Your Silence Is Hurting Your Company

And here's the cost to our silence — when issues stay unaddressed, stagnant, broken — we all fail. We ship bad products, our brand suffers, and our company performance plummets. In general, things suck. Not just for "them" but for all of "us." The cost of silence is suck-ness.

When we are silent, we are hurting the outcome. You see, minority viewpoints have been proven to aid the quality of decision making in juries, by teams and for the purpose of innovation. Research proves then even when the different points of view are wrong, they cause people to think better, to create more solutions and to improve the creativity of problem solving.

And so here's the opportunity to avoid suck-ness, and the thing I've learned along the way to speak your truth without losing your job. Rather than saying, "This is the problem" which can risk looking the fool and quite possibly pissing someone off, ask this: "Could it be ...that this is the problem?"

"Could it be" is a conversation starter, rather than an assertion. It is the way you put it out there without having to defend it. Could it be allows the issue to be a question for everyone. Could it be allows for a dialogue exchange rather than a yes/no argument.

Could it be....you're ready to speak up?

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/your_silence_is_hurting_your_company.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter