A half day with your leadership team on why people stopped telling you things, and what to do about it
You have probably already done the training. Maybe a speak-up campaign, a hotline, a psychological safety module in the leadership curriculum. And problems still surface late, or after they have become expensive.
Here is what I hear from people who have stopped raising things.
It is usually not that they are afraid. Across 46 keynotes and workshops, I have asked more than 600 people what keeps them from speaking up at work. Fear was a factor for 44 percent, but only 12 percent said fear alone. Futility was a factor for more than two thirds. Not “I am afraid of what happens if I speak up,” but “I did it before and nothing changed.”
Those are two different problems. Most speak-up programs are built for the first one.
What we do in the room
This is a working session, not a lecture. Your leaders spend most of the time on your organization, not on case studies.
Find out which problem you actually have. Fear and futility look identical from a leader’s chair. Both produce silence. They call for different responses, and getting the diagnosis wrong is why the last initiative did not stick.
Hear how your own behavior lands. There is a short exercise I use, adapted from work by Scott Burgmeyer at the Iowa Quality Center, where leaders find out what their team has learned to expect from them. It is usually not what they intended to teach.
Work through the four behaviors. Model, Encourage, Enable, Reward. The order is not decorative. Encouragement without modeling is a slogan. Enabling has nothing to route if people are not speaking up yet. And Reward, meaning what actually happens in the first five minutes and the first five days after somebody raises something, only matters once the first three are real.
Leave with one behavior to change. Not a program. Not a committee. Each participant leaves with something specific to do the following week, and a way to tell whether it worked.
What people take with them
A way to tell fear from futility on their own units and lines.
A clear read on what their current response to bad news is teaching people.
One change each leader has committed to, in writing, with a check-in date.
A copy of the book, and a discussion guide if you want the team to keep working through it after I leave.
Who this is for
Leadership teams in healthcare and manufacturing. Operations, quality, and continuous improvement leaders. Executive groups that have run the training and still cannot get problems to surface early.
It works best with people who have authority over how their own areas run. It works least well as a session for frontline staff, since the behaviors we work on are leader behaviors.
Groups of 12 to 30. Smaller is fine. Above 30 it becomes a keynote with discussion, which is also an option.
Formats
Half day, about three and a half hours. The standard version. Diagnosis, the behavior exercise, the four behaviors, individual commitments.
Full day. Adds a gemba walk with your leaders, working on live problems in your own environment, plus a session on what your current escalation and response process teaches people.
Keynote plus workshop. A 45 to 90 minute keynote for the wider group in the morning, then the working session with the leadership team in the afternoon. This is the most common arrangement at conferences and leadership retreats.
Delivered in person or virtually. The virtual version runs in two shorter sessions rather than one long one, because a half day on video is not a half day in a room.
Books can be included for participants, or for a larger group if you want people reading it before or after.
How this gets built
I do not deliver a canned workshop. Before the session, we talk about what has already been tried, what surfaced late recently, and what your leaders would say if you were not in the room.
If you have engagement or safety culture survey data, we can use it. If you have had an event that people saw coming, we can work on that, carefully and without naming anyone.