A team where nobody speaks: silence as a rule and what it hides

“We don’t talk about that here.”

At his third meeting, the new colleague asked something perfectly logical: why reports were still copied by hand into two spreadsheets when one would do. For a moment the room went still. The manager said, “We’ll discuss that another time,” and moved on to the next item. Nobody said anything. After the meeting a colleague stopped him in the corridor, kindly, almost motherly, and told him that sentence. She didn’t explain why. She didn’t need to. By the end of the month he had stopped asking too.

In this piece I won’t write about why an individual doesn’t say what they think in a meeting — that is a different story, which I wrote about in Silent in meetings: why you don’t say what you think. Here I am interested in something bigger: a team in which silence has become the rule. Where nobody forbids anyone to speak, yet everyone knows what isn’t talked about. And where this silence, just as in families that keep a secret, isn’t empty — it hides something and protects something.

A silence that belongs to no one

In 2000 the researchers Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison and Frances Milliken published an article that gave a name to something everyone knew but nobody had really studied: organisational silence. Their key idea was that silence in an organisation isn’t simply the sum of individuals who are shy or cautious. It is a collective phenomenon. It arises when two shared beliefs take shape in a team: that speaking up is pointless, because nothing will change anyway, and that speaking up is dangerous.

What is interesting is how these beliefs spread. Not through orders. Mostly nobody ever says them out loud, at least not officially. They spread through informal channels — in the kitchen, in the corridor, over lunch —, where people tell each other stories about what happened to the person who once said something. Morrison and Milliken call this collective sensemaking: people put together a picture of the world they work in, and then act according to that picture.

That is exactly why organisational silence is so stubborn. Newcomers don’t learn it from a rulebook, but from looks, pauses and sentences like “we don’t talk about that here”. And once they have learned it, they pass it on.

How many people stay silent — and about what

Three years later Milliken and her colleagues conducted in-depth interviews with 40 employees from a range of fields. As many as 85 per cent said that at least once they had found themselves with a concern about something important at work which they did not raise with their superiors. The study was small and doesn’t tell us how common silence is across the whole population. What it does tell us is that silence isn’t the exception, but something almost everyone knows.

People most often kept quiet about problems with a manager or colleagues, about concerns over how work was being done, about unfairness in pay and promotion, and about suggestions for improvement. The reason they gave most often was fear of being seen in a bad light — as complainers, as people who “make trouble” — and fear of damaging relationships. Many added a sense that it would make no difference anyway.

These reasons are deeply human. Belonging to a group is one of our most fundamental needs — I describe it in the knowledge base under belonging. Anyone who risks being pushed out of the group risks something the body experiences as a serious threat. In that sense silence is reasonable. The problem begins when it becomes the rule for everyone.

How silence feeds on itself

As early as the 1970s the German public opinion researcher Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described a phenomenon she called the spiral of silence. We constantly, mostly unconsciously, gauge what the majority around us thinks. If our opinion seems to be in the minority, we are more likely to keep it to ourselves, because we fear isolation. But when we keep it to ourselves, the minority view looks even smaller than it really is — and the next person who thinks the same finds it even harder to say.

In a team this often combines with what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance: each individual thinks they are the only one bothered by something, because they can see everyone else is quiet. In reality many are bothered — but because everyone stays silent, each concludes they are alone.

It is hard to step out of this cycle, because each participant experiences it as their own personal caution, not as part of a pattern. But precisely because it is a pattern, a single voice — if it is heard — can break it. When someone speaks up and nothing terrible happens, the others suddenly discover they weren’t alone.

Where it comes from: the unwritten beliefs of management and team

Morrison and Milliken also described what feeds a climate of silence from above. The unwritten beliefs of management matter: that employees look out mainly for themselves and so can’t be fully trusted, that management knows best what is right, and that disagreement is a sign something is wrong with the team, while consensus is a sign of health. A manager who thinks like this won’t forbid anyone to speak. But with every concern raised they will stiffen a little, put it off “until another time” or take it personally. That is enough.

Later, James Detert and Amy Edmondson showed that people also bring their own, equally unwritten rules to work about when it is safe to speak up. For example: don’t go over your boss’s head, don’t embarrass your boss in front of others, don’t raise a topic unless you have solid evidence and a ready-made solution. These rules are often so taken for granted that people don’t even notice them as rules. They only notice that something stops them.

When these beliefs from above and from below meet, you get a team in which everyone obeys a rule that nobody ever made.

A parallel: the family that keeps a secret

In family therapy we know collective silence very well. We call it a family secret. The family therapist Evan Imber-Black, who has written about secrets for decades, points out that a secret isn’t just a missing piece of information. A secret shapes relationships. It divides a family into those who know and those who don’t. It creates alliances among those in the know. It marks the topics at which conversation stops, and often whole parts of history that nobody mentions. Children in such families sense early on where the boundaries are — not from words, but from the atmosphere that thickens around certain topics. I wrote about how secrets leave traces across generations in Family secrets and unfinished stories: where a genogram finds them.

A team that keeps silent works in a very similar way. It has its own topics at which conversation stops: the former director, the failed project, the redundancies years ago, the colleague management protects. It has those who know and those who don’t. It has its own family myth — the story a team tells about itself, such as “we’re all one team here” or “we don’t have conflicts” — which stays true only as long as certain things aren’t talked about.

Imber-Black distinguishes between privacy and secrecy. Privacy is a boundary that protects something that doesn’t concern others. A secret hides something that does concern others but has been withheld from them. This distinction is useful at work too. A manager not revealing a colleague’s health problems is privacy. Everyone knowing that a project is doomed and nobody saying so is a secret.

What silence protects

From a systemic point of view, every pattern has a function. So does silence. If we saw it only as a fault, we would miss why it is so persistent.

First, silence protects balance. Systems — families and teams — tend to preserve things as they are, even when that state isn’t good. Change is risky, because nobody knows where it will lead. You will find a short explanation of why a system resists change under the family as a system.

Silence also protects those in power from having to face their own mistakes. And it protects everyone else from the conflict they fear. Often this fear is linked to experiences that reach far back before this job: someone who grew up in a family where every disagreement ended in an outburst or days of silence will quickly feel at home in a team that avoids conflict. In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we start from an insight that in Slovenia has been developed most fully by Christian Gostečnik: we unconsciously seek out and recreate the atmospheres we know from home — including the ones that weren’t good for us.

Once you understand what silence protects, it becomes clear why it can’t simply be removed with an instruction to “be more open”. First you have to show that what silence protects can be protected in another way.

What silence costs

The cost of silence rarely shows all at once. It builds up slowly.

The first cost is the mistake that never gets corrected. When people don’t flag problems, management loses information it needs to make good decisions. In her well-known analysis of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the sociologist Diane Vaughan described how, in an organisation, departures from safe limits gradually come to be accepted as normal — she called this the normalisation of deviance — and how the fragmentation of information between departments, which she called structural secrecy, makes it hard for anyone to see the whole picture. The example is extreme, but the mechanism is an everyday one.

The second cost is borne by people. Someone who stays silent for a long time about something that bothers them often doesn’t stop feeling. But they stop believing it matters. Out of this, cynicism is born — I wrote about it in Cynicism as a sign: when you no longer care and it isn’t your character. And where the issues concern other people and their safety, silence can turn into the moral distress I described in Moral distress in healthcare: when the system won’t let you do what’s right.

The third cost is quieter and the hardest to notice. In a team that keeps silent, people slowly learn to be present at work with only part of themselves. The part that notices, stirs and would like to say something stays at home. This is tiring in a way that is hard to explain, because on the outside nothing is happening.

A conversation that opens a door

This is how a conversation between the new colleague from the beginning and the colleague who told him that sentence might sound a few weeks later (composed, not a real person):

“Can I ask you something? Why does nobody really talk about the spreadsheets?”
“Ah. Years ago one colleague suggested simplifying it. It turned into a huge row with the old boss, and the colleague left soon afterwards.”
“And the old boss isn’t here any more?”
“No, he’s been gone three years.”
“So we don’t talk about it because of someone who isn’t here any more.”
A pause. “When you put it like that … yes. I don’t think anyone has ever checked whether it still applies.”

This is often what the rules of silence look like up close. They arose in response to something that really happened. Then the reason disappeared, but the rule stayed, because nobody checked it again. In families it is the same: a secret that once protected someone is passed on long after the person it protected is gone.

Exercise: map your team’s unwritten rules

You can do this exercise on your own, in half an hour, with paper and a pencil. If there is someone at work you trust, you can later do it together.

1. Write down the topics at which conversation stops. Don’t think about whether they are important. Write down everything that makes the air in the room go still, makes people look down at the table or makes someone quickly change the subject.
2. Next to each, write how you know. Did anyone tell you explicitly that this isn’t talked about? Or did you pick it up from looks, from a story you heard, from what happened to someone else?
3. Find the origin. When did this rule come about? What happened at the time? Are the people it arose because of still here?
4. Separate privacy from secrecy. For each topic, ask yourself: does the silence protect something that really doesn’t concern others, or does it hide something that does?
5. Choose one rule to test. Not the biggest one. The smallest, where the reaction would probably be mild. Testing can be as simple as asking a colleague you trust: “Do you think this rule still applies?”

You may find that some rules are still justified and worth respecting. Or you may find that part of the silence you have been carrying no longer belongs to anyone.

When silence isn’t a problem, and when the answer isn’t with you

I want to be fair to the other side here.

Not every silence is a sickness of the team. Discretion is part of mature work with people. A team that doesn’t discuss colleagues’ private lives, their illnesses or divorces isn’t a team that keeps silent, but a team with boundaries. Not debating certain decisions endlessly can also be a sign of health rather than suppression.

One person doesn’t change a culture. Organisational silence is a collective phenomenon, so it isn’t fair for the burden of breaking it to fall on a single employee — especially not someone with little power or on an insecure contract. Responsibility for a climate of silence lies first and foremost with management. If you are a manager yourself, the most useful thing you can do is to watch what happens in the first few seconds after someone voices an uncomfortable concern — and how you respond.

When to seek help elsewhere. If silence is covering up wrongdoing, endangering people’s safety, or if you have faced retaliation for speaking up, this is no longer a question of culture but of rights. Talk to a trade union or a lawyer who specialises in employment law; in Slovenia the Labour Inspectorate is responsible for overseeing employers. I don’t give legal advice here. And if silence turns into the systematic exclusion of one person, have a look at Office coalitions, where I write about how a team sometimes concentrates its tension in a scapegoat.

When it is your own story. If you notice that silence at work weighs on you more than on others, or that you carry it wherever you go, it may be worth looking at what your family of origin taught you about speaking and silence. Therapy can help with this — not so that you learn to speak louder, but so that you understand which silence is yours and which isn’t. I also work with English-speaking clients.

What to remember

• Organisational silence isn’t the sum of shy individuals, but a collective phenomenon: a shared belief that speaking up is pointless and dangerous.
• It doesn’t come from orders, but from stories about what happened to the person who spoke up. That is how newcomers learn it too.
• A team that keeps silent works like a family with a secret: it divides people into those who know and those who don’t, and protects its myth about itself and its balance.
• The rules of silence often outlive their reason. They are worth testing, starting with the smallest.
• Responsibility for a climate of silence lies first with management — it isn’t your job to break it alone.