Unlearning silence in leadership and organisational dynamics
Unlearning Silence is not a book about speaking up. It is a book about why silence makes sense. In many organisations, silence is misread as disengagement or lack of confidence. More often, it is a rational response to power, risk, and past experience. Elaine Lin Hering invites us to stop asking “Why aren’t people speaking?” and instead ask “What is this system teaching people about the cost of honesty?” When silence is widespread, it tells us something about leadership, safety, and how conflict is handled. I’ve written an article exploring how these dynamics show up in organisational life, and how silence can be read as data rather than absence. Silence tells a story. The question is whether we are willing to listen.
Elaine Lin Hering’s Unlearning Silence offers a powerful lens through which to examine leadership and organisational life, particularly the invisible dynamics that shape who speaks, who is heard, and whose perspectives influence decisions. When applied to organisations, the book exposes how silence is not merely an individual communication issue, but a structural and cultural phenomenon that directly affects trust, decision quality, conflict, and performance.
At an organisational level, silence becomes a signal. It reflects how power is exercised, how safety is established, and how leaders relate to difference. Understanding silence in this way reframes many familiar organisational challenges, including disengagement, risk aversion, groupthink, and unresolved conflict.
Before engaging with these ideas in practice, Hering invites readers to pause and consider their own starting point. Reflection begins not with behaviour change, but with awareness.
Reflective prompt: What identities do you currently hold, such as role, tenure, background, or social identity, and how might these shape your experience of voice at work? What drew you to this inquiry, and what are you hoping to understand differently?
Leadership, power, and the distribution of voice
One of the central insights of Unlearning Silence is that silence follows power. In organisations, formal authority, positional status, tenure, identity, and proximity to leadership all shape whose voice carries weight. Leaders often experience speaking as low-risk, while others experience it as consequential. This asymmetry creates a distorted communicative environment in which leaders may believe they are accessible and inclusive, while others are quietly calculating the personal cost of honesty.
From a leadership perspective, this creates a significant blind spot. Silence is frequently misread as agreement, competence, or lack of insight, rather than as a rational response to power dynamics. Decisions are then made on incomplete information, not because people have nothing to contribute, but because the environment has trained them not to.
Effective leadership in this context is less about encouraging people to speak and more about recognising how authority shapes behaviour. Leaders influence not only what is said, but what feels sayable. The absence of dissent is rarely a sign of alignment. More often, it reflects unspoken assessments of risk.
Reflective prompts: Where in your organisation are people most likely to stay silent? Where are they most likely to use their voice? What patterns do you notice when you consider who speaks freely and who speaks carefully?
Psychological safety as behaviour, not intention
Organisations frequently claim to value psychological safety, yet Unlearning Silence highlights why stated intentions are insufficient. Safety is not created through reassurance or slogans. It is inferred through repeated observation of how leaders respond when challenged, contradicted, or disappointed.
Employees watch closely. They notice who is interrupted, who is rewarded, whose emotions are tolerated, and whose are dismissed. They also notice how mistakes are treated and whether vulnerability is met with curiosity or control. Over time, these observations shape behaviour far more powerfully than formal policies.
In organisational dynamics, silence often emerges where safety is conditional. People may feel welcome to contribute as long as they do not disrupt dominant narratives or threaten established authority. When safety is contingent in this way, silence becomes selective and strategic. Individuals speak only in low-risk areas and withhold insight precisely where it is most needed.
Leadership maturity, as implied by Hering’s work, is demonstrated through consistency. Leaders who can remain present, regulated, and genuinely open when faced with discomfort create conditions in which voice can emerge organically.
Reflective prompts: What have people learned, through observation rather than instruction, about what happens when they disagree or express uncertainty? When was the last time you noticed yourself becoming defensive or controlling in response to challenge?
Communication, listening, and organisational intelligence
Unlearning Silence reframes communication as a shared responsibility rather than an individual skill. In organisations, this has significant implications for how listening is understood. Listening is not passive reception. It is an active use of power.
When leaders dominate airtime, interrupt, or prematurely evaluate contributions, they unintentionally narrow the field of organisational intelligence. Over time, people adapt by simplifying what they say or by saying nothing at all. This leads to a reduction in diversity of thought, even in organisations that appear diverse on paper.
Hering’s emphasis on making room translates directly into organisational practice. Making room involves pausing rather than filling silence, asking questions without controlling outcomes, and allowing ideas to remain unresolved long enough to be explored. These behaviours require leaders to tolerate ambiguity and resist the urge to perform certainty.
Organisations that fail to make room often mistake speed for effectiveness. They move quickly, but with limited input, reinforcing existing assumptions rather than challenging them. Silence, in this context, becomes a hidden cost to decision quality and innovation.
Practical reflection: What communication formats make it easiest for people to contribute thoughtfully rather than reactively? Whose voices are best served by current meeting structures, and whose are marginalised?
Conflict, silence, and escalation
In many organisations, conflict avoidance is mislabelled as professionalism. Unlearning Silence helps explain why unresolved conflict often manifests indirectly through tension, withdrawal, or sudden emotional escalation.
When people do not believe that disagreement will be met with respect, they suppress concerns until the emotional load becomes too great. At that point, expression may appear disproportionate or disruptive, reinforcing the belief that speaking up is dangerous. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle in which silence is rewarded until it breaks down.
From an organisational standpoint, healthy conflict depends on predictable relational safety. People need to trust that raising concerns will not threaten their standing or relationships. Leaders play a crucial role here by modelling disagreement without punishment and by distinguishing challenge from disloyalty.
Hering’s work suggests that many organisational conflicts are not about incompatible goals, but about accumulated experiences of not being heard. Addressing conflict therefore requires attention not only to content, but to the relational history that surrounds it.
Reflective prompts: How is directness understood in your organisational culture? What level of directness is expected of you, and what level feels safest? Where do mismatches in communication style create misunderstanding or tension?
Confidence, visibility, and misinterpretation
Organisations often equate confidence with visibility. Those who speak frequently and decisively are seen as leaders, while quieter individuals are assumed to lack conviction. Unlearning Silence disrupts this assumption by showing how confidence is shaped by context.
Confidence grows where voice is met with acknowledgement. It diminishes where contribution is ignored, minimised, or penalised. In organisational settings, this means that perceived confidence is often an outcome of reinforcement rather than an intrinsic quality.
This has implications for talent identification and progression. Organisations may systematically overlook capable individuals whose silence reflects learned restraint rather than lack of insight. Over time, this reinforces homogeneity in leadership and narrows the range of perspectives that shape organisational direction.
Leaders who understand this dynamic become more attentive to who is not speaking and why. They recognise that silence is data, not absence.
Reflective prompts: Whose confidence has been reinforced by the system, and whose has been quietly eroded? How might silence be masking insight rather than absence of it?
Courage, responsibility, and organisational culture
Hering’s framing of courage as discernment rather than force is particularly relevant in organisational life. Courage is not constant self-expression. It is the ability to align action with values while remaining aware of context and consequence.
In organisations, this means recognising that individuals should not carry sole responsibility for cultural change. When organisations celebrate bravery without examining the conditions that make bravery necessary, they inadvertently normalise environments that remain unsafe.
Leadership responsibility lies in reducing the personal cost of honesty. This involves addressing power imbalances, modelling reflective behaviour, and responding constructively to challenge. Courage then becomes a shared capacity rather than an individual burden.
Reflective prompt: Where in your organisation does honesty still require courage? What would need to change for it to become ordinary rather than exceptional?
Conclusion: from insight to experiment
Mapped against leadership and organisational dynamics, Unlearning Silence reveals silence as a critical diagnostic indicator. It points to how power is exercised, how safety is enacted, and how relationships are managed. Silence is not a lack of engagement. It is often evidence of careful observation and adaptation.
Organisations that take this insight seriously move beyond exhortations to speak up. They focus instead on how leadership behaviour shapes the communicative landscape. By attending to listening, making room, and responding well to discomfort, leaders can transform silence from a constraint into a source of insight.
Hering encourages readers not to rush into solutions, but to experiment thoughtfully.
Suggested next steps for readers and organisations
- Notice your current relationship with silence. What does your voice sound like now, compared with five or ten years ago?
- Identify where you have been silenced, and where you may have silenced others, intentionally or not. What feelings arise when you consider this?
- Clarify decision boundaries. Where are you genuinely seeking input, and where are you informing rather than consulting? What would greater honesty here change?
- Re-curate your voice environment. Whose perspectives shape your thinking, and whose are missing?
- Design small experiments over the next few weeks. Name what you will try, what you are concerned about, and what support you need.
Ultimately, unlearning silence at an organisational level is not about extracting more voice from individuals. It is about creating conditions in which speaking, listening, and disagreeing are no longer acts of courage, but ordinary features of healthy collective life.