The Price of Silence
When decisions come from the top and the consequences are lived at the bottom.
Those who make decisions do not always live with their consequences. And those who live with them have not always had a chance to influence them.
In a meeting room, management announces a major transformation. No one objects. Faces are calm, pens take notes, a few practical questions are asked. Management leaves relieved, convinced it has won its teams’ support.
It is mistaken.
In The Price of Silence, Raphaël Izzar, CRHA, explores a phenomenon that dashboards do not measure: the moment employees stop saying what they know. Sometimes out of fear. Sometimes out of resignation. Sometimes simply because they have understood that their voice no longer changes anything.
This book shows how organizations made up of reasonable people end up no longer hearing those who know their work best.
Among other things, you will discover:
- Why information loses its substance at every level it passes through.
- How the best employees unintentionally hide a project’s design flaws.
- Why a token consultation can do more harm than a decision openly made without consultation.
- What the voice contract is, the implicit clause of the psychological contract, and what happens when it is broken.
- How silence ends up being costly, in trust, in skills and in departures.
Combining narrative and analysis, the author draws on research in work psychology, organizational sociology and management, including the work of Albert Hirschman, Amy Edmondson and Christophe Dejours.
He also offers two practical tools: the first to understand the organizational cost of silence, the second to help leaders decide, before a decision, whether to inform, consult, deliberate together or decide jointly.
This book is for:
- Leaders who wonder why their meetings are so quiet.
- Managers who carry out, every day, decisions they did not make.
- Human resources professionals who want to play their role to the full.
- Anyone who has ever said “OK” while thinking something else.
The Price of Silence does more than denounce silence. It explains how organizations produce it, what it costs them and how to give people’s voices a place again.
About the author
Raphaël Izzar is a Chartered Human Resources Professional (CRHA) in Québec. He is interested in how decisions are made, explained and experienced in organizations, and in the place employees’ voices hold in them.
Let’s talk about your situation.
A first one-hour exploratory meeting, free and confidential, by video conference with Raphaël Izzar, CRHA.