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From a Culture of Whispers to a Speak-up Culture
- Julien Haye
- Mar 15, 2025
- 14 min read
Updated: May 30
Risk failures often don’t stem from what organisations know but from what remains hushed, unspoken, or cautiously hinted at. Time and again, crises unfold not because risks were undetected, but because individuals felt unable to voice their concerns. Whether due to fear, hierarchy, misplaced loyalty, or cultural norms, a culture of whispers can create the perfect conditions for regulatory breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage.
Organisations trapped in a culture of hushed concerns and muted voices risk making decisions with incomplete information, allowing hidden vulnerabilities to fester. When employees hesitate to speak up, risk signals go unnoticed until they escalate into full-blown crises. The shift away from whispers begins with leadership fostering an environment of trust, actively listening to employees, and creating a speak-up culture at work where individuals feel heard and valued.
Leaders must recognise that a whisper culture does not emerge in isolation. It is typically the result of leadership behaviours, whether intentional or unintentional. Failing to invite challenge, discouraging dissent through subtle cues, or reacting defensively to bad news can reinforce silence. In that context the sentence “We are all in nice people” is at best naïve and at worth an unintentional call to silence “perceived dissent”. Risk-aware leaders must ask themselves:
Are we unknowingly signalling that certain concerns should not be raised?
This article explores the dangers of whisper cultures, how to identify them, and how leadership can create a safe space that encourages employee engagement and transparency. It also builds on key themes from our previous discussions on the human factor in risk management, cultural intelligence, and risk culture and governance to provide a holistic perspective on the role of a speak-up culture in the workplace and risk management.
Executive Takeaways
For readers scanning rather than reading in full, five governing insights frame the argument:
Speak-up culture is a governance capability, not simply a cultural aspiration.
The ability to surface concerns, challenge assumptions, and escalate risks determines how effectively organisations maintain visibility of emerging issues. Speak-up cultures support governance by ensuring decision-makers receive timely, accurate, and sometimes uncomfortable information before risks materialise.
Silence creates information gaps that weaken decision-making.
Leaders can only act on the information available to them. When employees hesitate to raise concerns, organisations risk making decisions with incomplete visibility of operational pressures, control weaknesses, misconduct, or emerging vulnerabilities. Governance effectiveness depends on the quality and flow of information throughout the organisation.
Psychological safety directly influences risk identification and escalation.
Employees are more likely to raise concerns when they believe they will be heard, respected, and treated fairly. Leadership behaviours play a significant role in shaping whether challenge, transparency, and escalation become embedded organisational norms or remain theoretical expectations.
The absence of reported concerns does not necessarily indicate a healthy culture.
Many organisations monitor incidents, breaches, and whistleblowing cases. Far fewer assess whether employees feel comfortable speaking up, challenging decisions, or escalating concerns. Low reporting levels may reflect strong controls. They may also indicate that important information is failing to reach leadership.
Strong governance depends on trusted escalation and constructive challenge.
The most effective organisations create environments where concerns are surfaced early, debated openly, and acted upon consistently. Clear escalation pathways, constructive leadership responses, and visible follow-through strengthen organisational resilience by ensuring risks are identified and addressed before they become crises.
What Leaders Don’t Hear Can Hurt Them
The Cost of Hushed Concerns
History provides numerous examples of organisations where unspoken warnings led to major failures. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 is a striking example of how a culture of whispers and suppressed concerns can have devastating consequences. As detailed in Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, some risk professionals and executives inside Lehman were aware of the firm’s excessive leverage and exposure to subprime mortgages. However, hierarchical pressures and a fear of retaliation prevented many from challenging leadership decisions or forcing difficult conversations. CEO Richard Fuld was known for dismissing dissenting views, reinforcing an environment where concerns were not openly debated.
Rather than addressing the risks, Lehman Brothers relied on accounting manoeuvres like Repo 105 to temporarily remove liabilities from its balance sheet, masking its true financial exposure. By the time the full extent of the crisis became clear, it was too late to take corrective action. The result was not just the downfall of Lehman but a financial catastrophe that might have been mitigated had there been an environment that encouraged a speak-up culture, open discourse, transparency, active listening in leadership, and challenge in risk management.
Regulatory breaches provide another glaring example. The Wells Fargo fake accounts scandal occurred in part because employees, pressured by aggressive sales targets, hesitated to report unethical behaviour. Many workers were aware of the fraudulent practices but felt trapped by corporate expectations and the fear of losing their jobs. Instead of addressing the issue early, the problem grew until it resulted in a massive regulatory and reputational crisis.
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Operational failures also illustrate the destructive consequences of a whisper culture. The Boeing 737 Max crisis revealed an environment where employees felt unable to raise concerns about design flaws, despite internal knowledge of potential safety issues. In some cases, engineers and test pilots voiced their doubts about the aircraft’s systems in private but did not feel empowered to escalate their concerns. This lack of a work environment that encourages a speak-up culture contributed to fatal accidents and widespread industry repercussions.
These cases illustrate that leadership does not need to explicitly silence concerns to create a whisper culture—simply failing to reward transparency or dismissing inconvenient truths can be enough. A lack of leadership curiosity, an aversion to difficult conversations, or a culture that prioritises short-term gains over long-term stability can all contribute to suppressed risk awareness. Ignoring signals, however subtle, is itself a leadership failure.
Psychological Safety and Risk Management
Without psychological safety, employees fear retaliation and avoid raising concerns. This delays risk mitigation and undermines governance. When concerns go unspoken, leaders make decisions with incomplete information, increasing exposure to operational failures and regulatory non-compliance. Employees in such environments often default to self-preservation, keeping their insights to themselves rather than challenging existing processes or highlighting potential dangers.
As Terri Duhon, a board member and risk expert, noted in her RiskMasters interview, an effective board doesn’t just evaluate formal risk frameworks—it probes how long it takes for behavioural issues to surface. She explains:
“So the things that are important to ask… How long did it take for someone to identify a problem? How long did it take for someone to self-identify when they made a mistake? How long did it take for that person who everybody knew was a bit of a bully, how long did it take for someone to report that that person was a bully? How often do people raise their hands and challenge a process or a thought or an idea?”
If misconduct, operational failures, or risk challenges take too long to come to light, it signals a weak speak-up culture, regardless of how strong the governance structure appears on paper. Boards and senior leadership must actively question whether employees feel safe to challenge decisions, admit mistakes, and escalate concerns, as these factors determine the true resilience of an organisation’s risk culture.
A culture that discourages open, clear communication fosters a false sense of security, increasing the likelihood of unexpected crises. An absence of reported issues is not necessarily a sign of stability—it may be a warning sign that employees are withholding critical information. Moving away from a whisper culture requires deliberate action to create a work environment where employees feel heard, psychologically safe, and engaged in risk management.
Practitioner Pulse-Survey
In a recent poll of 479 risk and governance professionals, 45% identified a lack of leadership backing as the primary reason middle managers hesitate to escalate risk issues. A further 29% pointed to fear of blame.
The findings reinforce an important reality. Speak-up cultures are shaped less by formal policies and more by how employees believe leadership will respond when concerns are raised. Where challenge is supported and escalation is encouraged, important information moves more freely through the organisation. Where employees anticipate negative consequences, concerns often remain local, informal, or delayed.
Speak-Up Culture as a Governance Capability
Speak-up culture is often discussed as a behavioural or cultural topic. In practice, it serves a broader governance purpose.
Organisations rely on the timely flow of information to identify emerging risks, challenge assumptions, and make informed decisions. When concerns are not raised, governance loses visibility. Leaders continue to make decisions, allocate resources, and assess performance, although the information available to them may no longer reflect operational reality.
Speaking up therefore functions as a governance mechanism. It enables organisations to surface changing conditions before they appear in incidents, losses, regulatory findings, or performance deterioration. The value of a speak-up culture lies not only in encouraging employees to voice concerns. It lies in preserving organisational visibility.
Three governance dimensions are particularly important.
Escalation Quality
The effectiveness of governance depends on how concerns move through the organisation. Employees may recognise emerging issues, operational pressures, or control weaknesses long before they appear in formal reporting.
The critical question is whether those concerns can be escalated clearly, consistently, and without unnecessary friction.
Weak escalation pathways create delay. Information becomes diluted as it moves across management layers. Context is lost. Critical signals arrive late or fail to reach decision-makers altogether.
Strong speak-up cultures strengthen escalation quality by creating trusted pathways through which concerns can be surfaced, challenged, and acted upon.
Decision Quality
Decision quality depends on the quality of information available at the point of decision-making.
Boards, executives, and management teams rarely fail because they lack data. More often, they make decisions without access to important information that was never escalated, never discussed, or never challenged.
A healthy speak-up culture increases the diversity of perspectives available to decision-makers. It creates opportunities for assumptions to be tested, risks to be debated, and blind spots to be identified before significant commitments are made.
In this sense, speaking up is not simply about identifying problems. It improves the quality of organisational judgement.
Organisational Visibility
Many organisations monitor incidents, losses, breaches, and other realised outcomes. Far fewer monitor whether visibility itself is deteriorating.
Reduced challenge, slower escalation, unresolved concerns, and increasing reliance on informal workarounds can all indicate that important information is becoming less visible to leadership.
This creates a dangerous governance condition. Performance may remain stable while leaders become progressively less aware of emerging vulnerabilities.
A strong speak-up culture protects organisational visibility. It helps ensure that changing conditions are recognised early enough for informed intervention and effective governance action.
From this perspective, speak-up culture is not simply a cultural aspiration. It is a core governance capability that supports transparency, decision-making, and organisational resilience.
Practitioner Pulse Survey
In a recent poll of 127 professionals, only a minority identified reluctance to escalate as the primary challenge. Instead, respondents highlighted competing priorities (31%), unclear escalation thresholds (29%), and attempts to resolve issues locally before escalation (28%).
The findings suggest that weak escalation is not always driven by fear or misconduct. It often develops through ambiguity, workload pressure, and uncertainty about when concerns should move beyond local ownership. Effective speak-up cultures therefore depend on both psychological safety and clear governance mechanisms.
How to Spot a Culture Where Employees Are Afraid to Escalate Risks
A whisper culture is rarely obvious. Leaders may assume they have open lines of communication, yet employees may still feel hesitant to challenge decisions, report risks, or escalate concerns. To assess whether a whisper culture exists, leaders can look for key warning signs and take a structured approach to uncover hidden issues.
Seven Steps to Diagnose a Whisper Culture
Gauge How Long It Takes for Problems to Surface – Track how quickly behavioural issues, misconduct, or operational risks are identified and escalated. If problems remain hidden until they cause significant damage, this suggests employees may fear speaking up.
Observe Meeting Dynamics and Debate Quality – Pay attention to whether discussions encourage diverse perspectives or default to groupthink. A culture where people only echo leadership’s opinions or avoid challenging ideas signals that employees do not feel safe questioning decisions.
Analyse Risk and Issue Reporting Trends – Review historical patterns of risk reporting. A sudden drop in reported issues—or consistently low numbers—may indicate that employees are withholding information rather than resolving risks proactively.
Monitor Turnover in Critical Risk Roles – High attrition rates in compliance, risk, or internal audit functions can be a red flag. If key personnel frequently leave, it may signal frustration with an environment that does not encourage transparency.
Evaluate Leadership Reactions to Feedback – Assess how managers and executives respond to bad news. Do they react with curiosity and problem-solving, or with defensiveness and denial? If employees feel that raising issues leads to blame or career risk, they will remain silent.
Examine Escalation Pathways – Review how concerns move through the organisation once they are identified. If employees are unclear about where to escalate issues, who owns decisions, or when concerns should be raised, important information may fail to reach the right people. Effective speak-up cultures depend on clear, accessible pathways that support timely escalation and action.
Track Reliance on Informal Workarounds – Pay attention to where teams regularly rely on informal solutions to overcome recurring problems. While workarounds can help maintain operations in the short term, their repeated use may indicate that underlying issues are not being formally addressed. A growing dependence on workarounds can suggest that employees have adapted to problems rather than raising them through established channels.
Recognising these warning signs allows leadership to take proactive steps in breaking the cycle of hushed concerns and muted voices, ensuring that a strong speak-up culture is embedded into daily operations.
Creating a Speak-up Culture
Leaders play a central role in shifting from a culture of whispers to one where employees feel safe speaking up. This requires more than just open-door policies; it involves deliberate actions to create a healthy speaking up culture where transparency is embedded into everyday interactions.
Encouraging Open Dialogue
Frame Speaking Up as a Strength: Position risk reporting as a proactive measure that strengthens decision-making.
Lead by Example: Demonstrate openness by admitting mistakes and seeking feedback.
Recognise Constructive Challenge: Publicly acknowledge individuals who raise critical concerns, reinforcing that challenge is welcomed.
Embedding a Healthy Speaking Up Culture
Provide Safe Reporting Channels: Establish anonymous reporting mechanisms that employees trust.
Develop Risk Champions: Empower individuals across teams to advocate for transparency and risk awareness.
Close the Feedback Loop: Ensure employees see tangible action from raised concerns to build trust in the process.
Reinforce Shared Responsibility: Embed shared ownership across teams for encouraging a healthy speaking up culture, making it clear that psychological safety is not just a leadership responsibility but a collective commitment.
How This Connects to Risk Culture and Governance
The presence of a whisper culture is not just a communication failure; it is a risk culture failure. The ability to surface risks early, challenge assumptions, and make informed decisions is directly tied to a speak-up culture and governance framework. Without clear, proactive leadership in this area, silent cultures take root, allowing risks to escalate unchecked.
Understanding the Human Factor in Silent Cultures
In our previous discussion on the human factor in risk management, we explored how biases influence decision-making. Silent cultures are a direct byproduct of psychological tendencies that suppress risk escalation. Three key behavioural dynamics reinforce a whisper culture:
Fear of Retaliation – Employees hesitate to raise concerns because they worry about career consequences or social repercussions. This fear is particularly strong in rigid hierarchies where speaking up is seen as challenging authority rather than contributing to collective success.
Bystander Effect – Individuals often assume someone else will raise the concern, reducing the likelihood that anyone takes responsibility for escalation. As a result, issues that are visible to many people may remain unreported. If employees believe that raising concerns is not “their role,” critical risks can remain hidden until they cause real damage.
Loss Aversion – Individuals tend to place greater weight on potential losses than potential gains. Employees may therefore perceive the personal risks associated with speaking up as more significant than the potential benefits of raising a concern. The fear of being wrong, facing blame, or disrupting harmony discourages proactive communication.
Without targeted interventions, these behavioural dynamics create a risk culture that rewards compliance over critical thinking, reducing an organisation’s ability to pre-empt crises.
Cultural Intelligence and Risk Perception
Different cultural environments also shape how risks are communicated. As explored in our article on Cultural Intelligence in Risk Management, leaders must recognise that risk perception and escalation mechanisms vary across teams, industries, and geographies. Key factors influencing silent cultures include:
High Power-Distance Norms – In cultures where hierarchy is deeply ingrained, employees are less likely to challenge senior leadership or question decisions. Silence becomes a survival mechanism rather than an intentional act of deception.
Risk-Averse Industries – In sectors where reputational damage carries severe consequences (e.g., financial services, healthcare, law), employees may fear that admitting errors or weaknesses will have long-term negative impacts on their career or the company’s standing.
If leaders do not actively account for these cultural dynamics, they risk designing escalation processes that look strong on paper but fail in practice. An organisation can have the best whistleblower protections and risk policies, but if employees feel culturally or structurally discouraged from using them, the culture of whispers will persist.
Strengthening Risk Culture Through Governance
Governance must do more than provide formal structures; it must actively reinforce psychological safety and accountability at every level. Effective risk governance requires leaders to take a proactive stance by embedding transparency into key governance mechanisms:
Measuring Psychological Safety in Risk Culture – Just as financial risks are tracked with metrics, psychological safety should be measured through anonymous reporting participation rates, employee risk perception surveys, and issue escalation trends. A lack of reports doesn’t mean a lack of risks—it may signal a culture where people don’t feel safe reporting them.
Board-Level Oversight on Risk Culture – Boards and executive committees must go beyond reviewing high-level risk reports to assess the effectiveness of escalation mechanisms. This includes reviewing case studies of past failures, analysing time-to-escalation data, and directly engaging with employees at different levels to gauge openness in risk discussions.
Holding Leaders Accountable for Speak-Up Culture – Psychological safety must be an explicit leadership KPI. Risk leaders should be assessed not only on compliance metrics but also on their ability to foster an environment where employees feel safe escalating concerns.
By integrating risk culture into governance frameworks, organisations move beyond static compliance-driven approaches and ensure that transparency becomes embedded in decision-making, leadership behaviours, and strategic planning.
Board Oversight Checklist
Five Questions Directors Should Ask About Speak-Up Culture and Risk Escalation
1. How quickly do concerns move from identification to leadership visibility?
Boards should understand how long it typically takes for behavioural issues, operational concerns, misconduct, or emerging risks to surface through formal channels. Delayed visibility can indicate barriers to escalation, uncertainty around ownership, or reluctance to raise difficult issues.
2. What evidence demonstrates that employees feel safe challenging decisions and escalating concerns?
A strong speak-up culture is reflected in behaviour, not policy statements. Directors should look beyond training completion rates and reporting mechanisms to understand whether employees actively challenge assumptions, raise concerns, and contribute alternative perspectives without fear of negative consequences.
3. Where do concerns most commonly stall within the organisation?
Risks rarely disappear simply because they are not escalated. Boards should seek to understand where concerns encounter friction, whether through unclear ownership, management layers, competing priorities, or ineffective escalation pathways. These points often reveal where organisational visibility is weakening.
4. How do leaders respond when difficult messages are raised?
Leadership behaviour shapes whether employees continue to speak up. Directors should assess whether managers respond to concerns with curiosity, engagement, and problem-solving, or whether employees perceive challenge as creating personal, professional, or reputational risk.
5. How do we distinguish between low levels of risk and low levels of reporting?
An absence of reported concerns does not automatically indicate a healthy culture. Boards should review broader indicators such as issue escalation trends, employee feedback, turnover in key control functions, and reliance on informal workarounds to determine whether important information is reaching decision-makers.
Conclusion: From Silence to Strength
A strong risk culture is about ensuring that leaders listen, employees trust the system, and governance supports open risk discussions. Silent cultures do not emerge overnight, and dismantling them requires persistent effort.
Leaders must ask themselves:
Are we unknowingly rewarding silence?
By shifting from a reactive governance model to a proactive speak-up culture, organisations can transform whispers into a healthier, more transparent culture of informed, strategic decision-making where your people feel comfortable having uncomfortable discussions, where risks are surfaced, debated, and mitigated before they turn into crises.
If your leadership team has not received a difficult question, an uncomfortable challenge, or a critical risk escalation in the past quarter—should that concern you?
About the Author: Julien Haye
Managing Director of Aevitium LTD and former Chief Risk Officer with over 26 years of experience in global financial services and non-profit organisations. Known for his pragmatic, people-first approach, Julien specialises in transforming risk and compliance into strategic enablers. He is the author of The Risk Within: Cultivating Psychological Safety for Strategic Decision-Making and hosts the RiskMasters podcast, where he shares insights from risk leaders and change makers.