First, leaders can explicitly solicit input and feedback and consultation practices from employees. By default, this helps eliminate the problem of lower-ranking employees not being sure whether they can come to you. By seeking that input, you’re signaling receptiveness to the employees, telling them, “Come to me with anything. I’m open to hearing your side of the story. I’m open to hearing your feedback.”
If leaders exhibit that type of behavior, they’re encouraging it in everyone else. The actions that leaders exhibit are contagious. Because in the hierarchy, we look up and ask ourselves, “What’s happening? What are the people around me doing? And what are the people above me doing?”
Finally, when an employee comes to you as a leader, try to create space and opportunities for them to feel safe. Offer confidentiality. Foster a climate in which cooperation and prosocial behavior are acknowledged, rather than competition and secret meetings. By doing so, you’ll help build a culture of collaboration and create space for people to feel psychologically safe.
Originally published on Forbes.com
