Do You Dare to Speak Up?

I’ll open with something many of you already know, but often forget... How we carry ourselves matters. When we look meek, disheveled, or don’t look people in the eye, we inhibit the confidence others will feel in us. Compare this with someone who stands tall, shoulders back, dressed like a professional, looks you in the eye, and communicates with conviction. Carrying yourself with confidence changes how you feel about yourself, and it changes how others feel about you.

While appearing confident is important, more important is that we feel confident on the inside – but what often gets in the way is the willingness to overcome an internal voice that tells us to quiet down. That questions our thinking. That makes us hesitate. There is a wonderful book completely focused on this topic called You Have More Influence Than You Think, by Vanessa Bohns. The quick summary is that we underestimate how many people will say YES to our requests, our suggestions, our desires by almost 2x. Yes – you read that right. People are twice as likely to say yes to what we want than we give ourselves credit for. But for some reason, we hold back, and don’t even ask.

The Bystander Effect

Let me illustrate this through some research that was covered in the book, called the bystander effect. The study was designed to see how willing someone is to speak up about something they know to be true. In this case, a subject in the study was sent into a doctors office. They would check in for their appointment, and then sit in the waiting room by themselves as the only patient in the room. Then, a small amount of smoke was sent into the room through a vent. Not a giant cloud of smoke, but just enough to make someone notice. Clearly there shouldn’t be smoke coming into the room, and it’s indicating there could be a fire in the building. So is the person going to speak up about it?

75% of the time, the person would speak up and say something to the receptionist that there may be a problem in the building. Now that makes you wonder what the heck the other 25% of people were doing. That’s easy for us to say as an outsider just reading a blog post about it, but the point of the study was that while we may think we would speak up, when we get into the actual situation, we only speak up 75% of the time.

Here’s where it gets more interesting… when adding just one more person in the waiting room. This other person is part of the research team, and they were instructed to not react to the smoke. So now, the subject sees someone else in the room which creates some social pressure. And they see this other person not reacting, further making them question themselves. Even though the situation is EXACTLY THE SAME as when someone was in the room by themselves.

In this scenario, the person only speaks up 38% of the time. It cuts the willingness to speak up in half. And when you add two more people in the room, the willingness to speak up plummets to 10%.

Do You Dare to Ask?

And this is with strangers, in a building that may be on fire. So what happens when we’re talking with a customer? A teammate? Our boss? When we know something is true, when we know something is right – do we speak up? Do we have the confidence to ask that hard question? To recommend an alternate idea to the customer? When asking someone to take on a new project or try a new approach?

The research says that we hold back more than we should. I dare you to ask anyway.