The Truth We Don't Tell At Work | PART 1/5

Employees don’t decide whether it’s safe to speak up based on what leaders say. They decide by watching what happens when someone does.

The 90%–40% Gap: Why Don’t We Speak Up?

Gallup found that 90% of employees say they would report unethical behavior if they witnessed it. Only 40% of employees actually do.

I’ve spent more than 30 years in HR, and that 50-point gap fascinates me. I don’t think the gap is simply about honesty. In my experience, it’s about what happens in the space between knowing we should say something and deciding whether we’re  willing to say it.

And this isn’t just about reporting serious misconduct. Not telling the truth at work doesn’t always look like lying. In fact, some of the most consequential truths that go unspoken in organizations have nothing to do with what we would traditionally call dishonesty.

I’ve sat in countless meetings where I knew people disagreed with what was being said, but you would never have known it by watching the meeting. People nodded, stayed quiet, and waited until afterward to say what they really thought.

I’ve watched people recognize a problem and decide not to mention it. I’ve watched leaders tell employees they were “doing great” because they didn’t want to have the harder conversation. I’ve seen feedback become so softened and vague that the person receiving it had no idea there was actually a problem. And I’ve watched leaders allow behavior that was clearly hurting a team because addressing it felt uncomfortable.

No one was necessarily lying, but no one was really telling the truth either.

That distinction matters because we can create organizations where almost no one is technically lying while very few people are saying what really needs to be said.

What Happens Inside That 50-Point Gap?

Silence at work is often a risk calculation: Is saying what I really think worth what might happen next?

I think we calculate risk...

We wonder what will happen if we say what we’re really thinking. Will my leader become defensive? Will I be believed? Will I be labeled difficult? Could this affect my career? Will I damage the relationship? Will saying something actually change anything? And perhaps one of the most powerful questions of all: What if I’m wrong?

Sometimes that calculation is conscious. But I suspect much of the time it happens almost instantaneously before we consciously recognize it. We read the room. We read the person. We remember what happened the last time someone challenged the leader—or what happened the last time we did.

And sometimes we decide it’s safer to stay quiet.

Gallup’s research gives us another reason to pay attention to this. In a 2024 study, 23% of U.S. employees said they had personally witnessed or had firsthand knowledge of unethical behavior by a colleague or manager during the previous year. Employees with firsthand awareness of unethical behavior were 2.7 times as likely to be actively disengaged and 2.3 times as likely to experience burnout.

Silence doesn’t necessarily mean nothing is happening, and it certainly doesn’t mean people agree.

I’ve Watched an Innovative Culture Die.

Years ago, I was an HR Director sitting in a leadership meeting with my boss and ten of my peers. We were a publicly traded company, it was Q3, and we were finalizing the coming year’s budget.

We had grown nearly 30% that year while adding only two positions. Employees had been working mandatory overtime for months. They were exhausted, and it was beginning to show.

When we got to headcount, we learned that projected sales would allow us to add ten positions the following year. My boss announced that most would go to Sales and Research & Development.

“The focus is the future!” he said.

One leader spoke up, and embarrassingly it wasn’t me. He suggested that some of those positions needed to be spread across the organization to support the current growth.  He shared that his own team was exhausted and he was concerned he was going to start losing good people.

My boss’s face went crimson, he questioned the leader’s ability & commitment to the future of the organization, he suggested that perhaps him or his staff simply were not resilient.

The room went quiet. Then, one by one, people began reinforcing the boss’s position. Everyone in that room didn’t suddenly agree with him, they just learned what happened when someone openly expresses disagreement. No one needed to tell us to stay quiet. One interaction taught the lesson & combined with similar interactions it built a culture, a culture that lost brilliant people and suffered quickly from lack of innovation.

Compliance Can Look Remarkably Similar to Agreement

A quiet room can look like alignment. Sometimes it only means people have learned that disagreement isn’t worth the risk.

I’ve watched versions of that meeting play out countless times throughout my HR career. A leader presents a decision, nobody objects, the meeting ends, and the leader walks away believing everyone is aligned, then the real meeting starts.

It happens in the hallway, on Teams chats, behind a closed office door, over lunch, or during the drive home. Suddenly people have concerns; they disagree with the decision. They see problems the leader may not have considered, and they have questions they never asked.

The issue isn’t that people didn’t have something to say. It’s that they didn’t say it in the room where the conversation could have actually made a difference. Silence and agreement are not the same thing. Neither are compliance and commitment.

That leadership meeting taught me something I’ve seen repeatedly since: people don’t need to personally experience the consequences of speaking up to learn whether it’s safe. They watch what happens to other people. If I’m the leader and nobody challenges me, it can be easy to interpret that silence as evidence that I’m doing a great job. Everyone agrees. Everyone is aligned. Everyone is on board.

But there’s another possibility, and it’s a much more uncomfortable one: Maybe people have learned that challenging me isn’t worth the risk.

Speaking Up Isn’t Just an Employee Responsibility

I think we’ve spent a lot of time treating “speaking up” as an employee competency. Employees need to be courageous, they need to use their voice, raise concerns, challenge ideas, ask difficult questions, and tell leaders when something isn’t working. Yes, this is true but that’s only half of the equation. Creating an environment where people are willing to speak up is a critical leadership responsibility.

We can tell people to speak up, challenge us, bring us problems, and tell us when they disagree. But employees don’t decide whether those statements are true based on what’s written in an employee handbook, printed on a company values poster, or said during a town hall. They decide whether those statements are true by watching what happens to the person who does.

Does the leader become curious or defensive? Do they ask questions because they genuinely want to understand, or do they use questions as weapons to explain why the employee is wrong? Does the leader listen differently when the feedback is about them? Does disagreement effect future opportunities? Does the employee suddenly become “negative”, “difficult”, “not a team player?” Perhaps most importantly, does anything really change?

People pay attention, they watch what happens to others, and they remember what happened to them. Over time, those experiences teach people whether speaking honestly is encouraged, tolerated, or quietly punished. Culture teaches people very quickly whether truth is truly welcomed.

Maybe Leaders Are Asking the Wrong Question

The 90%–40% gap should make leaders curious. When people aren’t speaking up, our first instinct may be to ask, “Why won’t they say something?” I think there’s a more useful question: “What happens here when they do?” There is one more deeply personal question for those of us who lead others: “What happens when someone tells me something I don’t want to hear?” Do I become curious, or do I become defensive? Do I listen long enough to understand, or immediately begin explaining? Do I minimize what the person is telling me? Do I start looking for the flaw in their argument? Do I treat them differently afterward? Those questions are harder because they shift the focus away from the courage of the employee and toward the behavior of the leader.

We talk a lot about psychological safety in organizations, but psychological safety isn’t created because a leader tells people it’s safe to speak. It isn’t created by putting “open communication” in our organizational values or telling employees that our door is always open. Psychological safety is created by what happens after someone walks through that door and tells us something we didn’t want to hear. It is for this reason that we leaders need to pay more attention to inside that 50-point gap. People aren’t simply deciding whether to tell us the truth they’re deciding whether telling us the truth is worth the risk. They are weighing their actions based on what they have seen happen when someone tells me something I don't want to hear. 

In Part 2, I will turn this around, because employees aren't the only ones avoiding the truth. Leaders do it, too, and sometimes we call it kindness.

A Challenge for Leaders

When was the last time someone on your team brought you a difficult truth?

When was the last time they productively challenged you—or each other?

And perhaps more importantly: When was the last time you wished they had?

Psychological safety isn’t created by telling people it’s safe to speak. It’s created through what they experience when they do.

At True North Leadership Solutions, we believe the same is true for developing leaders. We don’t simply teach psychological safety—we create experiences where leaders practice it: navigating discomfort, listening with curiosity, challenging productively, responding without defensiveness, and holding people accountable without creating fear.

Leaders develop these skills by experiencing them, practicing them, and learning to use them when the conversation gets hard.

Ready to create a workplace where people are willing to say what needs to be said? Let’s talk. Contact Us

— Tammy Lake

Co-Founder, System Architect, True North Leadership Solutions

Guiding Teams to Their True North Through Steady Leadership Systems™

Sources: Gallup workplace research on reporting unethical behavior and workplace ethics.