Silence is data, and most people either don’t notice it or misinterpret it. Silence can be seen as apathy, ignorance, or resistance, and it’s easy for our personal biases to prompt us to jump to a quick conclusion.
But the data of silence may be telling a very different story, and when your track record of success has been forged by confidence and decisiveness, it’s easy to miss – or maybe dismiss – the story that silence is really trying to share with you.
And there’s a crucial identity shift that engineering leaders must go through in order to hear the true story from the silence. That shift is to learn to value the people on your team at least as much as you value their product or project results.
Why is that? Because what drives their silence is likely highly personal and not something that they’re likely to reveal without a high degree of trust in you.
Here are some examples of internal silencers:
🔵 When conversations are dominated by bold voices, and those with differing opinions are mocked or marginalized, the lack of safety in the environment can mute people with brilliant but counterintuitive ideas.
🔵 When they have shared ideas regularly in the past only to have those ideas neither enacted nor acknowledged, they may eventually conclude that their perspective is not valued, even if it happened under another person’s leadership.
🔵 When discussions are held rapid-fire with frequent interruptions, those who tend to be more rigorous in their thinking and polite in their interactions may feel that they have no opportunity to share their thoughts.
Valuing people over process is also important when you work to encourage people to participate in conversation. After finding the driver behind their silence, you’ll need genuine empathy, not a “proven formula,” to avoid compounding their fears and instead empower them to speak.
And if you’d like a thinking partner to explore your situation privately, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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