Nitish Upadhyaya: Welcome back to the Culture & Compliance Chronicles, the podcast that gives you new perspectives on legal, compliance and regulatory challenges faced by organizations and individuals worldwide. The clue is in the title—culture is at the heart of everything. It’s the endlessly shifting patterns that govern our environment and behaviors. The magic is in amplifying certain patterns and dampening others. Let’s see if we can pique your curiosity, get you to challenge some of your perceptions and give you space to think differently about some of your own challenges. I’m Nitish Upadhyaya, and I’m joined by Richard Bistrong.
Richard Bistrong: Nitish, pleasure to join you today.
Nitish Upadhyaya: After a great episode with Tal, talking about cultural relativism, how different compliance issues are perceived across cultures, and some of the top tips for doing things differently across multiple localities, who do we have in store for listeners today?
Richard Bistrong: Nitish, our guest today is Megan Reitz. Megan is the founder of Reitz Consulting. She is an associate fellow at the Saïd Business School University of Oxford. Among her many accolades, Megan is listed on the Thinkers50 ranking of Global Management Thinkers and HR Magazine’s Most Influential listing. I also had the pleasure of meeting and listening to Megan at the 2023 Thinkers50 Gala in London. Megan is also the author of numerous books, including Speak Up: Say What Needs to Be Said and Hear What Needs to Be Heard. But more recently, and this is what we’ll talk about today, is her co-authored Speak Out, Listen Up: How to Have Conversations That Matter, and this is a book that I do not leave home without, in my client work. Megan, welcome—we are so excited about this conversation today and for your joining us.
Megan Reitz: It’s so good to be here. Thank you for such a lovely introduction, Richard.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Megan, before we dive into speaking up, speaking out, let’s do a rapid-fire round to help the audience get to know you a little bit better. Give us three things we should know about you.
[2:25] About Megan
Megan Reitz: First thing you must know about me is that I am a mom of two teenage daughters, and there’s a line on the bottom of my bio that says, “They teach me everything I have to know about dialogue and mindfulness,” which is no joke whatsoever. I am struggling my way through being a mother of teenagers. Another thing you need to know is that I tend to research things that I would like to improve on. I research stuff that I just think is so interesting and valuable, and I learn a lot from when I mess up. The third thing I would say is that my research isn’t really my research, in a way, because of all the brilliant people whom I work with. The last decade of research is with John Higgins, my absolutely wonderful co-researcher and author, and my research on mindfulness is with Michael Chaskalson.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Amazing. Now, what’s one thing you’re curious about?
Megan Reitz: Right now, I am really curious about people that are inside organizations that I might describe as “pathologically busy.” So, the organization’s fixed on doing stuff and short-term tangible targets, and yet, there are some people in those systems—and we probably all know one or two of them—that somehow manage to have a more spacious attention, a capacity to think more broadly, to be present, and to focus on relationships. Right now, I’m really curious about what are they doing, why, and how?
Nitish Upadhyaya: That is fascinating. I hope we get a bit more time to discuss that during the podcast. Last question: What’s the last thing that surprised you?
Megan Reitz: A few days ago, I went for an appointment that was about a half an hour walk North of King’s Cross in London. It constantly surprises me—I love walking in London. I live in the middle of the countryside, and I’m such a person that loves nature and quiet, but my goodness, walking through an area of London like that I was buzzing—I loved it.
Nitish Upadhyaya: I know the feeling all too well. I grew up in London and have seen the transformation of King’s Cross, Shoreditch, and other places over the last 20-30 years. It’s an incredible city that has both the lovely old cobbles and the history behind it, and then some of the new modern architecture as well. It’s been really nice getting to know you a little bit more, but let’s get ourselves back into the work that you’ve already done. The things I think you’ve been curious about over the last five or 10 years is something that is really interesting to me in my research and the organizations that I work with in terms of their culture, alongside the regulatory overlay as well. Talk to us about speaking up. What does it mean to you?
[5:25] What is Speaking Up?
Megan Reitz: Speaking up, to me, is relational. And by that I mean, we speak up in relation to the people that are around us, whether they’re listening, whether we’re scared of them—we speak up according to the context and the environment. We’ve often focused on the courage bit of speaking up, which is really important. I suppose I am positively even more interested in the context, in the relationship that makes speaking up feasible. The phrase “speaking up” or “speaking out” implies courage, which in turn implies that there’s a bit of fear. There’s often fear when we are disrupting the status quo, because of power status and authority differences in organizational systems. So, speaking up, to me, is that relational territory where you cannot disappear power, authority, and people’s experiences from what they’re able to say and speak up about. The other thing I would say is it links into “activism,” which is a very controversial phrase. But in our research, we look at voices of difference that are trying to challenge the status quo inside systems, which is, of course, utterly vital for conduct, innovation, and for performance.
Nitish Upadhyaya: The point you make about activism and the link to innovation is a really good one. I often hear people perceiving “speak up” when it comes to conduct issues or concerns in one bracket or in one bucket that, “We’re not so sure about that. Are we tattling?” The other side of it being, “We had a great idea. Let’s raise that and let’s get it up to management.” How have you seen people try to balance those two or argue away those issues? And what do you say when those come up?
Megan Reitz: I’ve been doing a project called Speaking Truth to Power for over 10 years now. When we kicked it off in 2015, that’s when the VW emissions crisis and scandal happened, and lots of people were thinking about speaking up in relation to conduct. I had lots of big organizations going, “Oh my goodness, what the hell is going on inside my organization that I don’t know about? We better find out.” So, it’s a big focus on conduct. After a while, then, there was this big focus on agility. And then, it was speaking up, is about how do we get people to voice ideas? How do we get people to challenge ways of working so that we can innovate, and we can transform? We then had a really interesting period of time where speaking up and our work was very much connected to inclusion and diversity in organizations. How can we get voices of difference engaged? Whose voice do we listen to? Whose voice don’t we listen to? What are the consequences of that? Then, more recently, really as a catch-all, I suppose, is psychological safety, which is to have the robust, difficult conversations that matter, and that brings it all together. The issue around transformation and innovation is one that really interests me. There seems to be a slight hope that many managers I work with have that they’re able to transform their organization and their team somehow smoothly with everybody agreeing. And I’m, like, “No. How does that happen?” “Transform” by its very definition means that you’ve challenged things—the status quo is not going to survive. Different people are going to need to speak up about different things and be heard by different people, otherwise, by necessity, nothing transforms.
[9:50] Why Listening Up Is Important
Richard Bistrong: When we think about speaking up, if we think about these aspirational, “We always have an open-door policy here,” it seems like all the pressure is on the individual to take the action, which brings me to the topic of your second book—what made you feel like we needed to focus more on listening up? I think a major theme in this book is, we are all scarier than we think we are. So, how do we become better listeners? I’d love to hear your thought process as to how you got to the “listen up” part.
Megan Reitz: Listening was a big theme in Speak Up, but we just realized that the title of the book did not convey that level of importance for listening at all. Our very first Harvard Business Review publication on this research was, in fact, called “The Problem with Saying ‘My Door is Always Open’.” We were saying that of course you want to invite people to speak up. The problem is if you expect anybody to actually come in and tell you what you need to hear. You’re asking people to come into your territory, and you are completely blind to the fact that you might be really quite scary—you might be absolutely lovely, but you’ve got a position in the organization that means that people fear you. And that blindness—we call it “advantage blindness” in another HBR article—is something that catches out so many managers and leaders who have a really positive intent in terms of wanting people to feel safe to speak up, but they forget that they are scarier than they realize. They forget that they have certain titles and labels and power that means that they see and experience things very differently. They often are in a position where they feel able to speak out, and they assume everybody else sees things similarly and feels equally at ease, and that’s one of the things that we really wanted to identify and make sure that people were aware of.
There’s one more quick story, and I do tell this story quite a bit, because it’s one of the things that instigated the whole research. We had a leader right at the beginning of the research who wanted some of his employees to speak up because they weren’t courageous enough, they weren’t being brave, and they needed to be more assertive. When I talked to these particular employees, the first thing they said was, “Last time somebody spoke up, they disappeared.” And, of course, this really highlighted this relational aspect of speaking up. You can’t just point at people that you want to fix, and you want them to suddenly become braver and send them on an assertive training course and expect that you can then hear what needs to be heard. You have to realize that how you show up is probably the biggest thing you need to work on in this relationship, hence, increasing focus on both listening up and the impact that power has on how people speak.
[13:15] Practical Exercises for Leadership, Managers, and Teams
Richard Bistrong: Such a great point. One of the things I took away from your book is, if we’re not careful, we might think that we’re giving a speak-up message when we’re giving a shut-up message, so we really need to be so intentional. For our podcast listeners, because we talk a lot about red flags in our field, I’m holding up a FIFA red card. Speaking more practically in terms of how you do this, you talk about a truth teller exercise where you can have someone in an executive or leadership position in the meeting or the workshop and appoint them as the truth teller. I always encourage them to hand the red flag to the truth teller and to say, “Challenge me. What am I not thinking about? What could we be doing better?” And very often, it’s a junior person that it gets handed to, because that sends the message of speaking truth to power. I love these hacks or little exercises to build up our listening-up muscle. So, I’m curious, in your client work, are there any exercises in building that speaking-up and listening-up muscle?
Megan Reitz: It’s worth just saying, although it’s a quick exercise hack, you have to use it over time, because, of course, the irony is, you hand the red card to a junior member of the team, you’ll probably scare the death out of them, and that won’t mean that they’ll speak up. They’ll have to have an experience over time where they gently improve what they dare say, and each time you respond in a way that makes them want to do it again so that they feel properly safe in order to do it. So, with that caveat, in our book, we have a framework which is called the “five W’s,” which stands for “Who, Why, What, Where, and When.” We go into the pragmatics of how do you speak up using that framework? And also, how do you listen up?
Just to pull on a couple of those things, the “Where”—the environment that you create—hugely impacts whether people feel able to speak up. A quick example: it makes a real difference to conversation if you are going for a walk and talk outside in a park with somebody versus sat in a team meeting in a goldfish bowl in the middle of your office. In fact, I’m writing an article right now on the absurdly uncreative meetings that we have. Regardless of what we’re hoping to get out of a meeting, we seem to organize them in the same way and expect different results. The environment makes a huge difference, whether it’s virtual or whether it’s face to face. And the “When”—is it on a Monday morning? Is it after work? Is it at lunch time? These things impact what gets said, and we need to think much more creatively about them.
I worked in a construction company where all of their meeting rooms were quite gray, but they always had a bright orange chair in each room. I first thought that they were just trying to be really trendy, but as it turns out, the bright orange chair was known as the customer chair. The idea was that in any meeting, whatever you were talking about, there would either be a person in that orange chair or at some stage you would look at the orange chair and say, “Pause. What would the customer say? What’s the customer’s voice here?” And that links a bit into another thing that I would say is, the way you ask questions makes the most phenomenal difference to how people speak up. Again, a real story. When we were in an organization with a leadership group that needed to cascade a new strategy, we watched the managers communicate with their teams. We had one manager who called a massive town hall meeting and from the stage did the PowerPoint presentation and literally at the end just said to the group, “Right. Feedback.” And that was it. Then, we had another manager that had a group, and she said to them, “Imagine you are the most ruthless competitor that we know, or imagine that you are a really fussy customer, or imagine you are a junior employee, what would they say?” What that manager’s doing so skillfully is she notices that power affects what people have to say—she knows that it feels risky to challenge ways of working. So, she’s asking groups of people to get together, and that immediately reduces the level of risk because it’s collectively voicing—she’s asking people not to speak up as themselves, of course, but to speak up as somebody else, making things feel far less risky.
Nitish Upadhyaya: It’s something that’s not done particularly well—the idea of thinking outside the box when it comes to having conversations. You talked a little bit about relationality and how there’s something bigger at work when we’re talking about speak-up culture. There isn’t just, “You say this—this will happen,” or, “Be more courageous.” I’d call it complexity and thinking about working in complex ecosystems. For the compliance officers who are out there, who are thinking about the DOJ talking about understanding speak-up culture, who are getting pressure from the business all the time as well, do you have any more tips on how do you figure out what is actually going on in your business?
[19:15] Mapping What Is Going on in Your Business
Megan Reitz: Most of the organizations I work with have an employee survey that has one or two questions relating to, “Do you feel able to speak up? Do you feel your opinions count?” I’ve met a number of senior teams that utterly rely on pulse surveys and employee surveys to tell them what is going on in their own organization, and that is a very, very dangerous situation, I would say, to be in. Other ways that you can find out about a speak-up culture, if you’re looking at them through this lens, of course, you’ve got things like incident reports. What has actually gone on in this particular case study here? What does that tell us about people’s capacity to speak up? We’ve got entrance and exit interviews that are hugely underplayed in terms of how we learn about our organizations, particularly new joiner interviews. This is just another completely absurd thing we do in organizations. We bring in new people for their insights, amongst other things, and we know that they come into a system, and they can see stuff that we can’t see because we’ve been there too long, but we normally wait until they’ve been assimilated into the system and can no longer see what they saw at the beginning. So, finding new people to come in and make observations about culture and how people are able to speak up or not, I think, plays a really important role.
The other thing that I do a lot in my research and in the organizational interventions that I do is I work with inquiry groups. By that, I mean small groups of people coming together to talk about their experiences of speaking and listening up in the organization. What you’re doing is you’re finding out an awful lot about culture, but you’re also intervening, because what you’re doing for those people in those groups is you’re raising the profile of this, and they leave the conversation, and they look at the world in a new way. They have reflected and they’ve thought about the way that they’re speaking up and listening up, and very often, almost automatically, they change. They do micro-changes in the way that they respond with other people. So, inquiry processes over a period of time can be amazing in terms of what you get to understand but also in shifting culture and conversations over time. The last thing I would say, which is an interesting one, is really carefully observing the top team in their meetings. You can pretty much predict what’s going on in the rest of the organization by seeing what happens in the top team and whether they’re having good conversations that matter.
[22:05] Changing Organizational Systems for Speaking and Listening Up
Nitish Upadhyaya: Absolutely. Do you have any stories for us of things that have worked with your clients or more generally that you’ve come across that illustrate the power of taking this approach from start to finish?
Megan Reitz: Yes. I’ve worked in a number of very different organizations in very different countries around inquiry groups examining speaking up, and how those organizations can, over time, through inquiry processes in particular, alter cultural norms. At the moment, I’m looking at a project called Spaciousness, and it looks at what we pay attention to in organizational systems. Many of us are using what I call the “doing mode,” which is we focus on targets, and we focus on the quantitative data—we see what the survey says. In that process, it’s all about being instrumental—it’s all about the utility of a conversation or a meeting. We need to be able to attend to the world in that way, but we also have to attend to the world in a more spacious manner, and that’s when we expand. We understand interdependencies—we can see more of the system. We show up present, willing to look at emergent possibilities rather than trying to control or predict what we’ve got to do.
The reason why this is relevant is that the organizations that do better at altering their conduct processes and their conversational cultures are the organizations that realize that they have to give conversations that matter space and time. If they only focus on what is just around the corner, what they can control and predict, and the utility of their conversations, they are very unlikely to be able to shift and change and allow people’s insight and capacity to speak up. So, this is of particular interest to me now. One of the organizations I work with comes to mind. They did a huge amount of work in altering psychological safety and changing it. Then, of course, there was a market change that meant a lot of the organizations suddenly went into cost-cutting, and they dropped it just like that. It was at the time where they really needed these conversations more than anything, they reverted to, “Actually, no, our quarterly targets have changed. We’ve just got to focus on that.” It takes a leap of faith to change culture, and it takes leadership. Leadership, to me, is the capacity in the face of an utterly pathologically busy world to be able to hold space open for the conversations that really matter.
Nitish Upadhyaya: I think you’re absolutely right. It is such a leadership aspect of thinking more in the medium term and long term giving space. Especially in the compliance spaces and legal space, they’re not often given the power to make the business leading decisions—the strategy, what to cut, what not to cut. Sometimes, it’s compliance funds that end up being cut. So, what do we do when we are not the people necessarily who are driving all of this? And how do you make the best of the resources and the access that you have?
Megan Reitz: That is exactly what we’ve been examining in our research. I think it’s really important to notice that people are within systems where they feel a real lack of freedom to be able to do things in a certain way. What we have found is that there are managers within those systems that are able to show up in a way that means that people can say what they need to say. A lot of that is not about having time—lots of us don’t have time. It’s the way that we pay attention, and in the research that we’re publishing at the moment, we’re looking at loads of practical things that individuals can do to create these spaces inside these very tight systems. It overlaps with some of the things that I said earlier, like thinking about the environment where we have conversations, and thinking about how we introduce conflict into systems. What I mean by “conflict” here is dissonance—the capacity to engage in thoughts and ideas or voices that show us what’s actually happening in a system and that can create real insight.
People is another thing. Who do we surround ourselves with? Are we surrounding ourselves with people who are a little bit too similar to us? Are we surrounding ourselves with people who constrain and constrict our view, or are we also engaging with people that might hold open spaces so that we can see the wood for the trees? Do we schedule in time with a coach, facilitator, therapist, or a really good colleague that helps us step back and go, “I know it feels like we can’t do anything in this system but actually we can, but I have to have that space and time just to see it.” So, that is one of the foundational things that enables us to do our work better, but we can’t do it when we are trapped in this busyness element. If there is one thing that I would say to people, it’s, “How do you create the space where you can step back, see a bit more of the system, regain and reconnect with what intention you have, and then make small experiments and changes to the way that you show up at work?” That’s absolutely crucial.
Richard Bistrong: It seems like none of this is a one and done exercise. For leadership to say, “Yes, we had a workshop on listening up. We’re good to go.” That’s not being intentional.
Megan Reitz: This is a long-term, constant cycle of action, reflection, and experimentation. Any change in culture and habit requires that cycle ongoing for a period of time, because, essentially, what we are talking about is altering habits. And we know how hard that is—it’s really tricky to change our habits and to change our conversational habits. Any processes that we can put in place that hold people and keep people accountable to that experimentation, learning, and reflection is a path that I would strongly recommend.
[28:55] Key Takeaways
Richard Bistrong: I’m going to leave with my favorite quote from your book, and then I’m going to turn it over to Nitish: “Without listening, there is no speaking. And without speaking, there is no listening.” I think that’s a beautiful statement and a practical one as well.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Megan, thank you so much for giving us a little bit of an insight into your research and that of your collaborators, of giving us some of the mindset shift I think that folks need to go through in the first instance, rather than just treating speak up as another check box exercise or using reductive means to assess their speak-up culture, and to try and embrace it fully as a way of making improvements in the business, of driving value, of trying to innovate and seeing things in a different way. Do you have a final message for our listeners from the compliance space—from HR, from audit, from risk, from across the business world—about what they should do next in thinking about speak up?
Megan Reitz: The thing that resonates so much is really a phrase that’s come to me from Iain Wilkie, who runs a charity called 50 Million Voices. Essentially, he talks about how you show up affects the other person’s voice. How we show up enables the other person’s voice to come or not. One thing I would love to ask people to experiment with at work and at home is how does the way you show up affect what you then get to hear? And how might you show up in a way that’s even better than you currently do?
Nitish Upadhyaya: What a great takeaway, and it echoes so many thoughts that we’ve had on this podcast already. We had Katie Daniels talking about showing up with empathy and showing up in a way where you can be vulnerable, and allowing yourself to then create the space that gives your business contacts and others a chance to really have a proper conversation with you. So, I think what a wonderful exercise for someone to practice when they have heard the podcast and are next heading off to have one of those conversations. Thank you so much for a really great conversation, and I think what’s left is for us to give readers and listeners a chance to find out more about your work. Where should they go?
Megan Reitz: The best place to go is my website, which is meganreitz.com, so that’s fairly easy to remember, and that’s got every publication that I’ve done. And then, the book that obviously Richard referred to, which is Speak Out, Listen Up.
Nitish Upadhyaya: We’ll put all of those in the show notes. Thank you again for your thoughts, ideas, some of the challenges that you brought to the conversation, and I’m excited to see where this new curiosity-driven research takes you.
Megan Reitz: Thank you so much, both of you. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed speaking with you.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Thank you all for tuning in to the latest episode in our Culture & Compliance Chronicles series. For more information about our series and any of the ideas discussed today, take a look at the links in our show notes. You can also subscribe to the series wherever you regularly listen to podcasts, including on Apple and Spotify. Amanda, Richard and I will be back very soon for our next chapter. If you have topics you’d like us to cover or novel perspectives you want everyone else to hear about, get in touch. Thanks again for listening. Have a wonderful day and stay curious.