The Companies You Should Worry About Are the Ones Where Nobody Speaks

Companies where nobody speaks openly about leadership, culture or mistakes often hide dysfunction. Healthy organisations accept that people are imperfect and can discuss defensiveness, ego and poor decisions without feeling threatened. If a company claims to value transparency but reacts badly to honest conversation, its stated values probably are not real.

Why public conversations about leadership, culture and human imperfection are usually a sign of organisational strength rather than dysfunction, and what an employer’s reaction to them tells you about the place you work.

1. An Interesting Question About Capitec

Someone I used to work with at a previous company asked me recently what it was like working at Capitec. We covered the usual ground, but the part of the conversation I keep coming back to was their observation about my writing. They had noticed that I regularly publish articles about leadership, culture, difficult conversations and accountability, most recently If Your Exit Interview Is the First Time You’re Honest, You’re Not a Leader, and what genuinely surprised them was that I could do this so openly. Wasn’t it uncomfortable for my employer? Didn’t anyone worry that I was criticising the organisation, and surely somebody in communications or HR wanted to review what I wrote before it went out, particularly when a piece talks about poor leadership or organisational dysfunction?

That question stayed with me, because the thing they found unusual is precisely the thing I believe should be normal. I have spent around forty years in technology across a number of organisations, and in that time I have seen some extraordinary leadership, some spectacular failures and just about every variation of human behaviour in between. I have worked with people who welcome difficult questions and people who find the mildest challenge threatening, and I have seen organisations that genuinely encourage debate alongside others where everyone quietly knows which subjects are best avoided. When I write about those experiences I am not writing about Capitec, I am not writing about a particular person, and I am not secretly documenting something that happened in a meeting last Tuesday. I am writing about patterns I have watched recur across industries and companies over a whole career.

The fact that I can do that publicly, without my current employer becoming defensive, says something about the culture I work in, and I think the freedom to have these conversations openly is one of the more useful signals of a healthy culture. I should be honest about the obvious limitation up front, though. A senior executive being free to write in public tells you relatively little about whether a graduate engineer feels free to challenge their team lead on a Tuesday afternoon, and a company could easily tolerate commentary from its CIO while discouraging everyone else from speaking up. So I am not offering my own experience as proof of anything. The real test of any culture is whether the freedom to challenge extends all the way through the organisation regardless of hierarchy, and that is the standard everything below should be held to, including by me.

2. Why Are We So Afraid to Talk About Culture?

There is something rather strange about the way organisations approach culture. Almost every company claims to value transparency, integrity, accountability, collaboration and openness; the words appear on websites, in annual reports, on office walls and in every recruitment presentation. Try having a genuinely uncomfortable conversation about one of those values, though, and you very quickly find out whether the organisation actually believes in it. Write about leaders who avoid difficult conversations and someone immediately worries that it reflects badly on the company. Discuss organisational politics and someone wonders whether you are revealing internal dysfunction. Ask why senior leaders sometimes become defensive when challenged, and the conversation shifts from the substance of the question to whether you should be asking it at all.

I find that deeply contradictory. If an organisation genuinely believes in accountability, why would a discussion of accountability make it uncomfortable? If it values transparency, why would a conversation about transparency feel threatening, and if it expects its leaders to have difficult conversations, why would an article explaining that expectation be considered controversial? The reality is that organisations are made of human beings, and human beings are imperfect. We become defensive, avoid conflict and protect our egos; we occasionally make poor decisions, sometimes confuse our authority with our correctness, let personal relationships colour our judgement, and become so invested in our own ideas that we struggle to see when they are wrong. None of that is shocking. The interesting question is not whether these tendencies exist inside an organisation, because of course they do, but whether the organisation is mature enough to recognise them, talk about them and actively work to stop them becoming part of how it operates. There should be no shame in discussing human imperfection; the shame lies in pretending it doesn’t exist.

3. What Netflix Understood About Candour

One of the books that has shaped my thinking here is No Rules Rules, written by Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer. It describes a culture built around talent density, candour and giving people freedom to make decisions without unnecessary controls, and one of its central ideas is that feedback should be frequent, direct and genuinely useful, with people able to challenge one another, including their managers, without the exchange turning into a personal confrontation. Netflix’s culture has its critics, and I certainly wouldn’t argue that every organisation should copy its practices wholesale. What I find compelling is the underlying principle: if you want an organisation full of capable people making good decisions, you need an environment where information moves freely and uncomfortable truths can be said out loud.

That is much harder than it sounds. Most organisations are perfectly comfortable with positive feedback, and the real test only arrives when somebody challenges the assumptions. Can a junior employee question a senior executive’s decision? Can a leader admit publicly that an approach was wrong? Can people debate organisational behaviour without someone hearing it as an accusation, and can any of this happen without someone first calculating the political consequences? The Netflix view recognises that withholding feedback can do more damage than delivering it, because avoiding an uncomfortable conversation might protect someone’s feelings today while creating a much larger problem tomorrow. An organisation that is genuinely confident in its values should not need to control every discussion of them; it should welcome those discussions, because they reinforce what it stands for. A strong culture does not require everyone to agree. It requires people to be comfortable disagreeing.

4. The People Who Ask, “Is This About Me?”

Something else happens almost every time I publish. I receive messages from people asking some variation of the same question: is this about me? Sometimes they come from people I worked with years ago, sometimes from former colleagues at entirely different organisations, and occasionally from people who have simply recognised a behaviour that feels familiar. My answer is always the same, which is no. I don’t sit down to write about individuals, and I don’t have a particular person in mind when I describe leaders who avoid difficult conversations, managers who become defensive under challenge, or organisations that confuse activity with progress. I write about patterns I have seen repeatedly over forty years; sometimes things that frustrated me, sometimes things I admired, and sometimes mistakes I made myself.

What I find fascinating is what comes next, because while I can tell you I wasn’t writing about you, I cannot tell you why you thought I might have been. Perhaps the article describes something you have done, reminds you of feedback you once received, or names a behaviour you have been trying to change; perhaps it just describes a situation you have run into so often that it feels uncomfortably familiar. I can tell you who I was thinking about when I wrote it, but I can’t tell you why you recognised yourself when you read it. Recognising yourself doesn’t mean you are guilty of anything, but it might be an opportunity for reflection, and I would much rather work with people who read something uncomfortable and wonder whether they could improve than with people whose first instinct is to work out who is being criticised. In a defensive culture people read criticism and ask who is being attacked; in a reflective culture they read it and ask what they can learn.

5. Silence Is Not Evidence of a Healthy Culture

One of the most dangerous assumptions we make about organisations is that the absence of visible disagreement means the presence of harmony. A company where nobody discusses leadership problems is not necessarily a company without them, and a business where everyone appears to agree with senior management does not necessarily have an exceptionally aligned leadership team. It may simply be a business where people have learned that disagreement is expensive, because challenging a decision hurts careers, difficult questions earn a reputation for negativity, or people have watched colleagues pay for speaking up and quietly concluded that it is safer to say nothing. It may also be an organisation so focused on managing its reputation that it has confused controlling the conversation with controlling the problem.

I want to be careful here, because there is an important distinction between public restraint and internal silence. A listed, regulated bank has perfectly good reasons to be measured about what its executives say in public, and plenty of organisations that say very little externally argue ferociously behind closed doors. That kind of quiet is not what concerns me. What concerns me is silence inside the building: the meeting where everyone can see the problem and nobody names it, the strategy that everyone privately doubts and publicly endorses. Public openness is useful mainly because it is one of the few signals an outsider can actually see, and it makes the organisation’s stated expectations visible enough for people to ask whether they are being met. It is a clue about the internal culture, not a substitute for it.

The research on why people stay quiet at work adds an uncomfortable dimension. Detert and Edmondson (2011) found that employees hold taken for granted beliefs about when speaking up to those above them is risky or inappropriate, that these beliefs are widely held, and that they significantly add to the explanation of workplace silence beyond the factors researchers had previously measured. The authors trace these beliefs partly to socialisation and earlier experience, which means people often bring them into an organisation rather than learning them there. Burris (2012) found that managers tended to respond less favourably to voice that challenged the status quo than to voice that supported it, partly because challenging voice was perceived as less loyal and more threatening. Taken together, these findings suggest that a leader cannot assume silence will lift simply because nobody is being punished. If people arrive already expecting challenge to be risky, an organisation that wants candour has to demonstrate repeatedly, and visibly, that it isn’t, and how leaders respond when challenged is one of the most direct ways of doing that. The absence of criticism is not evidence of excellence; sometimes it is evidence that criticism has become too costly, or that people simply assume it is.

6. Why Public Conversations Are Particularly Valuable

There is another reason I enjoy writing publicly about these subjects, and it has nothing to do with my employer: I learn an enormous amount from the responses. When you discuss culture only inside your own company, your perspective is inevitably bounded by that company’s experiences, assumptions and history, and you may never notice the entirely unnecessary process that nobody has thought to question. Publishing an idea opens a much broader conversation. People from other industries describe how they tackled the same problem, leaders from other organisations share what worked and what failed, and every so often somebody challenges an assumption I have held for years and I realise my thinking needs to move.

A piece about leadership accountability might draw responses from people in banking, retail, technology, manufacturing and government, and while their environments differ, the human behaviours are strikingly similar. Defensive leadership is not a banking problem, avoiding difficult conversations is not a technology problem, and politics, weak accountability and a reluctance to challenge authority were not invented by any one company; they are recurring features of human organisations. If the problems are common, it makes sense to discuss them collectively rather than pretending every company must discover the answers on its own.

Not everything belongs in a public forum, of course. Client information, confidential business plans, individual employment matters and commercially sensitive information all deserve proper protection, and candour is not a licence to disclose things that were entrusted to you. But there is an enormous difference between protecting confidential information and suppressing a discussion about leadership principles. An article arguing that leaders should welcome difficult questions does not disclose any corporate secret; it contributes to a wider conversation about what good leadership looks like.

7. What Your Employer’s Reaction Tells You

Which brings me back to that conversation about Capitec. What I find interesting about my employer is that it doesn’t appear to feel threatened by my writing. There is no expectation that every piece about leadership must be read as commentary on the organisation, and there is an understanding that I have built up experiences and opinions over a long career, and that discussing them publicly is not inherently disloyal. Capitec has a strong sense of its own identity; it understands the culture it is trying to build, the behaviours it values and what it expects of its leaders. Debate and challenge are part of how we work, so we question decisions, examine assumptions and argue about whether what we are doing is consistent with the organisation we want to be. That does not make us perfect, because no organisation is, and by the standard I set out at the beginning, the real measure is whether everyone here feels that same freedom, not whether I do. It means we recognise that culture is something you keep working on rather than something you declare finished.

So when I publish something about a leadership behaviour that concerns me, the organisation doesn’t need to assume I am describing an internal problem. It can take the article for what it is, a discussion of a behaviour that any organisation, ours included, should keep an eye on, and I would hope people reading these pieces ask whether the behaviours described could ever emerge in their own teams, not because they have been accused of anything but because they care about protecting the culture. A healthy organisation should be able to read an article about poor leadership and say, “That’s interesting; are we doing enough to make sure that doesn’t happen here?” It should not immediately ask who wrote it, who they are talking about, and how to stop people interpreting it negatively. Those are two fundamentally different reactions, and they tell you a great deal about an organisation’s confidence in itself.

8. If You’re Looking for a Job, Look for Evidence of Openness

This has a practical implication for anyone weighing up a new employer. Most people spend a lot of time evaluating compensation, progression, titles and the technical challenges on offer, and all of that matters, but I would encourage people to spend considerably more time understanding how the organisation handles disagreement, because that will tell you more about your day to day experience than almost anything on its careers website. Don’t simply ask whether the company values transparency or encourages people to speak up, because it will say yes; I have yet to meet an organisation that proudly advertises its intolerance of difficult questions. Look for evidence instead. Look at what the company’s leaders write and talk about, whether they discuss real challenges or only polished stories of success, and whether they are comfortable talking about mistakes and describing the behaviours they expect from themselves.

When you interview, ask for examples. Ask about the last time someone challenged a senior leader and changed their mind, how the organisation treats people who disagree with the prevailing view, and what happened the last time somebody raised an uncomfortable issue that turned out to be legitimate. Ask whether leaders are expected to give feedback upwards as well as downwards, and ask people below the executive level, not just the people interviewing you. A genuinely high functioning organisation should be able to describe the mechanisms through which people challenge decisions and escalate concerns, give you examples of times those mechanisms worked, and admit to times they didn’t. When you choose an employer, don’t just look at what the company says about its culture; look at what its people are allowed to say about it.

9. Culture Is Not a Reputation Management Exercise

Too many organisations treat culture as something to be communicated rather than something to be practised, investing heavily in defining values, running internal campaigns and making sure the external message presents the organisation well. None of that is necessarily wrong, but it becomes dangerous when the desire to present a positive image starts to outrank the willingness to confront uncomfortable realities. A culture becomes strong when people consistently behave in ways that reinforce its principles, particularly when doing so is hard. If accountability is a value, senior leaders have to be accountable; if transparency is a value, uncomfortable information has to be allowed to travel; and if challenging the status quo is encouraged, people must be able to challenge decisions made by powerful individuals without being punished for it. One of the clearest warning signs I know is an organisation becoming more concerned about the appearance of a problem than about the possibility that the problem exists, because at that point it is no longer protecting the culture but the image of the culture.

There is a reason psychological safety has become such an important subject. Amy Edmondson’s 1999 study of work teams in a manufacturing company found that team psychological safety was associated with learning behaviour, such as asking questions, seeking feedback and discussing mistakes, and that this learning behaviour was in turn associated with team performance. Her later book, The Fearless Organization, extends that thinking into how leaders can build environments where people raise concerns and admit mistakes without fear of humiliation or punishment. But psychological safety is not about being nice to people or making sure nobody ever feels uncomfortable. Sometimes the most valuable contribution someone can make is to ask the question that makes everyone in the room uncomfortable, and the real test is what happens afterwards: whether the organisation becomes curious or defensive, and whether it examines the issue or the person who raised it.

10. The Companies That Say Nothing

We often look for the wrong signals when judging culture. We see a company whose leaders openly debate difficult subjects and assume something must be wrong there, while another company, where every executive speaks through carefully approved statements and employees appear to have nothing but positive things to say, strikes us as the healthier of the two. Perhaps it is. Perhaps, though, the first has enough confidence in its people to tolerate uncomfortable conversations, while the second has simply become very good at keeping those conversations out of sight. You cannot judge a culture from the outside alone, but you can learn a great deal by watching what happens when people speak.

This is also, in a sense, the other half of my last post. There I argued that senior leaders who save their honest feedback for their resignation are failing the organisations they were trusted to lead, and that the people receiving those resignations should ask what made honesty so difficult in the first place. The two arguments end up in the same place. An organisation where people can talk openly about the behaviours that damage companies is one where exit interviews should rarely contain surprises, because the uncomfortable things were said while there was still time to act on them. An organisation where nobody speaks tends to learn about its problems one resignation at a time.

After forty years I have accumulated plenty of opinions about leadership and organisational behaviour. Some of them will be right, some will be incomplete, and some will change when somebody presents a better argument, which is exactly why I write: to put ideas into the world, hear how others have experienced them and test my own assumptions. If you read something I’ve written and wonder why my employer is comfortable with me saying it publicly, that might be worth reflecting on, because the ability to have these conversations without fear, defensiveness or someone trying to control the narrative is not something an organisation should be embarrassed about. The companies I worry about are not the ones whose people openly discuss what can go wrong. They are the ones where nobody feels able to say anything at all, and if you are looking for somewhere to build your career, I would pay very close attention to that distinction.

References

1. Hastings, R., & Meyer, E. (2020). No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. Penguin Press. An account of Netflix’s approach to candour, talent density, and freedom with responsibility.
2. Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley. Explores how psychological safety supports speaking up, learning and performance in organisations.
3. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. A study of work teams in a manufacturing company linking team psychological safety to learning behaviour, and learning behaviour to team performance.
4. Detert, J. R., & Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-for-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488. Across four studies, found that taken for granted beliefs about when speaking up is risky are widely held and add significantly to the explanation of workplace silence.
5. Burris, E. R. (2012). The Risks and Rewards of Speaking Up: Managerial Responses to Employee Voice. Academy of Management Journal, 55(4), 851–875. Found that managers tended to respond less favourably to voice that challenged the status quo than to supportive voice, partly because challenging voice was perceived as less loyal and more threatening.
6. Baker, A. (2026). If Your Exit Interview Is the First Time You’re Honest, You’re Not a Leader. andrewbaker.ninja. The companion piece on why senior leaders must raise difficult issues while they can still influence the outcome.