How to make people feel safe to speak up?

Silence in a team is rarely agreement. It is often self protection. I learned this in a painful way during an early startup where our meetings looked energetic and our chat channels seemed busy with ideas. When a major launch failed, we discovered a junior engineer had spotted the risk weeks earlier and wrote it down privately. She chose not to say it to the group because the room felt tight, the timeline felt sacred, and a senior had already sold a date to me. That moment reframed my thinking. If I wanted people to speak up, it would not be enough to encourage candor in slogans. I had to change the conditions so that candor felt routine and safe rather than heroic and costly.

Many early teams repeat the same mistake. They talk about values and reward speed. They celebrate quick wins and hope that brave people will volunteer hard truths when needed. This is not how most organizations behave under pressure. People protect status when they are not sure that the system will protect them in return. If speaking up feels like a personal gamble, most will wait until the fire is visible to everyone. The practical question for a founder is simple. What will you protect more in your daily choices, the schedule or the signal. If the schedule always wins, the culture learns to keep quiet. If a credible signal can pause a decision, the culture learns that raising a risk is part of shipping.

The shift begins with structure. I came to see that values are a promise while rituals are the proof. We rewired our decision making so that opinion and ownership were not fused. Every significant topic in our notes spelled out who owned the decision and who was invited to challenge it before the decision locked. During this challenge window, anyone could point out assumptions, risks, or missing information without inheriting responsibility for the entire problem. The person who raised a warning did not become the person condemned to fix it alone. That single separation lowered the personal tax on dissent and made participation feel less dangerous.

We also normalized criticism by design. Each week two people were assigned to stress test one active plan. Their task was not to block progress but to map failure paths, probe logic, and surface blind spots. The rotation included juniors and seniors across functions so that listening without defensiveness became a shared habit. When critique is a role that moves through the team, criticism stops signaling rebellion and starts signaling diligence. People learn to receive it without taking aim at the messenger.

Accountability had to be clear as well. We formed a rule that when someone raised a risk during the agreed window and the team chose another direction, the risk would be written next to the decision and remain with the owner. If the risk later materialized, we treated it as a consequence of the choice, not a reason to punish the person who spoke up. Many cultures fail precisely here. A warning is remembered and the person who issued it is marked as negative. We made the opposite visible. The warning became part of the institutional memory, and the accountability stayed where it belonged.

Language shapes how safe a room feels. I stopped asking for feedback in vague terms because that invites praise or silence. I began to ask for one assumption that could hurt us. People respond to a clear invitation to inspect the work rather than judge a colleague. I stopped asking who disagreed because that forces people onto sides. I asked what would change your mind about this plan. The conversation shifted to evidence and conditions. This subtle change let people protect the work without feeling they were putting a target on their back.

Meeting mechanics matter more than leaders admit. We moved status updates into written documents and used our most expensive time together for decisions and debate. Fewer people were invited. Every meeting named a decision owner and a challenge window. We ended with a decision and a review point so that disagreement had a natural place to live. The performance aspect drained out of our rituals. When the room is not a stage, it is easier to tell the truth.

One private channel for early warnings also helped, not to replace conversation but to encourage it. We kept a very simple form open at all times. Anyone could flag a risk, describe the impact, suggest a test, and state whether they wanted their name attached when we raised it. I reviewed the inputs on a regular cadence. We did not build a hotline culture. We used the channel to catch quiet signals before they grew loud. As we proved we would act on these notes, people used the form less and brought more into the room because they trusted that the process was fair.

None of these moves required a budget. Every one required the leader to go first. If you ask for honesty and then retaliate with tone or sarcasm, no process can save the culture. If you invite risk flags and fail to address them, people learn that you do not truly mean it. The hardest part for a founder is not inventing a ritual but keeping ego out of the way when the ritual works. You will hear ideas that contradict your plan. You will hear criticism of decisions you have already defended. Breathe. Say thank you. Ask one more question. Decide, document, and move. The next time will feel easier for the group because you showed them what happens after a hard truth is spoken.

These choices land differently across contexts. In Malaysia, I have found that teams appreciate clarity about tradeoffs and timing. When leaders name a time boxed window to challenge a plan before a lock date, people who care about helping the team hit the schedule feel freer to raise issues at the right moment. In Singapore, directness pairs well with crisp documentation. If the leader models plain speech and pairs it with written decisions that anyone can inspect, the team will match the tone. In Saudi Arabia, respect for seniority runs deep. Formal permission to challenge, granted out loud and visible to the room, changes everything. Appointing a challenger for a meeting and thanking that person publicly signals that dissent is a service to the work.

Hiring and promotions send the loudest signals of all. If you only celebrate smooth delivery, you will attract conflict avoidance. If you advance people who improved plans by exposing a hard truth and repairing it with the team, you will attract people who repeat that behavior. Collaboration is not agreement. Collaboration is the skill of changing minds without shaming the people who held the earlier view. Write this into scorecards and reviews. Reward the person who makes the plan better, not only the person who gets it over the line.

Looking back, the question that guides me is very simple. If I did not show up next week, would this team still raise the hard thing. If the answer is no, then the culture relies on the leader’s presence rather than the organization’s design. Safety should not depend on a mood or a personality. Safety should be predictable. It should live in routines that people understand, in words that invite inspection, and in records that make accountability transparent.

People do not come to work in order to keep quiet. They want to build things they can be proud of and they want those things to work. If the way the team works punishes honesty, you will get a show. If the way the team works rewards honest input and protects those who offer it, you will get the truth when it matters. Make the act of speaking up less costly. Reduce the guesswork. Separate opinion from ownership. Create a normal place for critique. Protect those who warned you when you chose a different path. Promote those who improved the plan. Do this consistently and speaking up will stop feeling like a brave act. It will feel like the way your team does the work.