Unlearning silence: How speaking up makes all the difference in your career

What seems obvious to us isn’t always obvious to others (and more insight into why speaking up is the best thing you can do for yourself).

Do you ever find yourself sitting in a meeting, wanting to contribute, but not speaking up? This happens to me all the time. And I know it’s not just me.

As a team lead, I’m frequently trying out new strategies to get my team members to pipe up, contribute their thoughts, or just challenge ideas. I don’t want to be the only one running the show, I’d much rather everyone feel empowered to take action.

One time when I was facilitating a working group, the product owner posed a question that I knew was not going in a useful direction. I didn’t chime in because I don’t like to shoot ideas down. Instead, I like the team to explore them and come to a positive conclusion on their own, and in this case I was confident the team knew “good” (and “bad”) when they heard it.

Sometimes, when it’s necessary, I’ll jump in to correct course. Dramatically, if need be. There’s an occasion or two where I’ve just said, “No, we’re not doing that, that’s stupid and here’s why.” Of course, with a statement like that you’ve got to have your facts and lay them out clearly.

But in this case, I knew the team had it. So I kept my mouth shut.

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And yet, the product owner kept talking about design details that just didn’t make sense and the team wasn’t chiming in with a critique, or even challenging questions. I kept trying to catch the eye of our back end programmer, our security lead, our DSO lead, but I wasn’t having much luck. Finally I Slacked our senior engineer, asking, “What do you think of this?” Right away I got back a response: “LOL this is awful.” I nudged him back, “You should say something.”

A moment later, he jumped in and pretty eloquently debunked this bad idea. With the team’s senior engineer chiming in, a few more added their voices — more good critical thinking, and that eventually shifted to better ideas, and finally a good idea.

What is it that keeps us from speaking up when we’ve got something to say?

Those of us who have a hard time speaking up have all been given a few words of encouragement. “Just be confident” or “if you’re worried about sounding confrontational, just ask a question.” It’s good advice, but it’s probably not enough to instill sufficient confidence.

Which brings me to a great podcast that I just heard on Coaching for Leaders.

Breaking the silence

What I really liked about this Coaching for Leaders episode is the exploration of a larger context around why people struggle to speak up — and how to break out of that mold. There’s a great power here for both team leads and individuals in “unlearning silence.”

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