Speaking Truth To Power With Megan Reitz

How can you speak confidently and navigate difficult conversations in your organization? How does power dynamics affect communication? In this episode, Megan Reitz, the author of Speak Out, Listen Up, talks about how perceptions of power enable and silence others. She also breaks down the TRUTH Framework that affects whether we speak or listen. Delve into the subtle influences that prevent us from voicing our most innovative ideas. Join Megan Reitz in this valuable conversation today.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcast/megan-reitz

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Speaking Truth To Power With Megan Reitz

Author Of Speak Out, Listen Up: How To Have Conversations That Matter

My guest is Megan Reitz. She is a facilitator, teacher, speaker, executive coach, researcher, and author dedicated to exploring and finding ways to improve the way we interact with one another in the workplace. Her recent research, done with John Higgins, focuses on speaking truth to power, examining how perceptions of power enable and silence others. Their work has been featured in Harvard Business Review and two TED Talks.

Their book, Speak Up, Say What Needs to Be Said, And Hear What Needs To Be Heard, was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year in 2020, and a second edition has been put out. Megan also collaborates with Michael Chaskalson on mindful leadership, and they have co-authored a book called Mind Time on that topic.

Megan runs her own business. She is an associate fellow at the Oxford School of Business and is an adjunct professor of leadership and dialogue at Hult International Business School. Prior to her work at Oxford and Hult, she was a management consultant and a dot-com boom participant. She was educated at Cambridge, gaining an MA in Land Economy.

She also received a Master’s in Change Agent Skills and Strategies at Surrey University and a Master’s in Research at Cranfield School of Management, where she was awarded her PhD. She is also a member of the Prestigious Thinkers 50 list. Megan, welcome. Thanks for doing the show with me. I appreciate it.

It’s lovely to be here with you.

You have an awful lot going on, which I only partially summarized. Give our audience a sense of the mix of things that keep you busy.

The thing that keeps me the most busy is the fact that I’m a mom of two teenage daughters. That’s the main thing. Work and everything else happens depending on what’s going on with the two teenage daughters. Therefore, it’s unpredictable. I have my work cut out there. I do a lot of research. I’m starting a new research project. I’ve got my head in that, which we might get to in a while. I write quite a bit. I also do conferences and workshops and work with executive teams over time. There are a lot of different things, and that’s what I like.

You came up as a management consultant. I came up as a management consultant. It makes you a bit of a change junkie.

It’s like having your fingers in a number of different pies and different things stimulating and going on. I enjoy it thoroughly. I enjoy my work.

A lot of people ask me, “How do you do all the things that you do?” I have a range of things going on. I said, “I don’t have kids at home anymore.” You’ll be amazed how much time that frees up when you all of a sudden realize that you don’t have to be driving them someplace, going to some event, or dealing with whatever the drama of the day is that comes with having kids in the house.

I cannot even imagine it, but I know you are right. It’ll be a change. In several years’ time, that’ll be the position that I’m in, and it will be interesting.

Part of your research focuses on speaking truth to power. How’d you get interested in that topic? How long have you been researching it?

I’ve been interested in the wider topic of organizational dialogue for many years. I started life as a management consultant and in strategy. I’ve always been interested in conversations. I was interested as a strategy consultant. Why organizations wouldn’t implement my brilliant strategy? That led me to understand and start to be curious about how people talk about strategy. What role do power and politics have in organizational change? That set me on the path towards understanding conversations, the role that they play, and how to change them because we have lots of habits in terms of the way we talk with one another.

I have been a manager myself in the internet industry since the craziness of the 1990s and into the beginning of this century. That taught me a lot and got me very interested in cross-cultural communication. How do we communicate when we’re not together? How do we communicate when we see the world in different ways? It has grown from there.

I thought you were going to say a minute ago that the thing that you wondered about when you were a consultant is why companies pay consultants to come in and tell them what they think they already knew.

The Perceptions Of The External Voice

I look at the power of the external voice and our perceptions. Consultants can play a role in saying the stuff that it’s not possible to say if you are from inside the system because if you said it, you wouldn’t be inside the system for long. It can be frustrating when organizations are using consultants to say stuff that their people could be encouraged to say because they know it already. That’s an interesting role from a consultancy.

To your point about how blunt you can be, I certainly had to learn to tone it down when I moved into the corporate world because when you’re a consultant, you’re expected to deliver hard-hitting perspectives. When you’re in a longer-term relationship with a company as an employee, you have to play more of the long game and think how this is going to land. How is it going to affect relationships? How did you and John Higgins, who you’ve worked with in this area, the two of you connect up?

We first met on a leadership program. We were both faculty at Astrid, which is now part of Hult International Business School. He was a faculty member. I joined the team, and I’m meeting him for the first time. I remember thinking at that moment, “I’m going to work a lot with you.” It was that click. I thought, “We’re going to work well.” That was several years ago.

You wrote a book together. You’ve published a second edition around speaking up and listening up. The titles are slightly different in the two editions. We’ll be more generic in describing it. How did that come about? Give us an overview of what the book is about.

Speak Out, Listen Up

The first edition is called Speak Up, Say What Needs to be Said and Hear What Needs to be Heard. John and I started working on that in 2015. I started a research project called Speaking Truth to Power. John has a background and real interest in understanding power inside systems and status. My area of interest was organizational dialogue and change.

2015 was when the Volkswagen emissions scandal happened. There was quite a lot going on in the UK, as there is in any other country in healthcare, around the consequences of people not being able to speak up when things are going on that shouldn’t be going on. That began to interest us and bring us into the research.

With compliance and ethics, we noticed that organizations became interested in agility and innovation. Our lens on it is like, “How do you enable people to challenge the rules of the game if you like? How do you get people to speak up with ideas?” We’ve also had a big interest in inclusion and diversity and whose voices get heard inside systems.

We’ve all got habits. You’ve got habits. I’ve got habits of when we speak up and stay silent. We also have habits around who we listen to and what we listen to. All of the readers have habits around which people. They think, “I’ll listen to them.” Which subjects do they say, “That sounds interesting, I’m going to listen to that?”

These habits define our lives, relationships, careers, and leadership practice. At a collective level, inside our organizations and our teams, they define ethical conduct, innovation, inclusion, talent, retention, and performance. Speak Up was all about understanding. Let’s look under the bonnet here. Let’s understand why we have the habits that we do and how we disrupt the ones that aren’t serving us, the people around us, and who we’re in relationships with. That was where we were exploring.

Powers at the center of this is a key area of interest for John. How do you define power? What do you feel other definitions get wrong about power?

Power is the architecture of our conversational habits. If there is one thing that determines what gets said and who gets heard in organizational systems, it’s our understanding of relative status, authority, and power. It is also the least likely thing we are to speak about. We don’t like talking about it. How do I define it? I don’t think we define it in Speak Up. I’m not that interested in defining power. I am interested in how others construct their understanding and sense the relative power in systems.

What I do look at is that we, both John and I, are influenced by the work of Joyce Fletcher, amongst others who look at how we use the power that others are giving us. Are we using power over others, or are we using power with others? Rather than what power is, how are we using it in systems? I talk a lot about titles and labels because they are more accessible than using this conceptual thing around power.

I ask people, “Which titles and labels in your organizational system convey relative levels of higher status and affect people’s voices?” In that way, people start talking about gender, race, ethnicity, and age but also hierarchical labels. How long have you been in the organization? Which language do you speak? Where are you located? Are you in the headquarters or the regions? All of these different labels affect relative status and authority. If we can understand that, we begin to understand the role that power plays in our conversations.

Speaking truth to power, it’s a two-way street. You talk about it from the perspective of the speaker and the listener throughout the book. What do you think makes them both challenging? Do you think one is harder than the other?

Speaking Truth To Power

Psychological safety has been one of the hottest topics in leadership and management over the last few years, as you’re aware. Every organization I work at work with has a Speak Up initiative. That’s why they bring me in. It’s almost ubiquitous with organizations trying to help employees speak up for all the reasons that I’ve mentioned.

One of the key things that we noticed early on that people were making a grand mistake in is that they were pointing at the people who weren’t speaking up and trying to make them speak up or even bringing me in to try and make them speak up. I tell one story, which I tell because it happened at the beginning of our research. An organization had brought me in and said, “We have some problems with this particular group. They’re not speaking up. Go on, Meghan. Try and get them to speak up.”

The first quote of our research came from when I spoke to them. They said, “Last time somebody spoke up round here, disappeared.” It became clear. I could work with this group on how they speak up. As we say in the UK, “Until the cows come home, I could do loads of work there.” It would be an utter waste of time, money, and resources unless I spend more time trying to figure out why you have to be so brave around here to speak up. What is it that people in perceived positions of power are doing that means that it’s silencing others even if they don’t intend to do that?

It’s the listening side that I end up spending far more time with. Get the listening up better, and people might be okay with speaking up. Otherwise, you encourage and infuse a whole pile of people to speak up with something. They do it. The response is rubbish. They roll their eyes and go, “I knew that wasn’t going to make any difference. I’m not going to try again.” In that sense, both are important, but listening up is where I’m focused

I certainly feel that running is a big part of our company’s organization. You want people to be able to speak up. One of my direct reports says, “You do realize how scary you are.” You’ve raised that point a lot in the book that people in leadership positions underestimate how intimidating the mere fact of being in that position is.

You may get as a leader twenty times a day. Somebody may say something to you that took in their view real courage for them to say it. You don’t even realize half the time that what they said was a big deal for them. For you, it’s one of many things you hear in the course of a day. It’s hard to have a level playing field in that respect because it’s to be fully in listening mode in a way that leaves them feeling like, “That person heard what I was talking about.” It’s hard. I agree with what you said based on my own experience.

A lot of our work looks at how leaders are in what we call an optimism bubble. When I’m feeling a bit more mischievous, I call it a delusion bubble. We can tell in our data. We’ve surveyed over 20,000 employees globally. As you get more senior, you overestimate the degree to which people are speaking up and the ease with which they’re speaking up. You’ll overestimate how approachable you are and your listening skills.

Many of us are in a position where we think things are okay. We are hearing what we need to hear. We are quite good at listening already. Why the hell would we want to change our habits? We don’t. We are looking back at these psychological safety initiatives. One of the trickiest things to do in culture change and psychological safety is to convince people that they will need to change their habits because most of us are listening, nodding our heads, and going, “Yeah, listening is important.” Luckily, I’m quite good at that. My colleagues need to improve. Everybody is thinking that. Nobody does anything.

How can we burst this bubble and enable leaders to go, “I remember when I was them?” I’m scary. I’m a bit intimidating. How do I put this person at ease so that I can hear what needs to be heard? How can I respond in a way that means that they’ll be encouraged to experiment and speak up again? That’s a crucial role for our leaders and managers.

A lot of the book centers around the framework that you summarize with the acronym truth. Can you break that down for us?

The Truth Framework

We’ve asked thousands of people, “What stops you from speaking up, what helps you to speak up, and what stops you from listening, and what helps you to listen?” From all of those responses, we created a framework called the Truth Framework. It identifies five key factors that affect whether we speak and listen. If we want to change our habits in anything, it’s a good idea to understand why we do what we do in the first place.

That’s what the truth framework is about. It’s about us figuring out, “This is what’s going on. This is why I make the choices I do.” If we can understand that, we stand more chance of being able to disrupt those habits. T stands for trust. The beginning of speaking up is I have to trust in the value of my opinion. I have to feel like I’ve got something important to say and I know enough about what I’m saying. Trust is the beginning of listening because I don’t listen unless I trust in the value of the other person’s opinion. Anybody reading this won’t be with us any longer unless they have something in their mind that says, “I trust enough in what is being said here. I trust that it’s valuable.”

R stands for risk. I may want to speak up, but I’m likely to think, “Yes, but what will happen if I say it?” There are loads of risks around speaking up. To mention some key ones, they’re social. We like to be in a relationship with somebody, but we often fear being perceived negatively or upsetting the other person. That puts us off, and other fears like fear that it won’t make any difference. That’s a big one. If we are listening, we need to appreciate how risky it feels for the other person to say something to us. That goes back to what we were saying. As a leader or a manager, can you appreciate that it feels risky for this person to tell us this thing? How can we help them to do that better?

U is for understanding. That’s understanding politics because speaking up is political. It affects people’s agendas and our own agendas. The more we are aware of that, the more we’re able to speak and listen effectively. The second T is for titles and labels. That’s back to power. What titles and labels affect who speaks up and who gets heard in the system? What titles and labels do I apply to myself and others that give me a sense of my relative power and status in the system? That’s a big one.

The H at the end is the how-to. I may want to speak up. I’ve thought about all the risks and the politics, but do I know how to say something in a way that will be heard and listened to? Do I know how to invite somebody to say what they want and what I need to hear? Have I got the strategy around it? It’s a quick summary of what the truth framework looks like, and we’ve gone into each of those elements to try and understand it more.

Part of the risks is speaking up. As the listener, they’re understanding the risks of the person they’re taking by speaking up. Are there risks in listening up?

There are huge risks. This speaks a bit to my research, which is why we find it so hard to pause and listen or bring our attention properly so that we create a space where people can say what they need to say. One of the key things in a manager’s and a leader’s mind is that we are undoubtedly, given our current environment, incredibly pressured. They’re on short-term targets that they have to achieve. They’re busy as hell. They’re working into the evening. They’re stressed.

The last thing they want to hear is a problem or something that they think, “This is going to create more work.” You open up a space, and you listen. In some people’s minds, it’s like, “I can’t control what I’m going to hear. What if I hear something that I don’t know the answer to? I’m a leader. I’m supposed to know the answer. What if they say something complex, and I’m not sure what to do with it?”

If we are listening, it means we are willing to be changed. It means we have to be open to altering what we’ve planned. If we step into listening, we are stepping into being prepared to be moved by the person who’s speaking to us. Not only at the moment, many managers feel like they haven’t got the bandwidth or the attention to even do that, but you are also asking people to open up a space where they might not be able to predict.

The big problem with that thinking is that we are silent and create a huge, great, big problem later on down the track, which we can’t control anymore. It’s false logic, but it’s completely understandable given the fact that our organizations are wrong, as if they’re hamster wheels. Nobody dared even step a pole off this hamster wheel because it was going fast. How do we create a situation where people can listen when that’s our environment? It’s a tough one.

It is a tough one with all the pressures that come with being a manager or a leader. Having somebody come to you and convey something is a problem. It’s going to divert your emotional energy away from what you were planning to do and convey in your tone, body language, and words that you’re open to hearing. It’s hard when people hit you in the hallway on something when you were headed to the toilet or canteen. You have to work on slowing yourself down at that moment.

It links into Amy Edmondson’s new work on failure. What happens if you create the space to listen and you hear stuff that you don’t want to hear? Something has gone wrong, or there’s been a mistake or a failure. It’s false logic. We don’t want to hear it. We shut it down. That creates more issues later on and reduces intelligent failures, which is all about innovation.

You make the point that bad news doesn’t get better with age. That was one of the things that caught my attention in the book. A small problem at the moment will grow into a bigger problem if you don’t deal with it. You mentioned the Volkswagen scandal. There have been many others. It’s lots of little moments where people choose not to speak up or not to hear what was said. They do pile up.

In these cases, you’ll hear, “I did tell them, but they didn’t listen.” It goes to what Amy’s been writing and speaking about around failure. This is how a simple failure turns into a complex failure. An intelligent failure turns into not an intelligent failure, but it’s hard in practice with everything else in the swirl of the data.

The thing with habits is most of the things that we see in the media where things have gone wrong have been sudden events. These small habits, the small choices that we make every day about whether to say something or listen to something, often don’t feel important. They feel inconsequential. If you have the same habits for the next several years year, these habits have big consequences for us personally and for the people that are around us.

Titles were another area in which I wanted to ask you about cultural differences in titles. You’re a Brit. I’m an American. You fill out your personal information in the US. It’s Mr. Miss, Mrs. Miss. If you do that in the UK, it’s Mr. Miss, Mrs, Dame, Duchess, and Duke. Do you feel like there are big differences in how people think about titles across cultures?

Yes, but not necessarily national cultures. We do see differences, but I see most differences within organizational systems and even between different teams. We have different understandings depending on our context, status, and authority. One aspect of that is the cultural norms that we’ve grown up in. There are obvious differences across the world. In different social and family systems, speaking up might be encouraged. In some others, it’s discouraged. If you challenge people in authority, it’s disrespectful.

We do have different norms across the world in terms of how we perceive status and the impact that it has on our voice and who we listen to. For each team I work with, the labels mean different things. I can work in one organization where nationality or language might be important, but in another one, not at all, but how long you’ve been in the industry. Whether you’ve come from a Google, that makes a real difference. It’s contextual, specific, tricky to generalize over, and dangerous to generalize over. We are aware of some general differences that result from different societies that we have around the world.

There’s a linkage to diversity, equity, and inclusion here. It goes back to what you said earlier in the conversation about the example of the one manager who had a list of the people who fit in. We all have biases toward who we are more and less likely to speak and listen to. How does that play out in all of these topics of titles?

Perceptions Of Power

I try to talk about this in a way that doesn’t bring people’s defenses up because that can be a barrier to people shining a mirror on themselves. One thing I do is ask people to note down who the people are that they go to and seek out their opinions. Have a look at that list. We’ve all got a list like that because we trust them. The problem begins when this list is restricted when we begin to be in an echo chamber. We have this list of other people that we don’t draw on, listen to, and seek out. One of the key reasons for this is unconscious bias.

Trying to understand, “Are we in a bit of an echo chamber? What are the dangers of that?” As well as the impact on the people around us. If we are a manager and we’re only listening to these voices, we’ve got some blind spots going on. We had better figure out a way to find out what those blind spots are. I do quite a bit of work in that territory in terms of trying to get people to understand.

One of the other things with titles and labels is that when we have high-status labels in a system, we are unlikely to notice them. We don’t notice that when we don’t have the high-status labels. When we don’t have the inadvertent comm right labels in a particular system, it’s obvious that it has an impact on what we say and whether we are heard or not. I call that advantage blindness.

The problem with it is because we have high-status labels, our experience tends to be, “I can speak up. I get heard.” We generalize. We go, “In this organization, we can speak up and get heard.” You forget about the impact that these titles and labels are having and the fact that it is a different experience when you don’t have the same labels. We have leaders and managers who may be well-intentioned but blind. If you are blind, you are not going the extra mile in helping people to speak up and be heard.

What’s become a cultural flashpoint in the US is this idea of White privilege. The reality is it is easier to be a white person in most of the Western world than to be a non-White person. It is easier in the work world to be a man than to be a woman. We’re working at those things. It’s hard. If you have the titles right, or you are the White male, you want to believe that you created your opportunity on your own. The reality is that you have, but at the same time, you had a much different starting point and glide path to do that relative to a minority woman. That’s the piece that is hard for people to accept because it challenges their own story.

We wrote about this with a late colleague, Ben Fuchs, in a Harvard Business Review article. It’s called Do You Have Advantage Blindness? We’ve gone into this topic quite a bit. We’ve surveyed 20,000 employees across the globe in different sectors and up and down the hierarchy. The effect of gender and ethnicity on speaking up and listening up is clear and statistically significant. The more White and male you are, the more likely it is that you will perceive other people to speak up with more ease than they do. You’ll think that you are more approachable. You are more confident that when you speak up, it will have positive consequences and care in generalizing.

I work in different organizations in different parts of the world. These labels and titles and the ones that people pay attention to and that make a difference differ. We need to know the general categories and situations. We need to go, “What is happening to us? What’s happening in this team and this organization? How might we need to reconstruct some of these perceptions around power and status if we are to change anything in a system?” That’s a difficult conversation to have in the first place.

You’ve worked with a lot of companies all over the world in different sectors. At the corporate level, what are the leaders doing to crack through all of these challenges across all aspects of your truth framework?

I’m wondering how to answer that question because my honest answer is in many situations, my response is not doing nearly enough. I would put this. This is true of many leadership development activities or cultural change projects. There’s an interest. It’s a hot topic. We’ll run conferences on it and do stuff, but we may not give it priority over an extended period of time that’s required to change habits.

The first response I would say is that many organizations are working in this territory and doing good stuff, but they’ll need to retain it and do it for years to start changing habits. We’re in cultural systems that don’t like that message. That’s boring. There’s another thing that we need to do. We’re also in systems that are pressed with many different initiatives. It’s unlikely that we keep our attention on one thing.

I will use that question as an opportunity to say, “This isn’t easy work. It’s not work that’s done quickly necessarily either.” I am working with a number of organizations that have a longer-term perspective and an understanding of how you have to keep going. I would mention the role that action inquiry processes take inside organizations. That’s a particular interest area of mind.

How do you get people to create spaces where they reflect on their experience of speaking up and listening up? They come up with experiments to make in the organization. They go out, do the experiments, come back, reflect, learn, and create another experiment. These cycles of action and experimentation, which I see, and I’m working with a number of organizations that are focused on this now, show promise in terms of changing habits.

The other thing I would say is that the leaders that I’m working with who are making a difference also notice when they’re saying one thing, but their actions are saying something else. One thing that brings many organizations down in this territory is that they speak about the importance of listening and collaborating.

There are some people who are influential in the organization that are the antithesis of that. They’re allowed to stay because they bring the money in or they know somebody. That is the thing that we need to get real about. Some of the leaders and managers I’m working with get that. As a result, they’re making quite difficult decisions. I could say many things to that question, but I’ll draw out those couple of things. The messages get real about what is needed to change habits.

Organizations of any form have a hierarchy. It is a rare organization where everyone is equal. It’s a utopian fantasy that there is such an organization. As soon as you introduce hierarchy, you’ve automatically created an unlevel playing field. Whether it’s hierarchy, ethnicity, what country you were born in, whether you’re a man or a woman, or whether you work in finance or sales, there are myriad ways that the playing field isn’t level. It’s hard to create all of those counteracting balancing factors, which makes it more level because it takes work, energy, and time. It forces people to confront things on both sides, the speaking and the listening side, that a lot of people struggle with. It’s something we can all keep working toward.

The vast majority of people that I work with write up the hierarchy and have positive intentions. Give them a moment and a space to connect to what matters to them, and they will tell you, “I want to have a positive impact. I want to develop the people around them.” You ask a parent what their intention is as a mother and father, and give them a space, and they go right to that place where they go, “I want to have a positive impact. I want to develop, encourage, bring up, and help people reach their potential. The problem is we are in a world that is fast, and we can’t attend and stay connected to that intention.

Part of what we need to do is create those spaces where we can have an opportunity to ask ourselves, “What am I doing? Why am I doing it? How do I want to show up? How do I want to show up here?” If we can create some of those spaces, the behaviors follow. If we spend an awful lot of time trying to train people in certain behaviors, it’s great and useful. A lot of people can do some of this stuff intuitively, but what they can’t do is connect to the thing where they remember, “This is what I want to be at work and at home. This is how I want to show up.”

It’s easy to get off course. You’ve had a long day at work. You’re tired, and you want to relax. One of your kids comes to you and needs to talk about a problem that they’re having at school. It’s hard not to convey some level of ugh when those situations happen with your kids, partner, parents, friends, and work colleagues.

It is one of the most important choices that we make. What to say, how, and who to listen to. Who do we need to create the space for so that they can say what they need to say? It’s such an important choice, and that’s why I love researching it so much.

You’ve got a new edition of the book that came out. What’s new? What’s different in the new edition relative to the first one?

It has got a new title. It’s Speak Out, Listen Up: How to Have Conversations That Matter. It’s updated. I can’t remember how many thousand people we surveyed in the first edition, but we’d doubled or trebled it by the time we got to this edition. It’s updated data. There’s a preface and an extra chapter on an area of research that has been another hot topic over the past few years, which is employee activism.

What topics do we talk about at work? That has seen a challenge and a change to wider social and environmental issues. As we see in the media all the time, we have employees speaking up in different ways. How do we respond to that? How do we create circumstances and conditions where we can have conversations that matter, but also, how can we make sure we still survive as a business whilst we do that? That’s an interesting area. There’s a chapter on that and additional work on technology in particular, which is about to alter dramatically potentially how we communicate, what gets said, and who gets heard.

I was curious when I read that chapter on AI in the first edition, whether it was a whimsical edition to the book, musing a bit about how technology could change, or it was something you were thinking about more deeply. You lay out a number of scenarios, from the bot boss to everybody relying on the facts to people spending all of their energy creating their fake profiles on social media. Is that an area that you’ve continued to think about?

We have an article coming out in Harvard Business Review on AI. My interest is in how our conversations will change, but how will we have conversations about AI? There are two different things. The thing that interests me is that the implementation of technology and the positive aspects that it might bring have some underlying assumptions.

There has been a lot written that assumes that AI is correct in the data that it then produces and the assumptions that it’s making. Another assumption tends to be that it’s implemented in an organization that’s psychologically safe and has cracked the whole power thing. It is used in a way that’s beneficial and positive. It also tends to assume that it’s implemented in a way that’s thoughtful and that we are learning as we are doing it.

There are some good reasons why we should question all of those assumptions. The article that we’ve got coming out and the chapter in the book that’s on this examines what role power plays. As with all of these things, technological advancements may be hugely positive if they are used with that intention. Let me give you an example. If an AI application is able to give feedback to a boss, everybody else who’s a human being is quite scared to give it. If an AI app can say, “Do you realize in that Zoom meeting you spoke 80% of the time? You never asked a question. You advocated. Do you realize that these three people never spoke? Those two people, whenever they tried to, you interrupted them?”

This feedback and coaching is feasible and could be hugely valuable if it’s used in a curious learning, developmental manner. We can use our power over others with AI. We can use it to augment our ability to relate to one another as human beings. We can try to delegate our listening capacities to an AI app. The latter worries me because these muscles we need to retain as human beings give feedback that sense where the other person relates with one another. Those muscles are getting weaker already. We need AI to help bolster them, not to make them weaker still.

It’s to further weaponize false information.

That’s a big one. The conclusion to this article, and what we’re saying in the book, is, where are the spaces where we have the conversations about how we’re having conversations with AI? Where’s that happening in our organizational systems? Are we implementing without that level of thoughtfulness or the experimental reflection cycle that I was talking about earlier? That’s what I want to focus on. How do we make wise choices rather than make the choices because we fear missing out and the sector is moving fast?

One last question because I know we’re up against time. We’ll have to get the mindfulness another time. If you think back on your career, what advice would you give your younger self fresh out of university about how to think about careers?

I should think about what I’m telling my teenage girls if I was to be authentic about that. I do tell them, “Follow what you are passionate about, even if you can’t see a thing or a target that lies at the end of that.” My experience is if you follow your nose, what lights you up inside, or something that you are interested in, that tracks your path. That’s your compass. That’s how I’ve worked.

I could never have told you that I would end up where I am and doing what I’m doing at the moment. I didn’t even know my job existed. At each path, I followed something that grabbed me. It’s not as easy as that all the time, but it is an important aspect. That’s what I would tell my younger self to have confidence. What I am telling my two teenage daughters.

I appreciate your time. When I heard you speak at the conference we were both at in November, the topic of speaking truth to power piqued my interest. I wanted to dive in more deeply. You gave me an excuse to read your book, which is great. I’m glad we had a chance to talk. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.

I want to thank Megan for joining me in discussing her work on improving workplace dialogue and the importance, irrespective of what industry or country you work in, of speaking up and listing up. As a leader, it’s important when you’re an individual contributor. With that in mind, thank you to Megan. If you’d like more regular career insights, you can check out Pathwise and become a Pathwise member. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the Pathwise newsletter website and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks. Have a great day.

Important Links

• Megan Reitz
• Speak Up, Say What Needs to Be Said, And Hear What Needs To Be Heard
• Mind Time
• Do You Have Advantage Blindness?
• Speak Out, Listen Up: How to Have Conversations That Matter
• LinkedIn – Pathwise.io
• Facebook – Pathwise.io
• YouTube – Pathwise.io
• Instagram – Pathwise.io
• TikTok – Pathwise.io

About Megan Reitz

Megan Reitz is a facilitator, teacher, speaker, executive coach, researcher and author dedicated to exploring and finding ways to improve the way we interact with one another in the workplace. Her recent research, done with John Higgins, focuses on ‘Speaking truth to Power’ – examining how perceptions of power enable and silence others. Their work has been featured in in Harvard Business Review and in two TED talks. Their book, Speak Up: Say what needs to be said and hear what needs to be heard, was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year 2020 and a second edition is due out this spring. Megan also collaborates with Michael Chaskalson on mindful leadership, and they have co-authored a book called Mind Time on that topic.

Megan runs her own business, is an Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, and is an Adjunct Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Hult International Business School. Prior to her work at Oxford and Hult, she was a management consultant and Dot Com boom participant. She was educated at Cambridge University, gaining an MA in Land Economy. She also received a Masters in Change Agent Skills and Strategies at Surrey University and a Masters in Research at Cranfield School of Management, where she was also awarded her PhD. She is also a member of the prestigious Thinkers50 list.