Why good teams stop raising problems

Why do teams stop speaking up?

Teams stop speaking up when experience teaches them that raising a problem costs more than it returns. Each time bad news is met with blame, irritation or no action, people update what they expect. Over time, silence becomes the sensible choice, even for capable, committed people who care about the work.

That is the uncomfortable part. Silence is rarely a sign that people have stopped caring. More often it is a sign that they have been paying attention.

Most leaders say their door is open. Most mean it. Yet the risk on the project plan appears in week eleven, not week two. The quality issue is found by the customer, not the team that saw it coming. And the dashboard stays green right up to the moment it turns red.

What the research says about employee silence

Researchers have studied why people hold back at work for more than two decades. Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken described "organisational silence" as a collective pattern, not just an individual choice, shaped by how managers respond to dissent and bad news ¹.

When Milliken, Morrison and Hewlin interviewed employees about it, most could describe a time they had been concerned about an issue and not raised it with a supervisor. The reason given most often was fear of being viewed or labelled negatively, and of damaging relationships that mattered to them ².

Two further findings matter for leaders:

• People learn the rules, then stop checking them. Detert and Edmondson found that employees hold taken-for-granted beliefs about when speaking up is risky, such as not embarrassing the boss in public or needing solid data before you raise anything. These beliefs drive self-censorship, and they are learned over a career, not only from the current manager ³.
• What the manager does matters more than what the manager says. Detert and Burris found that people spoke up more when they saw their manager as genuinely open to input, and that feeling safe was part of the reason why ⁴.

Morrison's later review puts it simply: whether someone speaks up depends largely on two quick judgements. Is it worth it, and is it safe? ⁵

Psychological safety: what it is, and what it isn't

Amy Edmondson defines team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking: asking a question, admitting a mistake, challenging a plan ⁶. In her research, teams with higher psychological safety showed more learning behaviour, such as seeking feedback and discussing errors, and that learning behaviour was linked to better performance.

A large meta-analysis, drawing on 136 samples and more than 22,000 people, has since linked psychological safety with task performance and with the helpful, cooperative behaviour that keeps teams working ⁷.

What it is not matters just as much. It is not a cosy atmosphere, permission to avoid hard conversations, or lower standards. Edmondson and Lei describe it as being about whether people feel able to take interpersonal risks, which is a different thing from feeling comfortable ⁸. A team can be held to demanding goals and still feel safe to say "this isn't working".

A note on "team mindset"

"Mindset" is a popular word in this conversation, so it is worth being careful with it.

Carol Dweck's growth mindset idea, that ability can be developed, is appealing. But the evidence at the individual level is more mixed than the headlines suggest. Two meta-analyses by Sisk and colleagues found that the overall link between mindset and academic achievement was weak, and so were the average effects of mindset interventions, with some benefit for students at a disadvantage ⁹.

The stronger evidence for teams is not about what individuals believe about their own ability. It is about what a team learns, together, about the safety of learning out loud ⁶. There is also good evidence that leaders' own beliefs about people matter. Managers who believe people can't really change are slower to notice when they do ¹⁰.

So when we talk about a team's mindset, we mean something practical: the shared expectations a team has built about what happens when someone raises a problem.

How silence shows up

Silence is hard to see because it looks like things are fine. Watch for:

• Green reports, red reality. Every status update is on track until, suddenly, it isn't.
• Late surprises. Risks surface at the deadline, when they are expensive, rather than early, when they are cheap.
• Problems found by customers. Issues the team knew about reach the outside world first.
• Quiet workarounds. People fix the symptom themselves and move on. In a study of hospital nurses, Tucker and Edmondson found that most problems were worked around in this way and rarely passed to anyone who could fix the cause ¹¹.
• Meetings with no challenge. The plan is agreed quickly, and the real conversation happens in the corridor afterwards.

The leader's five-second reaction

Teams learn what is safe from small moments, not from values statements.

A team leader reports that the weekly number will be missed. The manager sighs, looks at the screen and asks, "How did we let that happen?" It takes five seconds. Nobody is shouted at. But everyone in the room has just learned something about what bringing bad news costs.

The same happens when a plan is challenged in public, or when a problem is raised and nothing changes. Research on emotional contagion shows that a leader's mood spreads to the group and shapes how it works ¹². A sharp reaction doesn't stay with the person who receives it.

The five seconds is our illustration, not a measured figure. The point is that the reaction is fast, often unplanned, and repeated many times a week. That repetition is what turns an incident into a rule.

The Lean link: an andon cord only works if pulling it is safe

In Lean, the andon cord lets anyone on the line signal a problem the moment it appears. Spear and Bowen, in their study of the Toyota Production System, describe a system designed with built-in tests that signal problems immediately, and argue that it is the continual response to those problems that makes it adaptive. They also note that Toyota treats tools such as the andon cord as countermeasures, not as the system itself ¹³.

That is the lesson for any organisation that has copied the cord. You can install the tool in a day. Whether anyone pulls it depends on what happened the last time someone did. If pulling the cord leads to a supervisor arriving to help, people pull it. If it leads to a conversation about why the line stopped, they learn to keep it running and fix things quietly.

Read more on this in our Lean leadership guide.

How silence is built: the BTFA chain

In BTFA™ we describe behaviour as the visible end of a chain: Believe, Think, Feel, Act. This is our model rather than an established scientific law, but it is a useful way to see how a capable team learns to say nothing.

• Believe. After repeated experiences, people form an expectation: "Raising problems here gets you labelled." This is the team's wiring.
• Think. When a new issue appears, that belief shapes how it is read: "If I mention this, it will come back on me. Someone senior probably knows already."
• Feel. The interpretation changes state. There is a small spike of threat, and the safest option starts to look like the smartest one.
• Act. The person stays quiet, softens the message, or fixes it alone. The report stays green.

The chain also runs the other way. Each time silence is followed by no consequence, or by a near-miss nobody mentions, the original belief is confirmed. That is why telling people to "speak up more" rarely works on its own. It aims at the Act and leaves the Believe untouched. You can read more about the chain on the BTFA model page.

What leaders can do

1. 01Thank the messenger first. Make the first words after bad news "thank you for raising it", before any question about cause. The team is watching this more closely than anything else you do.
2. 02Ask before you tell. Open meetings with a question that invites problems, such as "What are we not seeing?" or "What would worry you about this plan?", and wait for the answer.
3. 03Close the loop, visibly. When someone raises an issue, tell them what happened next, even if the answer is "not yet". Tucker and Singer found that management walk-arounds made things worse when the problems people raised were not acted on ¹⁴.
4. 04Separate the problem from the person. Treat a missed number as information about the system first. Deming's advice to "drive out fear" is still the best starting point ¹⁵.
5. 05Notice your own state. Under pressure, your reaction becomes everyone else's working conditions. Catching it before it lands is a skill, and it can be practised.

Five questions to ask yourself

1. 01What happened the last time someone brought me bad news, and what did everyone else in the room learn?
2. 02When did someone last challenge one of my plans in public, and how did I respond?
3. 03Which problems have reached customers or senior leaders before they reached me?
4. 04When people raise issues, do they hear back about what changed?
5. 05If my team described what it costs to disagree with me, what would they say?

Silence is not a people problem to be fixed with a speak-up campaign. It is a learned response to conditions that leaders create, which means leaders can change it. For more on how threat shapes behaviour, see Resistance to change: what the brain is protecting and Leadership styles, and when each one backfires.

Questions

Sources

1. Morrison, E. W. & Milliken, F. J. (2000). Organizational silence: a barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 706–725.https://doi.org/10.2307/259200
2. Milliken, F. J., Morrison, E. W. & Hewlin, P. F. (2003). An exploratory study of employee silence: issues that employees don't communicate upward and why. Journal of Management Studies, 40(6), 1453–1476.https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00387
3. Detert, J. R. & Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Implicit voice theories: taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488.https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2011.61967925
4. Detert, J. R. & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869–884.https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.26279183
5. Morrison, E. W. (2014). Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 173–197.https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091328
6. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
7. Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A. & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: a meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165.https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183
8. Edmondson, A. C. & Lei, Z. (2014). Psychological safety: the history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 23–43.https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091305
9. Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L. & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science, 29(4), 549–571.https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617739704
10. Heslin, P. A., Latham, G. P. & VandeWalle, D. (2005). The effect of implicit person theory on performance appraisals. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(5), 842–856.https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.5.842
11. Tucker, A. L. & Edmondson, A. C. (2003). Why hospitals don't learn from failures: organizational and psychological dynamics that inhibit system change. California Management Review, 45(2), 55–72.https://doi.org/10.2307/41166165
12. Sy, T., Côté, S. & Saavedra, R. (2005). The contagious leader: impact of the leader's mood on the mood of group members, group affective tone, and group processes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(2), 295–305.https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.2.295
13. Spear, S. & Bowen, H. K. (1999). Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System. Harvard Business Review, September–October 1999.https://hbr.org/1999/09/decoding-the-dna-of-the-toyota-production-system
14. Tucker, A. L. & Singer, S. J. (2015). The effectiveness of management-by-walking-around: a randomized field study. Production and Operations Management, 24(2), 253–271.https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.12226
15. Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study (reissued by MIT Press, 2000, ISBN 0262541157). Point 8 of the 14 Points.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Bovis

Creator of BTFA. Time-served precision engineer with 30+ years in WCM and Lean change across Europe, and a Masters in Applied Neuroscience.

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