What You Still Can’t Say at Work

Most people know what can’t be said in their organization. But leaders can apply these techniques to break through the unwritten rules that make people self-censor.

Jim Detert October 17, 2024 Reading Time: 9 min

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Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images

Here are some things I bet you can’t say at work, no matter how much you believe them and how much they affect your own motivation, engagement, or ability to make good strategic decisions:

“I’m not motivated to work harder or innovate when you and your bosses get most of the credit and all the bonus money.”
“Employee engagement is low because key leaders aren’t trusted or respected and nothing serious gets done about that.”
“I can’t make good decisions unless you and your bosses are more transparent with financial or strategic details.”
“I think we’re growing and making enough money right now.”

Similarly, if you’re a senior leader, I bet you’d have a hard time responding productively if you did hear any of the above — because you’d be so surprised anyone said that to you.

The Power of Deep Rules

Why is this? Because these kinds of comments violate what I call the deep rules operating in most organizations. Deep rules reflect the unwritten understanding of what can’t be said, even in places that have surface-level psychological safety. This form of hidden power undermines well-being for most people and, in many cases, ultimately undermines even the leaders who seemingly benefit.

Let me explain.

I’ve studied how to improve organizational communication for 25 years, focusing on helping leaders create psychological safety and employees speak up competently and courageously. During my doctoral program at Harvard, I was inspired by Warren Bennis and wanted to make one of his predictions come true. Bennis, along with Philip Slater, argued that “democracy in industry is not an idealistic conception but a hard necessity. … Democracy is … a system of values and beliefs governing behavior, including full and free communication, regardless of rank and power. … Changes along these dimensions are being promoted widely in American industry.”

Here’s the thing: Slater and Bennis wrote that 60 years ago.

Today, leaders in my consulting engagements still struggle with communication issues related to making organizations more democratic in the sense of truly “full and free communication, regardless of rank and power.” As for employee engagement, Gallup’s annual poll on this topic shows only modest improvement during the past two decades, with somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of all employees surveyed in 2023 saying they are engaged at work.1

Why is this? I certainly don’t think it’s because most leaders are intentional power hoarders seeking to primarily benefit themselves. Many leaders strive to make the world better, and I have seen many improve psychological safety throughout the ranks.

What Deep Rules Look Like in Action

Collectively, however, we’ve largely left the deep rules go unnamed and unchanged. That means most of what gets said doesn’t challenge the core power structure or those with the most privilege. And that, I think, is a major reason that, despite a lot of executive talk about employee trust in leadership, commitment, and pay structures, these factors — and organizational performance — continue to disappoint.

To illustrate this, let’s examine a few examples, going back to the statements I shared earlier.

Seldom Heard	More Often Heard
• “I’m not motivated to work harder or innovate when you and your bosses get most of the credit and all the bonus money.”	• “We should be sure our pay and benefits are at least at or above industry averages to keep our people motivated.”
• “Employee engagement is low because key leaders aren’t trusted or respected and that doesn’t get addressed.”	• “Employee engagement might improve if we have more flexibility in work location and more sponsored social activities.”
• “I can’t make good decisions unless you and your bosses are more transparent with financial or strategic details.”	• “Based on the data I have, I recommend doing XYZ.”
• “I think we’re growing and making enough money right now.”	• “I have an idea for increasing profitability.”

I’m not suggesting that the improvement-oriented statements on the right serve no purpose. They’re reasonable and can add value. What they don’t tend to do, though, is address the most important or pressing reasons why employees aren’t engaged or why suboptimal decisions keep getting made.

Second, I’m not saying that we seldom hear the statements on the left because they’re explicitly banned or always severely punished. Deep rules as a form of power are mostly about what doesn’t even happen — they’re about suffocating ideas before they get voiced.

Once you have deep rules preventing most conversations about an organization’s purpose, power structure, pay and perks, and leadership mistakes, employees know that these kinds of comments lie outside acceptable bounds: They self-censor and keep their mouths shut.

In fact, neither employees nor managers tend to think about this form of power operating until a “breach” happens. Then, sadly, management’s instinct often is to snuff it out rather than explore or accept the need for deep change.

Think about the work-from-home issue that started during the pandemic but continues to be hotly contested. In too many places, when employees say they want to keep working from home because their office culture is toxic or soul crushing, they are met by threats of being fired rather than serious discussion about what it would take to make the workplace healthier. When faced with the chance to really consider what the “great resignation” revealed, some leaders instead chose to tell employees to beware of the “great firing” that would come as soon as macroeconomic conditions changed.

At most organizations — my own included — history and culture mean that certain statements draw negative knee-jerk reactions. And I fear that this is getting worse because we live in a world where language is weaponized to shut down serious discussion as soon as someone feels threatened. For example, in the U.S., all you have to do to shut down a serious discussion about some aspects of our capitalist system is to call the speaker a “socialist” or “communist.” Conversation over. Deep rules kept intact.

To Drive Change, Apply These Three Techniques

What can you do to change the situation at your organization? To start, people with more power must take the lead on change. Expecting people below you to stick their necks further out isn’t just unfair. It’s unrealistic. People might not like the deep rules they experience, but most don’t feel anywhere near safe or emboldened enough to start challenging them.

Here are some conversational prompt techniques I recommend in my work. Leaders have told me that these approaches have led to surprisingly frank and highly valuable conversations with colleagues about issues that both sides agreed should be started, stopped, or fixed.

Discuss the undiscussables.

Convene a group of people within the organization with whom you have an established relationship and tell them that to engage in some out-of-the-box thinking, you’d like them to answer this question: What undiscussables would we discuss if we decided to discuss our undiscussables?

You might ask this generically, or you might attach it to a specific issue by adding “about …” to the end of the question.

This question, which I learned from Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris, lands well because it interjects a bit of lightheartedness, essentially acknowledging that you know you’re asking people to say what has seemed unsayable.

Fix the follies.

Another prompt that works very well is to ask people to tell you about the organization’s follies, explaining that a “folly” is something the organization says it wants or values only to then do or reward the opposite. All you have to do is give a couple of examples of what you mean by this, and people will be off to the races. Perhaps it’s saying that you want more collaboration but then paying only for individual accomplishments. Or maybe it’s espousing values like integrity but then rewarding and promoting people who take shortcuts or put themselves above others.

This idea comes from Steven Kerr’s classic description of “the folly of hoping for A while rewarding B.”2 Trust me, your employees recognize a lot of follies but generally don’t raise them because to do so often requires breaking one or more deep rules about not mentioning leadership hypocrisy or failures.

Explore the “veil fails.”

Here’s a final prompt I developed based on philosopher John Rawls’s theory of justice.3 He proposed that you can tell whether something is fair by considering it from behind a “veil of ignorance” wherein you don’t consider your status among the people affected. For example, if you’re considering whether your organization’s pay and benefits scale is fair, the veil of ignorance test maintains that you can say “yes” only if you would say it no matter which job you had in the organization.

Theoretically, this is a thought exercise that leaders can do themselves. Realistically, we’re way too lacking in perspective to give an accurate answer. So it’s critical to ask a diverse group of employees to share what “some employees think is highly unfair around here, depending on the person’s organizational role.” That phrasing is a bit less risky: Respondents can project onto others when wading into deep-rules territory.

These techniques all generate great learning if you have some people who trust you enough to “go there” if your prompt and the way it’s delivered give them explicit permission.

When you’re not sure you even have that, you can try something less threatening. You can, for example, ask respondents on an employee survey to anonymously share follies. Or, following the process that TruePoint co-founder Mike Beer and his colleagues designed, you could appoint a multilevel task force of trusted employees to interview a group of colleagues using these prompts and then report the results back in aggregate.4

These techniques can all unlock types of input you’re not used to getting as a leader. But — and I can’t say this clearly enough — you have to also then do something meaningful in response to what you hear. Otherwise, you’ll only confirm to people that it’s futile to bother speaking up about “the real things.” This will further shut down a person’s willingness to speak their truth the next time you ask. It may even leave them feeling more angry and disenfranchised because you asked, you know, and, yet, you still don’t act.

I don’t think the point of getting deep rules out into the open is to create some la-la land where everybody has a vote in every decision or is deemed above average or equal in their contributions to the organization.

I do think, though, that leaders should still be aspiring to create environments with fuller and freer communication, and fairer and more transparent decision-making processes. And I don’t think we’ll get there without the strength to expose and explore the deep rules preventing this progress.

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About the Author

Jim Detert is the John L. Colley Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and the author of Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).
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References

1. “Employee Engagement,” Gallup, accessed Oct. 7, 2024, www.gallup.com.

2. S. Kerr, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B,” Academy of Management Journal, 18, no. 4 (December 1975): 769-783.

3. J. Rawls, “A Theory of Justice” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971).

4. M. Beer, “The Strategic Fitness Process: A Collaborative Action Research Method for Developing and Understanding Organizational Prototypes and Dynamic Capabilities,” Journal of Organization Design 2, no. 1 (2013): 27-33.

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