One of our colleagues pointed out to us last year that while humility — one of our core principles — is important, it was also important to recognize that a lack of confidence is also important. Appropriate confidence in one’s own expertise is critical to successful collaborative work, too.
Thus, we we dove back into thinking and came up with Expertise, Confidence & Humility. We are pretty happy with it, but we did not dive into the messier aspects of why people might not speak up when they should. We focused on the importance of appropriate confidence in one’s expertise, but not about reasons why someone with such confidence still might not speak up.
In that piece, we acknowledge that there are gender issues here around internalized and externally imposed societal expectations, but we did not address the social expectations that the expert in question might have for others — often well grounded expectations.
As we mentioned, one of us has had too much experience not being expected to have something worthy to contribute. If this happens enough — being faced with others not having confidence on your own expertise — it obvious gets more and more difficult to speak up. Why bother when you know that no one will listen, anyway. This is not a matter of confidence in one’s own expertise, but rather confidence in lack of respect by others. Yes, this is a real problem.
Unfortunately, it gets worse. Members of less powerful or prestigious groups (e.g., women, members of underrepresented minorities) can face real negative consequences for speaking up. For not knowing their place. For being — for lack of a better word — uppity.
And even worse, being right can make these consequences even more severe. People who resent the uppity voice will very much want to reinforce their own dominance, perhaps making sure to point out when that voice is wrong. But if that voice is not wrong, their need to reinforce dominance will seek other outlets — and perhaps require even more substantial efforts to enforce a desired hierarchy.
We don’t have an answer to this. We know that within our own teams, such dynamics should never happen. That violates the norms we try to establish and maintain. And we hope that the larger organizations in which our teams works are similarly disapproving of such attitudes.
But we know that this horrific dynamic exists broadly, and even within our own organizations and teams, there are people who are nervous to speak up because they have learned these problematic lessons elsewhere.
Of course, all of us still have to be mindful of when to we are relatively more expert or relatively less expert in a room. But one’s ability and readiness to offer contributions is complicated by doubt about whether others will listen, and fear of backlash simply for speaking.
We wish we had an answer to this, but we do not.