Whistleblowing or "speaking-out" was one of the themes running through an excellent conference (Business Ethics, Business Schools, and the World of Work) at Leeds Business School last week . Professor Amanda Mellor (Group Secretary for Marks and Spencer Plc) quoted the fictional sage Professor Dumbledore "it takes a lot of bravery to stand-up to our enemies, but even more to stand up to our friends".
In the real world, Professor Mellor provided insight into the very real challenges that M and S faced to ensure fairness for all parties during the operation of a Speaking Out policy. One of the main points she made was that the key to resolving issues was really to engender a culture of open dialogue between employees and their managers.
But the culture will surely only change when Boards themselves impose the same Speaking Out criteria on themselves by actively speaking-out about their leadership actions or inactions? This will help to ensure that passive "groupthink" doesn't dominate and that challenge is seen as important as being collegiate with "collective responsibility" no longer a concept to hide behind. These leaders need courage as a key competence of their roles and to understand/welcome the dissenter in forcing in-depth consideration of diverse views to improve decision making. As part of all good communication,leaders also need to ensure they are listening to all parts of their organisations.
Trusting your organisation and your colleagues is key to feeling comfortable/safe enough to talk about difficult issues. The organisational story, where there isn't a Harry Potter wand or a bearded wizard to magic away problems,has to include tales of people feeling safe in their culture and with their leaders so that courage and potential repercussions don't feature highly when speaking-out .
You may be interested in the following definitions, taken from the literature of High Reliability Organisations, in which trust is a key factor in avoiding errors and events:
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• Definition of confidence-confidence exists when the party trusted is seen to be able to empathise with (know of) your interests, is competent to act on that knowledge, and will go to considerable lengths to keep her/his word.
• Definition of trustworthiness-trustworthiness is a combination of trust and confidence.
In the language of HROs, a deeper level of trust is required to keep people safe than that developed simply through the formal relationships formed through day to day business transactions. It needs to be actively grown through targeted team and relationship building activities. When the safety you want to develop is psychological, the same is true.