Why nobody speaks up

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Many of us have been there or watched the scene play out several times: A manager stands in front of the team meeting and asks for bold ideas.

The room is quiet. People look around at one another, calculating silently. Finally, someone speaks up. It might be a good, viable suggestion, but it’s definitely not bold.

No one is willing to put themselves out there and suggest something risky. The truly innovative, potentially valuable ideas remain unsaid.

It’s an innovation paradox brought to light recently by INTOO, a global HR firm, and The Harris Poll, which explored the workplace contradiction where employees are expected to innovate but often fail to act for fear of losing their job over taking risks or making mistakes.

The numbers:

• 74% of U.S. employees say they are expected to bring new ideas to their organizations.
• Despite supportive messaging from their employers, 41% of workers fear that a single mistake could cost them their job.
• Lingering anxiety is suppressing creativity: 82% of workers say they feel safe admitting they don’t know something, and 64% wish they were more innovative.

A case of mixed signals

“The 74% being asked to innovate aren’t lacking ideas,” said Vicki Imran, digital marketing leader at Napollo Software Design. “They’re doing math. And right now, in most workplaces, the math says stay quiet.”

The paradox isn’t hypocrisy. It’s what Claire Law calls ‘mixed psychological signaling.’

“Organizations talk about innovation and openness, but behavior still tells employees there are consequences and risk,” said Law, a psychotherapist. “Employees then default to self-protection instead of innovation.”

Innovation requires a disciplined process, said Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School.

“We punish the sins of commission, not sins of omission,” McGrath said. “The chance you didn't take, the opportunity you missed, the thing you didn't try don't get sanctioned the same way that the things you do that go wrong are. So we're looking at an asymmetry that results in this schizophrenic behavior.”

Additionally, we say we want innovation, but innovation requires change, and people tend to resist change, McGrath said.

“When it makes senior people look bad, reveals a flaw in the strategy, or sheds shade on something we all suspected wasn't going to work but didn't say anything about, the person who instigated the change is often blamed,” McGrath said.

And lastly, McGrath said, “we try to manage innovation with the same tools and metrics we use for the core business.

“Wrong, just wrong.”

Why employees don’t believe the message

Workers tend to trust lived experience more than leadership rhetoric.

In Ariel Sheen’s organizational development research, this innovation paradox exists because leaders often confuse explicit knowledge with tacit knowledge. This creates a tacit fear loop, he said.

Leaders communicate explicit knowledge, such as mission statements and encouraging team members in meetings. But employees operate on tacit knowledge, Sheen said, such as who got punished, or who stopped speaking up.

“One employee seeing a colleague get quietly sidelined after a failed project can outweigh years of encouraging words,” Sheen said.

“The real problem isn't fear,” Imran said. “It's that most companies have built systems that punish mistakes while running campaigns that celebrate boldness. Those two things cannot coexist, and employees figure that out fast.”

Imran, who works with brands and leadership teams on messaging and culture communication, shared a story about a client company that spent six months rolling out an “innovation initiative,” which included a new Slack $WORK channel, quarterly idea pitches — “the works,” Imran said.

“Six months in, not a single person had submitted a real idea,” Imran said. “When I asked the team privately why, one person said it plainly: ‘The last person who spoke up about a broken process got managed out three months later.’ No initiative survives that kind of institutional memory.”

“Here's the contrarian take most leadership consultants won't say out loud: psychological safety cannot be programmed from the top down,” Imran said. “You cannot run a workshop on it. The moment a company tries to ‘install’ psychological safety as a culture initiative, they've already missed the point. 

“Safety is a byproduct of consistent behavior over time, not a campaign. What actually shifts things is boring and slow. Leaders who admit they were wrong in public. Managers who protect their people when a project fails instead of distancing themselves. Performance reviews that evaluate how someone handles failure, not just whether they avoided it.”

What leaders can do about it

1. Model uncertainty and curiosity

“Psychologically safe environments are created by leaders who have interrogated and challenged the mental models that they have about their own leadership,” said Emily Scherberth, CEO at Turas Leadership Consulting. “Once they become more aware of the power of collective intelligence — versus being expected to be the ‘hero’ in all situations — leaders will be more likely to proactively create the conditions that mine the wisdom of the entire organization through experimentation and innovation.”

2. Reward intelligent attempts, not just successful outcomes

Organizations often celebrate successful innovation, but rarely celebrate thoughtful risk-taking that didn’t work, said both Imran and Arthur Favier, founder and CEO of Oppizi, a company that digitizes offline marketing.

“The safest career path for most employees is to take no risk at all,” Favier said.

“You have to celebrate smart risk-taking even when it doesn’t pan out,” Imran said.

3. Build safe-to-fail systems

Sheen recommends creating low-risk experiments, or “safe-to-fail sandboxes.” Shift the KPI “from perfection to velocity of learning,” he said.

Instead of asking team members whether they “feel safe,” Sheen suggests asking: “What’s one process we have that makes experimentation feel like a career risk?”

Encouragement, no matter how honest and well-intentioned it is, is unlikely to spur innovation.

Innovative culture is created when workers believe they can take smart risks, tell the truth, survive mistakes, and still have a future at their organization.

“Innovation does not fail because employees lack ideas,” said Mira Greenland, chief revenue officer at INTOO. “It falters when employees feel they must calculate the career risk of every bold move.”