A practical workshop on why people stay quiet and how leaders can make speaking up safer and more worthwhile
Discuss a Workshop for Your Team
People can see a problem and stay quiet because they fear the response. They can also stay quiet because they doubt anything will change. Some experience both.
A speak-up campaign or leadership training session may not address what people have learned to expect. Leaders also need to examine how they respond to concerns and whether people have the time, support, and authority to act.
In this workshop, your leadership team applies those questions to your own organization and identifies specific changes to test.
The keynote introduces the ideas to a broader audience. The workshop gives your leadership team time to examine its own situations and choose a change to test.
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.
Examine fear and futility. Consider where people might hesitate because of the response they expect, where they doubt speaking up will accomplish anything, and where both may be present.
Examine your response. Reflect on what your responses may be teaching people to expect when they raise a concern.
Work through four leadership behaviors. Model, Encourage, Enable, Reward. Examine how these behaviors work together: how leaders acknowledge their own fallibility, invite input, provide time and coaching for improvement, and respond with appreciation and follow-through.
Choose a change to test. Identify one specific leadership behavior to try the following week, what you will look for, and when you will check back.
What people take with them
Participants leave with:
One specific change to test, with a check-in date.
Questions to help explore fear and futility in their own areas.
A leadership response or practical barrier they want to examine further.
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, approximately three and a half hours. Explore fear and futility, examine leadership responses, work through the four behaviors, and choose individual changes to test.
Full day. Adds time to examine live work and your escalation and response processes. For an onsite workshop, a gemba walk can be included when access and logistics are arranged.
Keynote plus workshop. A keynote for the wider group, followed by a working session with the leadership team.
In person or virtual. The virtual workshop is delivered in two shorter sessions. We’ll agree on the schedule and scope when planning your session.
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.