In the larger community, many conversations are assuming that free speech correlates with the ability to say everything. It is an argument to prohibit moderation.
What such conversations often don’t look at, is the safety people need to speak up. When someone expects that his ideas will be rejected or that his opinion needs to be justified he also has little incentive to speak up.
Holding others up to high standards through moralizing or cancel-culture may be an effort to act impeccably and be a perfect role model, however, it is also a route to try to hide any possible flaw or error. The easiest way to do so is to make oneself invisible or to stop showing up.
A basic principle of being human is, that people can change opinions, learn from errors, and may not have understood everything yet. Those who show up decided that they are good enough to do so or deny seeing the possibility that they are less than perfect.
Whenever there is a possibility that people stop speaking up, their team has lost its ability to provide a psychologically safe environment. They have put up defense mechanisms to protect themselves from their anxiety to be misunderstood and shunned. This also means that the team lost the ability to learn from different opinions and to regulate the conversation within the team by limiting how conversations become personal.
It takes time to establish a sense of safety and boundaries are one of the means contributing to it. The boundaries within which a team exists establish a culture that integrates knowing one another, everyone’s habits, differing beliefs, and learning styles. It provides the team with a knowledge that enables tolerance and the ability to understand when a comment is personal for example and when not. The culture transforms the way things are said as well as how they are understood.
Within these boundaries there exists a larger sense of liberty to speak up and receive difference.
It also pays to add some rules. They limit the liberty to speak up by reminding the team of the existing values and ways to engage with one another. A way these rules contribute to the sense of psychological safety is, for example, to limit with whom the given information may be shared.
The ability to establish a space in which people feel free to speak up is a means to share power with those feeling safe in that space.
It is a choice.
While leaders may assume that they have given power to their team, it doesn’t mean that they also shared it. What is being said is not always what is being done. Sharing requires paying more attention to others and a greater willingness to doubt oneself.
