The trouble with silence at work

We're all susceptible. Perhaps we've fumed about a co-worker but avoided a face-to-face discussion with the individual. Or we've glossed over an important difference of opinion because an explanation just took too long.

Leslie Perlow didn't set out to study this phenomenon. But as an anthropologist of corporate culture, she had the opportunity to be the proverbial fly on the wall during the 19-month life cycle of a dotcom. Founded by a University of Michigan student who had taken one of her business classes, the company posted lecture notes online from colleges nationwide.

Professor Perlow didn't know that she was watching the company self-destruct. Only toward the end - as she looked back at what people had told her behind one another's backs - did she realize how much the leaders had refused to communicate honestly about issues as important as the company's core purpose.

Wondering if it was just a feature of the fast-paced dotcom world, she began talking to people in other occupations about what she dubbed "silencing conflict" - not malicious or deliberate dishonesty, but the various ways people try to preserve relationships by not fully confronting differences.

Along the way, she found that everyone had a story to tell, at all levels of organizations' hierarchies.

Now an associate professor at Harvard Business School in Boston, she details her discoveries in her new book, "When You Say Yes But Mean No: How Silencing Conflict Wrecks Relationships and Companies ... and What You Can Do About It." Perlow recently shared some of her insights with the Monitor.

In our colloquial speech, conflict has a negative connotation. But differences of opinion and perspective are incredibly important in many kinds of work.

It's not the case in all work. If it's the military and I tell you "Go," I don't want to hear your difference of opinion. But creative work takes synergy - where we actually consider differences and build on them. If only one person raises an idea, even if the group doesn't follow it, the mere fact that it was brought up causes them to stop, reflect, and have a conversation.

The point is not about agreement but about mutual understanding. If people are looking for agreement they might never get there. There's a reason we have managers at the end of the day.

Every week [at a Fortune 500 high-tech company], there was a project management meeting, the PMM, where people would update the project leader. There was a lot of pressure to come in with PowerPoint slides and talk about how well they were doing.... It was a rosy picture.

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