In this episode, Drew and David examine workplace communication dynamics through Amy Edmondson and Anita Williams Woolley's 2021 paper "Reflections, Voice and Silence in Workplace Conversations," published in the Journal of Change Management. The discussion challenges the simplistic assumption that speaking up is always beneficial for safety, introducing a four-quadrant framework that distinguishes between productive and unproductive forms of both voice and silence. The hosts explore how withholding, disrupting, contributing, and processing behaviors shape meeting effectiveness and organizational safety outcomes.
Drawing on Edmondson's extensive psychological safety research, the episode provides practical guidance for safety leaders seeking to improve workplace conversations. The framework reveals that effective safety communication requires more than encouraging people to speak up—it demands deliberate leadership to create environments where contributions are productive, silence is reflective rather than fearful, and meeting goals are clearly articulated. The findings offer significant implications for safety professionals working to enhance organizational communication and change management capabilities.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
"The employee voice and silence literature is a lot more precise because it's looking at a specific question: what do people speak up about, when do they speak up, who do they speak up to, what do they say?" - Drew Rae
"A good meeting is when all participants are either contributing or processing with minimal withholding or disrupting." - Drew Rae
"It's not just that disruptive people take up time and space, they raise the threshold for others to speak up." - Drew Rae
"Where there's diversity in the room, race or gender, it can make this a little bit more difficult because people might feel personally vulnerable." - David Provan
"We want an environment that promotes productive conversations, and that environment is more about when and how we speak up ourselves." - Drew Rae
Resources:
Resource Link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6451
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
Drew Rae - cohost [0:00 - 1:04]
You're listening to the Safety of work podcast, episode 135. Today we're asking the question, is speaking up always a good thing for safety? Let's get started. Hey, everybody. My name's Drew Rae. I'm here with David Proven, and we're from Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to the Safety of Work podcast. In each episode we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and we examine the evidence surrounding it. And David, this is the closest I think we've come to rehashing or reusing one of our questions. In episode 103, we had an episode, should we be happy when our people speak out about safety? And that was a paper actually by Sidney Decker we were reviewing then. And we're coming back to a similar question this week. Do you want to tell us a bit about it?
David Provan - cohost [1:04 - 1:39]
Yeah. So this week we're sort of talking about speaking up. You know, last week we talked about workplace humor and its relationship to psychosocial risk. This sort of opens up a broader reflection on workplace communication more generally. And we know the importance of communication, I guess, for organizations to just do work and also understand and manage safety. So this week we're going to explore a paper, a more broad paper on workplace communication and I guess specifically how speaking up and also I guess the converse of that, staying silent, how that kind of relates to organizational effectiveness. So, Drew, anything you want to add up front?
Drew Rae - cohost [1:39 - 3:13]
So there's a lot of been talk recently, obviously about psychosocial safety and this companion idea of psychological safety, which is like a safe environment in which people can communicate. And I've always been a little bit uncomfortable. Psychological safety seems a little bit to me like safety culture in that, like it's a real thing. But it's a bit too much of a catch all term, which makes it really hard to study it. And you can like then end up in weird questions like, is there such a thing as too much psychological safety? Or like, you know, what's the right. So I think actually the employee voice, and sometimes it's called the employee silence literature is a lot more precise because it's looking at really quite a specific question which is, you know, what do people speak up about? You know, when do they speak up, who do they speak up to, what do they say? And that's like narrow enough that we can get a really good empirical grasp on it. When does it happen, how does it happen, what helps, what doesn't help? And I much prefer research that sort of like goes narrow first to make things more precise and then broadens out again to give more, you know, useful conclusion. So, yeah, there's a lot of links, obviously, between speaking up and safety because it's linked to things like stopping unsafe work. You know, usually your first act isn't to stop. Usually your first act is to say something. Links into ideas of hazard reporting, both formal and informal hazard reporting. So, you know, obviously different people see different things at work. Different people know different things at work. So the ability to communicate clearly concerns about safety is going to feed into the organization's ability to manage.
David Provan - cohost [3:13 - 4:05]
And I think Drew said, you know, discretionary space for people in roles. And, you know, we dug into this when we started doing our research on authority to stop work, which is, you know, what are those conditions that, you know, enable people to, you know, apply that discretion? Like, you know, I don't have to speak up, but I will speak up, or I really want to speak up, but actually I'm going to stay quiet. And so, you know, it's about employee choice in those. In those moments. And so I agree with you a little bit. I think psychological safety a thing, it's important. But I also, you know, prefer to understand more about specific leadership behaviors. And. And this paper that we're going to talk about today actually does a really good job of being practical and providing and drawing from the literature some, you know, practical things and centralizing the important role of leaders in creating the environment for this. So should we start? Should we introduce the paper?
Drew Rae - cohost [4:05 - 4:54]
Yep. So the title of the paper is Reflections, Voice and Silence in Workplace Conversations. The one, hopefully a lot of readers will recognize immediately is Amy Edmondson. She's a professor at Harvard Business School, and I think probably fair to say the biggest name in psychological safety. If you've sort of, like, heard or read anything about psychological safety, you've either heard directly of her, or the work's coming from her, and you just don't know where it's coming from. And then second, also has a PhD in leadership, university affiliated, but is currently an advisor for a strategy consulting firm. The paper was published in 2021 in the journal of Change Management, which is one of their Rutledge journals.
David Provan - cohost [4:54 - 5:09]
And so, Drew, the title of this paper starts with reflections colon, and then talking about it. And so how would you sort of describe what this type of paper is? Because, you know, it's not original research, it's not a systemic literature review, but nevertheless, it's a, you know, to me, is a good piece of work 20.
Drew Rae - cohost [5:09 - 7:03]
Or 30 years ago, I think I would have described this sort of paper as an essay. And I would use that as a fairly derogatory term because that was the point at which I was starting to get really fed up with how much of the safety literature was just big names pontificating instead of actually doing research. But there are different types of non empirical work that you get. One of them is this pontificating, which is this people just writing an essay that says this is how I think the world should be. And I think that's fairly useless. Another type you get is the kind of problematising paper which is basically taking a critical look at where we are now and setting the agenda for further research, which in itself doesn't do much, but is useful because we can then use it to base empirical research on this paper. And this is where the word reflections comes in and is also kind of a pun because it's like reflections, like voice and silence as reflections of each other. Is someone who has done a lot of empirical research and has been involved in a lot of empirical research looking back across that body of work and making sense of it. So it's like because of the authors, you trust that this is not just pontificating, but it's the sort of thing that, you know, a single study would be too narrow to draw these types of conclusions from. You have to base it off a larger experience and a larger body of work. So I think of this as like the theorising bit that sits on top of the empirical work. You're in a smaller paper. This would be the discussion at the end in a lifetime. So you have work. This is a set of things that you produce arising from that. So yeah, it's a sense making exercise. There's no empirical claim here. And you need to be careful to like, are there any hidden empirical claims that you know, is it actually backed up by the research or not? And we'll talk about that as we go through it. But think of it mostly as like a sense making exercise, a way to think about an issue for which, for any individual question, there's probably a lot of evidence.
David Provan - cohost [7:03 - 7:16]
Yeah. And then being academic, the authors, you know, point to the need for ongoing and further empirical work around this. So it is sort of like, what does the research say? How do we make sense of that? And then how do we provide some direction for future research as well?
Drew Rae - cohost [7:16 - 7:28]
Yeah. And that's really where, you know, where someone's doing a good job of sense making is when they get to the end and they don't try to claim, oh, we've solved the world's problems. They get to the end and say, okay, this new way of thinking about it now tells us what we need to study next.
David Provan - cohost [7:28 - 8:00]
So, I mean, the stated aim of the paper was to draw on and extend the psychological safety literature. Of course, these two authors were very much across, you know, more than a decade of writing and researching about psychological safety at the time of this, this paper. And they're specifically trying to sort of, like, link it to organizational change. I don't know how that theme doesn't really come through in the paper. I think that was just sort of in there in the introduction to try to get into the journal that it was going into, because the paper itself doesn't talk too much about change. It's much more about employee voice and conversation.
Drew Rae - cohost [8:00 - 9:01]
So it doesn't talk about change, but it does talk a lot about goals, which I think is almost a more useful way of thinking about things than change. Like, you know, organisations don't necessarily want to be changing, but they always do want to be moving towards something. The paper sort of like, starts off for me, this, like, immediately resonated because I've worked for most of my life within large organisations, and anyone who's been in a large organization knows that you have these meetings that sometimes you think, okay, that was a good meeting. We knew what we meant to achieve, we achieved it. We worked out of it with a sense of direction. And sometimes you just sort of like, think, like, why did that meeting even happen? Like, committees that seem to exist to have meetings, and you're sitting in those meetings thinking, like, why am I spending this time? What's the point of being here? Should I even bother speaking? Because I don't know what speaking is. And then there are other people in those meetings who are just, like, talking constantly, as if the meeting is an opportunity for them personally to vent about whatever they like, even if no one else in the meeting has the power to do anything about the issues that they're raising.
David Provan - cohost [9:01 - 9:46]
Drew, that was a paragraph that really hooked me into the paper, where I think it starts with the quote of, unfortunately, conversations at work are frequently unsatisfying, unproductive, or both. And they go on to talk about meetings and then draw on some research. One study, 70% of senior managers reported that their meetings were unproductive and inefficient, 65% finding that meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. So, you know, organizations kind of, like, function on group conversations and meetings. Yet, you know, I guess the research suggests that most people find these Types of group conversations, quite unsatisfying or unproductive. So it's quite a. Something so central to organizational functioning is not perceived as being useful to organizational functioning.
Drew Rae - cohost [9:46 - 10:17]
Yeah. And as anyone who's sort of like worked at anywhere above the front line knows, you can't just solve the problem by saying, let's stop having meetings. Like, organisations are a series of conversations and a lot of organisational structure is all just about who regularly meets with whom. That's the engine that organisations work with. So when meetings are productive, that's what actually makes an organisation work. And when they're not productive, it's what makes things slow down, seem to not be working, seem to never get anything done. It's not because you're having the meetings, it's because the meetings are not achieving their purposes.
David Provan - cohost [10:17 - 11:13]
So for the purpose of this paper, they're sort of talking about conversations at work being both formal, like the meetings, the type of formal meetings we've just spoken about, or even informal communication, like we talk about the water cooler or the coffee machine, type of conversation between peers, colleagues, small, small groups of employees. So it's workplace communication. And the purpose or the central organizing object of this paper is a sort of a four quadrant model that the authors propose is a way of thinking about high quality conversation, or way of thinking about convers and trying to understand productive and unproductive behaviors in workplace conversations. So the main body of this paper, Drew, I guess we'll talk to now, sort of is introduced as high. The title subtitle is High Quality Conversations the Role of Psychological Safety and Leadership. So, Drew, do you want to sort of frame anything up before we start to talk about, I guess, how we might think about productive conversations?
Drew Rae - cohost [11:13 - 11:19]
No, I think probably let's just get straight into describing the matrix and then let's look at the four quadrants.
David Provan - cohost [11:19 - 11:24]
Well, since we're an audio version podcast, without me doing a whole bunch of hand signals.
Drew Rae - cohost [11:24 - 11:30]
Okay, picture in your mind a large floating blue box in front of you divided into four squares.
David Provan - cohost [11:30 - 11:31]
It is blue. Yeah.
Drew Rae - cohost [11:31 - 12:04]
We have two axes here. First is voice, which is really simple, like are people silent or are they speaking up? And then type of contribution, is it unproductive or productive? So that basically gives you these four things. You've got unproductive silence, you, you've got productive silence, you've got unproductive talking, and you've got productive talking. Except we give those like four different names. Withholding, processing, disrupting and contributing, which I think are pretty clear labels. Yeah, yeah. We can get into like, what do those four things look like.
David Provan - cohost [12:04 - 12:28]
And I think, Drew, the four quadrants. I mean, Amy Edmondson seems to really like the four quadrants in the Fearless organisation. When she's talking about psychological safety, she talks about psychological safety on one axis and standards on the other axis and sort of talks about apathy and high performance. And, you know, so four quadrants seem to be a, I guess, a common way of starting to theorize around, you know, these types of issues.
Drew Rae - cohost [12:28 - 13:00]
Yeah, I'm going to have to have a think about that now, David, because when you see the diagrams like that repeating a lot, sometimes what it is is an oversimplifying rhetorical tool. But I think the way that she's using them is as like a sense making. When you have this apparent contradiction that speaking up is sometimes good and sometimes bad, how do you work out that? You can't just look at the volume of speaking up, you need to compare it to something else. And in this case it's a type. And you use that to sort of measure what is good speech versus what is the unhelpful speech.
David Provan - cohost [13:00 - 13:31]
That's an important point because the oversimplification that we have, and sometimes we have it in safety that speaking up is good and remaining silent is bad. And so we obviously try and encourage speaking up as much, as much as possible. And, you know, the extension here is that. Well, no, no, it's not that simple, right. That there's a need for employee silence and there's a need for. There's a unhelpful speaking up. And so, and I think, and I like the way it's not just about safety generally, but it's about workplace conversations. So you can actually look at the communication in context as well.
Drew Rae - cohost [13:32 - 14:35]
And as we'll get into a little bit later, one of the useful things about this way of thinking about it is, remember, conversations always have multiple people in play. So actually when one person is speaking up, that could actually affect how other people speak up, whether they speak or don't speak, and whether their own contributions are productive or not productive. And that's what a lot of this paper is getting into, is how leadership behaviours influence other people in the room and how those other people in the room then influence other people in the room. And I'm thinking here immediately of like a committee I was on for a year was having really productive conversations. A leader who just said, a really clear agenda, what are we here for? What are we trying to do? The exact same composition of people changed. The leader had someone who had much less sense of goal and direction who just said like, okay, like, who wants to share? And immediately like half the people kept talking and the other half people just like shut up and wanted the meeting to end as soon as possible just because, like, the different ideas of goals gave rise to different people dominating the conversation in ways that like, just drove other people to just be silent and try to get out of the room fast.
David Provan - cohost [14:35 - 15:28]
And the author sort of framed up this role of leaders and sort of said, you know, increasingly in industry managers, managers understand the importance of psychological safety. And then what they also claim was, you know, but, but at the same time, you know, the authors feel that managers don't really understand, you know, how they can create it. And this goes back to a little bit about it being a bit of an abstract type of concept to deal with on a day to day basis. So they really wanted this paper to try to lean into that gap, which is how do leaders lead better conversations? And like I said at the start, each of these four sections, there's like a table which is drawn from the research about specific things that leaders can do. There's example quotes about how you could open up a meeting that would encourage a more productive conversation. So for a theory building type of piece, it's also a very practical resource as well.
Drew Rae - cohost [15:28 - 16:16]
I actually like, just before we get into each of the quadrants, they give a definition of just like, what is a good meeting. And I think this is a good heuristic that like, whether it's like a formal meeting or just people catching up over coffee or running into each other in the corridor, a good meeting is when all participants are either contributing, so that's the productive speech or processing the productive not speaking with minimal withholding, like not speaking when you want to or disrupting. So yeah, if you're sitting in the room and you're not contributing or processing, why are you there? And if you're like there and you want to speak, but are not speaking or you're like actively disrupting, then you're like actively harming the meeting. So you could almost like, I mean, you couldn't do this in real time, but like take a barometer of who is doing what when and come up with a meeting quality score almost.
David Provan - cohost [16:17 - 16:44]
And I think they then talked about like your example in the committee that you were on Drew that these, for this to happen, these conversations need leadership, you know, and that's a combination of, you know, overt direction, setting, goal, purpose, facilitation, and also gentle nudges, you know, and they, you know, inviting People, you know, who. Who you perceive might be withholding and how to do that and so on. So, yeah, really cool. So should we dive into the sort of four sections of the quadrant?
Drew Rae - cohost [16:44 - 17:41]
Okay, so let's start with withholding. So withholding people refraining from sharing stuff that is on topic and potentially relevant reasons they might do that are because they feel it's risky, so there might be some consequence to them or inappropriate. They just don't want to do the wrong thing or, like, unwelcome. They think, you know, it's going to hurt someone else. So, you know, it's either that they fear consequences to themselves or they just fear it's not the right thing to do, to share that this is something that, like, it's the hardest thing to see because if someone can be silent for all sorts of reasons, you don't know what they're thinking, you don't know what they might have said, but, you know, over time you're going to find out, particularly if that information comes out later and you'd really wished you'd heard it earlier. Why do people do that? And this is where mainly psychological safety comes in, is we need to make somewhere where people feel that their contribution will be valued and responded to positively. So how we react to people speaking has a big part in whether people want to speak.
David Provan - cohost [17:41 - 18:20]
And I think at an individual level, I think even connecting in the last episode, Drew, they're sort of saying that, you know, where there's diversity in the room, so race or gender in that it can actually make this a little bit more difficult because people might feel personally vulnerable. But also organizations that don't value, you know, challenge, where leaders have shown in the past that they don't like anyone criticizing their ideas or suggesting a different direction. So sort of like individual factors here and also kind of like individual leader issues and then broader organizational kind of signals that get sent about does the organization and does the leader really want to hear different points of view?
Drew Rae - cohost [18:20 - 18:50]
Yeah. And it doesn't have to be like, overt telling people to shut up or telling them that they're wrong. A lot of the time you can just imagine a meeting. Someone says something and the leader says, yes, that's very interesting. Who else has something to share? And just by moving on, rather than engaging with it, you've told someone what they offered was irrelevant and you're more interested in other people as opposed to, like, saying, yeah, that's important. Can someone build on that? Can someone add to that, how do other people feel about that? Like, directly engaging with inviting other people to bring into what someone said.
David Provan - cohost [18:50 - 19:15]
And we won't have time in the podcast, Drew, to sort of share all of their helpful tips. But that's sort of an example of where they specifically provide a couple of scenarios. There's. There's a sort of a common thread scenario about a law firm that we're sort of not drawing into the episode that runs throughout this whole paper. So as far as this episode goes, is probably one where I think, you know, if the episode interests you as a listener, this is a really good paper to get a hand on and read top to bottom. Yeah.
Drew Rae - cohost [19:15 - 19:24]
Particularly the tables. Sort of, like, bring out these sets of tips so you could read the paper, skim the text, and just pull out the tables almost as things to try in your next meeting.
David Provan - cohost [19:24 - 19:49]
Yeah. So, Drew, we've got this sort of. We want to. We want to kind of minimize withholding, which is where, you know, there's an important contribution that could be made to the conversation, but the person doesn't feel that it's safe or, you know, desired by the rest of the group for them to actually contribute it. So we want to minimize that behavior. And we also want to minimize what they call disrupting, which is speaking up. That's not, I guess, not in a productive way for the conversation at hand. So do you want to sort of talk a little bit about disrupting then, Drew?
Drew Rae - cohost [19:49 - 20:46]
Yeah. So I think, like, everyone knows this instinctively, but it's worth pointing out that it's not just that disruptive people take up time and space. They raise the threshold for others to speak up. So, you know, if you're in a meeting and other people have wasted time, you fear wasting time yourself, so you tend to, like, hold back, or you fear that person jumping in on you as well, so you hold back. And we could all, like, almost probably name names of people who, like, in meetings, tend to do this to just try to make themselves the center of attention with a joke, an anecdote, a personal story, a funny remark that just derails the actual purpose of the invitation for people to share and sucks up the space in which others might have come in and said something that was meaningful and moved the conversation forwards. So it's really, like, the key thing they say is it's thoughtless utterance where the speaker could have, but did not consider the impact on others of what they were saying and how they were saying it.
David Provan - cohost [20:46 - 22:01]
Yeah, and I like the way so. So they also frame this. So unproductive voice could be in the way that, you know, A leader frames an invitation for input which is like, okay, we've only got five minutes left in this meeting. This is a topic. I think we've already got a way forward. Does anyone have anything they want to add? Right, so that's an unproductive voice. Like that's just not a question. That's, that's a helpful, productive question. They also talk about unproductive voice. Voice being in the way that management or leaders or others respond to like belittling someone or you know, like you said, being dismissive of a contribution. But then interestingly to me, Drew, they also talked about like examples where leaders, you know, started talking about, oh, you know, they got playing golf on the weekend and spent five or 10 minutes just about a personal anecdote or you're in a meeting about one issue and someone starts talking about a different organizational problem or a broader kind of business issue or you know, maybe even some book that they read on the weekend. And like you said, it was really interesting to me how, you know, we've, I think with humble inquiry and that we talk about the value of small talk and the value of being genuine and authentic and personable. But the interesting thing that I took out of, out of this part, which is like if you're in a group conversation that's goal orientated, that can be unproductive.
Drew Rae - cohost [22:01 - 22:31]
Yeah. The one that really drives me crazy at my work is we're having a local meeting to solve local problems and people want to vent about things that no one in the room can do anything about. And so instead of focusing time on doing the stuff that we could do something about, people are using the session to share and like this is not the time and place for those concerns. There is a time and place for those concerns. That is voice that is important. But it's important in your feedback to senior management, not to local management who are trying to solve a local problem.
David Provan - cohost [22:31 - 22:31]
Yeah.
Drew Rae - cohost [22:31 - 22:35]
And everyone else just knows already those concerns, they've heard you voice them before, they don't need to hear it.
David Provan - cohost [22:35 - 23:52]
And they talk about this for unproductive voice. And this section of the paper is sort of subtitled when the Truth Hides behind Closed Doors. And they sort of talk about, you know, in the two peers complaining about a problem together, its unproductive voice. Right. Like yes, they might be speaking truth, it might be behind closed doors, but they're letting off steam, but it makes no difference. So from an organization point, it's unproductive because there's two people who agree, who, you know, neither of which can do something about it. But then they also go on to also then just raising that with people who can't act. So, you know, going to your own leader and complaining about, you know, the CEO of the company, it's just unproductive voice, right? It's just not something that, that, that group conversation can actually do anything about. So that's why I think when you mentioned change and goal at the start of this conversation, the practical advice they've got for discouraging unproductive voice is little bit, I don't know if transactional is the right word, but even like the way that you start a meeting and clarify the topic and the goal and the way the conversation is going to happen, what's on and off topic and so on. So things like ground rules reinforcing kind of like principles of good communication. So some things that I think we just don't, you know, like we don't set up these conversations with a lot of clarity. We just sort of like roll into a meeting and start talking by saying.
Drew Rae - cohost [23:52 - 24:34]
Like, here are the ground rules. It can be like we're all at the start of a year. So your first meeting of the committee for the year, you say, okay, this is what this committee is for. This is what we're going to do this year. This is what we expect. And it can be like quite positive because it can be very goal setting, not just boundary setting. But yeah, I think it's interesting sort of how nefarious it can be that if you spend your time griping to someone who can't do anything about it, not only are you sort of raising discontent and wasting both people's time, but also both people now think that they've told someone about it. And so when the accident happens at a year time, people say everyone was talking about this. And like, no, you weren't. You're having unproductive conversation about it. You weren't telling the people you thought you were talking about it, but not to someone who was the right person to talk to about it.
David Provan - cohost [24:34 - 25:19]
And I think the other thing that this, this part of the paper does well is not be judgmental about that. Like we're talking about some potentially negative behaviors or unproductive behaviors. And it was a little bit like the workplace humor and psychosocial safety episode in the last episode, you know, and the authors sort of point out that people are often unaware that they're being unproductive. Like they might be making a joke or trying to ease the tension in the room and that. So they talk a lot here about feedback and the role of leaders in, you know, how to discour unproductive voice by kind of noticing it and constructively kind of resetting conversations. So I thought that was really important because again, you know, if it continues, then it's, you know, worsening the environment for productive conversation in the future.
Drew Rae - cohost [25:19 - 26:02]
Yeah. I have to say, I don't come out of these meetings angry at the person who was disrupting it. I come out of the meetings angry at the person who was supposed to be leading the meeting sharing it, because they could have taken that person aside before the meeting, they could have shut that person down during the meeting, they could have refocused the conversation, they could have invited someone else to speak in a way that set things back on track. And that's what would have made the difference. Not. People who aren't self aware aren't going to magically become self aware. And if anything, what happens is we try to train people or be self aware about your contribution. All the people who are currently being silent think that that's about them and they speak even less. And the people who are not self aware, that doesn't change them at all. It has to come from the chairing of the meeting and the leading of the meeting and setting up the context of the meeting and who's there even.
David Provan - cohost [26:02 - 26:33]
So, Drew, we've talked about the sort of unproductive side of the quadrant. So withholding where you know someone's got something to contribute but. But don't. And then sort of like unproductive voice, you know, which is sort of speaking up and contributing, but in an unproduct, you know, in a way that doesn't sort of take the conversation forward towards its goal. So let's sort of talk, maybe we can talk now about the diagram. It's the right hand side of the, of the quadrant. How do we sort of promote, you know, productive contribution and sort of encourage productive silence.
Drew Rae - cohost [26:33 - 27:18]
So the first and I think most important thing they say is that productive voice doesn't actually necessarily mean, like, throwing in ideas. There is such a thing as productive disagreement. There is such a thing as productive asking a question. So they say, like, it can be offering an idea, it can be asking a question, it can be redirecting, actually deliberately trying to steer the conversation to focus on something it wasn't focusing on. It can be advocating for a particular position. There are all of these behaviours that move it forward. What makes it productive is not sort of like the direction you're pulling in, it's that it is actually contributing to the purpose and goal of that particular conversation, moving it forward. And disagreement can move things forward if done well.
David Provan - cohost [27:18 - 27:57]
Yeah. So that constructive disagreement or even verbalizing agreement with others, supporting someone else's position, building on it. I like the way there's a sentence in there that says sort of productive voice occurs when people make comments and give reactions in a way that reinforce the norm that candor is welcome. So anything that someone's contributing that reinforces openness and honesty is. And goal orientation is desirable here, then that's going to be productive contribution. Like you said, it's not just offering new ideas, which I said is sort of the reverse then of withholding. Like, contributing is not just about saying stuff, it's about saying certain types of stuff.
Drew Rae - cohost [27:57 - 28:17]
Yes. And I find that really interesting from the point of view of, like, everyone contributing by meeting that, like, it's actually not helpful to say, oh, I have nothing to say. I have nothing to add. Because you could still do like, any one of these things, like, why are you not saying anything? Oh, it's because, like, I really agree with what that previous person has said and I back them 100%. That is a productive contribution to the meeting.
David Provan - cohost [28:17 - 28:20]
Or I don't quite understand this and ask a question or.
Drew Rae - cohost [28:20 - 28:26]
And again, yeah, I'm kind of a bit lost. Or I don't understand why we're not talking about this. Instead could actually be a productive.
David Provan - cohost [28:26 - 29:02]
It sort of took a lot in this section about contributing through advocacy and inquiry. So they're sort of really. And we sort of know a little bit in safety. And this, this actually referenced. Some of this section is referenced from Peter Senge's work, which is in the 90s, like, you know, the fifth discipline around change and things like that. But this idea about, you know, we've got to be able to both advocate and inquire so, you know, what do we think and what's our position and how do we understand what others think and other positions and, you know, I guess they're talking about productive contributions in ways that kind of balance both advocacy and inquiry.
Drew Rae - cohost [29:02 - 29:37]
Yeah. Which I mean, part of that depends on, like, the purpose of why are we having a meeting as opposed to an email, as opposed to a bulletin or as opposed to something else, is that, you know, very often meetings are people who are coming from different perspectives and positions trying to reach agreement on a course of action. And for that to happen, you do need this healthy mix of having your own position and being willing to support and advocate for it, but also the ability to realize that the media Exists. You know, you're there to compromise, and you're there maybe to change your mind. And that requires you being able to do these different productive behaviors.
David Provan - cohost [29:37 - 29:50]
So, Drew, constructive silence. So. Or productive. Productive silence. You know, this idea. And they label this sort of section of the quadrant. Is it a quadrant, or is the whole thing a quadrant? And this is a quadrant inside a quadrant. I don't know.
Drew Rae - cohost [29:50 - 29:53]
A quadrant is a section of each. Each of the four is a quadrant.
David Provan - cohost [29:54 - 30:04]
Okay, got it. Apologies. So in this quadrant, they sort of label it processing, and this section, they sort of talk about. Encourage processing. So do you want to sort of talk a little bit about what the authors mean there?
Drew Rae - cohost [30:05 - 31:05]
Yeah. So essentially what they're saying is that it is actually important for people to have that time when they're not speaking as well. And, you know, the way a meeting typically works, often you only have time that you're not speaking because someone else is speaking. So that is actually, you know, making sure that people are doing the active listening, not just waiting for their turn to. You know, you're not just sitting back, letting them do the work and having a conversation, nor are you planning out the next thing for you to say. You're actually using your mental capacity to process, to form opinions, to adjust your own mind based on. And sometimes people need support for that. You know, it is actually quite complex trying to reflect and process and work out what you're going to say next in a meeting and work out what other people are thinking. It's a very social, difficult environment. So sometimes people actually need opportunities for that cognitive distance. And, you know, that's where you might actually, you know, deliberately put in tools into the meeting. Like, you know, let's all just take a minute to think about that and then restart the conversation. Or longer meetings, you know, strategic use of breaks or breakout groups or ways to give people a chance to.
David Provan - cohost [31:05 - 31:52]
Yeah, I think in coaching, when we sort of talk about coaching and even in some ways, you know, counseling and things like that, the. The saying is sort of like silence is when the thinking's happening, you know, and so I think the way they talk about processing is. And we've talked about active listening in workplaces for a long time is this idea. And I think you can, you know, I think being conscious, like you said, Drew, it's almost like the scoring before being conscious. I think this is something that you can actually notice people, particularly these days in meetings, like, as soon as someone pulls out their phone or opens their computer, you probably. They're not really processing the conversation. That's going on right, right there and then. So, you know, while you might not be able to notice withholding from an unproductive silence point of view, I think you can definitely sort of know if people. I think you can tell if people are processing or not.
Drew Rae - cohost [31:52 - 32:18]
Yeah, they kind of give fewer tips for processing than for other things. Maybe just because it's a very context specific thing what sort of tools you use. But like when I'm leading my discussion classes even I will just like wander around the room behind everyone to see like who's on their computer because they're taking notes and who's on the computer because they're doing other things. Just as norm setting that like, you know, gently encouraging people who are doing things that actively disengage that actually maybe that's not helpful.
David Provan - cohost [32:18 - 32:55]
And I sort of ask people to explain things in their own words which as well to see if processing's gone on. So you might present like a set of principles of human organizational performance and say sort of without mentioning these principles. Have a think for a moment and then in a few minutes time I'd like to invite people to kind of like just what does this mean in your own words? So actually creating a semi structured kind of processing environment, like I like the way you said before Drew, about, you know, take a minute to think about this and then let's hear some reflections about it. I actually think we need to actively encourage kind of processing because so much communication in the workplace is like in one ear out the other.
Drew Rae - cohost [32:55 - 33:17]
And I mean when you try doing these things for the first time, it can feel a little bit uncomfortable and paternalistic, almost like you're being a bit of a school teacher in the meeting. But I think once you start to do it more often people just appreciate that as like that's your leadership style is deliberately trying to build reflection and learning and contribution into the meeting. They appreciate having a bit of that structure and direction about what's expected of them.
David Provan - cohost [33:17 - 33:24]
Yeah, I'd agree. So Drew, I guess anything you want to add before we maybe summarize and move towards practical takeaways?
Drew Rae - cohost [33:24 - 33:46]
Probably not. I mean this is one of those ones where I would definitely recommend. If you find this interesting, read the paper and pull out those four tables of the tips in the four quadrants and think about specifically which ones you might use in your meetings. I think in the takeaways we're going to be talking a little bit more generally rather than David, were there any like favorite tips, anything you read that you sort of like thought, oh, I'll try that in my next meeting.
David Provan - cohost [33:46 - 34:50]
I actually like the quite simple labels. Like, there's a risk of all these, you know, like such. There's no question that psychological safety is a complex phenomena. Right. And there's a lot of variables at play and a lot of individual differences and group dynamics and potential to be incredibly overwhelming, you know, in terms of people making progress inside, you know, their team and their organization. So I quite like the simplicity of the labels here. Like, you know, when someone's speaking up is disrupting or is it contributing when someone's not contribute. When someone's not speaking up in a meeting, are they withholding or are they processing? So I actually quite like the practical nature of some of these labels. Yes, they're. They're oversimplified. But I think you can start to think about, oh, this person seems to have been withholding lately. I might invite them deliberately to make the first comment at the next meeting and really then make it clear that I value, you know, whatever they have to say. So I think there's, there's. There's some real things that I guess, you know, I felt that I could actually do myself, having read this paper. So particularly with those labels, I can go, ah, withholding. Okay, what can I do about that?
Drew Rae - cohost [34:50 - 35:22]
Yeah, the one that stood out to me was explicitly saying at the start of the meeting whether this is an exploratory discovery type event or whether this is a problem solving, because they sort of seem to suggest that all meetings should be more in that discovery space. I kind of disagree. I think sometimes meetings are very much, we need to do something, we need to have a concrete plan. Let's just get down to it. But being explicit about that and saying, like, which one are we? And setting the space for people that this is a space for us to learn from each other rather than.
David Provan - cohost [35:23 - 35:53]
And that case study example, they sort of frame up an example meeting like that, where someone come, where the leader comes in and says, you know, this is what we're here to talk about. This is sort of a complex issue. Our goal is to provide X, Y, Z going forward. We've all got something we can contribute to coming up with the best outcome. So the way that that's framed, Drew, I think framing it, and I agree with you, most meetings are going to be part problem understanding, part solution. But it's about basically setting the scene for all of that to occur. So practical takeaways, Drew? Sure.
Drew Rae - cohost [35:53 - 36:35]
So the first one I had, which is not actually directly from the paper, it's more Just a reflection I had reading the paper is that sometimes these open forums aren't always actually the best way for consultation in the first place. These things do have difficult social dynamics. Different people speaking can affect other people. We do need just to be aware that meetings aren't the solution for everything. If we want to know what people are thinking, sometimes we do actually need to engage on them one on one where they're not affected by the dynamics of other people disrupting and trying to work out for themselves whether they're supposed to contribute or not. And one on one meetings fix that problem because they know that they're supposed to be the one talking and supposed to be linked to. I'm a big believer in managing by one on ones, not just on collective meetings.
David Provan - cohost [36:35 - 37:30]
Yeah, I like that Drew, because I mean this is probably going to be a wrong interpretation of the theory, but sort of. I did read at one point that, you know, trust is something between two individuals. Like that's whatever psychological safety is sort of a group phenomena. So, you know, it is something where it's very hard for people who are withholding in a group situation for a leader to suddenly publicly encourage more contribution. Right. But in a one on one, I've been in that situation, but on the employee side where I was very uncomfortable saying what I thought about safety in this organization. And it was actually the CEO one on one who said to me, one on one, just tell me what you think. Like, don't hold back, just tell me what you're seeing in this organization, what you're thinking. And I spoke then in a one on one way that I would never have spoken in a group at that point in time. So I totally think this takeaway that the constructs that we're talking about in this paper I think apply in one on one situations as much as they do group. Yeah.
Drew Rae - cohost [37:30 - 38:15]
And then allow you to bring that back into the group. Because people have had their chance to vent or had their chance to build the trust that then contributes back to dynamic second one. Just fairly obvious but important is it is actually a skill controlling a meeting. It's not something that you just like say, okay, you've got to run a meeting now and expect people to be able to do all of this stuff. We need to either pick leaders who have demonstrated the ability to do this, or we need to give them coaching and training in these skills of setting the goals for a meeting, managing the people in the meeting, give them coaching and feedback on what's working well and not working well in their attempts to yeah. Which often sometimes needs the sort of, like, senior leader to be in the meeting as a secondary person, observing the more junior person running the meeting so that they can give that coaching and feedback and develop those skills.
David Provan - cohost [38:15 - 38:16]
Yeah. Third one.
Drew Rae - cohost [38:16 - 38:38]
Third one is just like, understanding what the whole point of the communication is, is really important. A lot of withholding is people thinking that they don't have something to add, but just because they don't know what is valuable or isn't valuable. And a lot of disruption is people just not understanding that what they're saying doesn't serve the purpose of this particular meeting. So giving people direction helps people monitor their own contributions.
David Provan - cohost [38:39 - 39:25]
I think that's really important. I think it, you know, it's. Many of our listeners probably look at their calendar every week, and there's 30 hours of meetings or there's. There's meeting after meeting. And some of these are standing things. Some of these are things that they've been invited to. And I think that is a really big takeaway. Just, you know, every formal conversation setting in an organization, what's the goal and purpose? And why are the people in the room. The people in the room that have been invited along for that goal and purpose. Right. And I think that framing of these types of conversations, I just think we all assume that we all know why we're here, and we all know what we're here to do. And there's even a comment in the paper about, you know, productive conversations happen when people verbalize assumptions and actually discuss and challenge and align on assumptions, you know, before and during the conversation.
Drew Rae - cohost [39:25 - 39:34]
Oh, we did say that questions are a form of productive contribution. So, excuse me, why am I here? Might be a good question to ask in your next meeting.
David Provan - cohost [39:34 - 40:20]
Yeah. What contribution would you like me to make to this meeting? So, Drew, maybe just some general comments. Like I said this paper, I really. I really kind of like the simplicity, but also the depth of thinking in kind of like framing effective communication. I think they sort of extend. They sort of deepen the psychological safety literature in some very practical ways, drawing on, you know, other. Other literature as well. So. So, yeah, I think it's a. It's only a few years old. This is only 20, 21 paper. So it's good to see that this work. This work continuing and what's available to organizations who want to work on psychological safety. I hear lots of organizations saying, I want to work on psychological safety. And the risk is it becomes like the last two decades of saying, we want to work on safety culture. And I think it's papers like this that help us actually be more deliberate with what we're doing.
Drew Rae - cohost [40:20 - 40:29]
Yeah, I like that. As a takeaway. Yeah, you want to work on psychological safety or psychosocial safety? Work on having better meetings, having people chair meetings.
David Provan - cohost [40:29 - 40:37]
Well, better interactions between people at work. So, Drew, the question we asked this week is speaking up always a good thing for safety?
Drew Rae - cohost [40:37 - 40:53]
And I think the short answer is that we want an environment that promotes productive conversations. And that environment is more about when and how we speak up ourselves. So less focusing on what other people are doing, more on what environment are we creating by what we say and when we say it.
David Provan - cohost [40:53 - 41:05]
That's it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own way. Organization Send any comments, questions, or ideas for Future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.