Have you ever hesitated about speaking up at work, even when you knew exactly what to say?
Christina hesitated about speaking up at work, and her hesitation haunted her for years.
She was a nurse on a team caring for two premature twins, born at just 27 weeks. In a recent training, she’d learned that best practice was to give a prophylactic surfactant to help protect lungs that weren’t quite ready to breathe on their own. She knew what to do.
When the doctor assigned to the twins didn’t order the surfactant, she wasn’t sure if it was okay for her to speak up. She’d seen doctors speak harshly to nurses before. She second-guessed herself, and as she hesitated, the doctor walked away. The moment to speak was lost.
The twins survived. But the moment stayed with her — and it’s stayed with me too, because it’s such a precise picture of something researcher Amy Edmondson, who originally told this story in her book The Fearless Organization, calls “an epidemic of silence.”
Key Takeaways
If you’ve ever known exactly what to say and stayed quiet anyway, here’s what’s actually going on — and what helps.
- Speaking up at work is hard because saying something can feel risky in the moment.
- “No one was ever fired for silence” is a common belief, but it trades a small, visible risk now for the larger, invisible risks that come with not contributing what you know.
- Many people think there are two options when speaking is risky: blurt it out or stay silent. But there’s a third option that’s safer — start with validating questions and find consensus.
What People Say When They Hold Back
I hear versions of this often from clients:
- “I’d rather stay within the lines than say something and risk looking stupid.”
- “No one was ever fired for silence.”
- “I keep quiet because I don’t want others to turn against me.”
None of these are character flaws. They’re stress responses. Some organizations understand the risk of silence and have built entire safety cultures around fixing it. Some have not.
Imagine if Christina had spoken up in the moment and said, “But doctor, shouldn’t the twins get the surfactant?” The doctor might have read that as a challenge to his authority and his knowledge — and it’s likely to have made him defensive.
The Third Way: Learning to Check In with People Safely
Whether your organization feels like a safe place to speak or not, you can start building more confidence and visibility by learning how to initiate safe conversations — conversations built on questions, where no one feels challenged or judged.
Instead of starting with a challenge or taking a position, start by validating, then move into clarifying.
For Christina, that might mean starting by repeating the doctor’s orders exactly as he’d said them. Just letting him know she’s heard him helps generate trust and opens a conversation.
Then there’s a moment to clarify — in this case, saying the opposite of what she thinks and simply confirming the doctor’s position: “And no surfactant, am I right?”
It’s not a challenge. It’s a confirmation of something she didn’t hear. He can always just say, “right.” But if it jogs his memory, he might say, “no, that’s not right.” Whether he says yes or no, she has signaled that he is fully in charge, but the reminder has been registered.
Speaking Up Isn’t the Hard Part. Deciding To Speak Is.
Safe conversations aren’t hard, but they require some habits and thinking that enable people to change their minds without admitting they were wrong.
That’s exactly what we’ll work on live on September 30 — not confidence as a personality trait, but confidence as a skill you can build: how to recognize the moment before you go quiet, and how to interrupt it.
Keep Learning
Stop Second Guessing Yourself: A Confidence Webinar — Sept. 30.
Find more on Validation at Work here.
Find out more about the framework here.
FAQ
Isn’t speaking up just about being braver?
Not exactly. Christina wasn’t a timid person — she was a trained professional who knew the right call. What stopped her wasn’t a general lack of courage, it was a specific, learned hesitation from having seen people treated harshly before. That’s not a character trait to overcome once — it’s a pattern that makes speaking up at work harder in specific, avoidable moments, and a pattern you can learn to interrupt.
How do I know if speaking up is actually worth the risk?
Ask what happens if you’re right and stay quiet. Your organization loses the value of your experience and you lose an opportunity to be visible. Learn to mitigate the risk by using validation and clarification techniques. The personal and professional cost of silence is almost always greater than the risk of speaking up respectfully.
What if I speak up and it backfires?
Then you’ve learned something real about that room, and you still did the more useful thing. Most of the fear around speaking up is about an imagined reaction, not the actual one — and even a bad reaction rarely costs what staying quiet costs over time.
What if my workplace genuinely doesn’t make it safe to speak up?
Then that’s real information too, not a reason to blame yourself for staying quiet. Start with a safer way in — like validating before you clarify — before deciding the room itself is unsafe. Psychological safety usually has to be built by someone actively inviting it, one relationship or one room at a time.
