Book Chat with Ryan Smerek: Speaking Up at Work
In conversation with Diane Knoepke
MSLOC community members are busy writing, publishing, and contributing to books adding greatly to our work as learning and organizational change scholars and practitioners. This chat with my colleague Ryan Smerek is the first in a series of interviews with the authors we will be sharing here. We discuss Ryan’s second book, Speaking Up at Work: Leading Change as an Independent Thinker. In the edited transcript of our conversation below, Ryan discusses how the book came to be, who he wrote it for, how the book has shaped his thinking and teaching, and more.
Ryan, thank you for talking with me about your latest book, Speaking Up at Work. What made you want to dive into the topic of speaking up at work?
My initial fascination was with the notion of independent thinking. It’s a common thing you hear; I had discussed [the culture of the investment management firm] Bridgewater Associates under Ray Dalio in my first book. I was really interested in Michael Burry’s story, another from the world of investment, and how he had a different viewpoint (from most) on the American financial system and was proven right when a lot of really sharp people were wrong. I find that general phenomenon really interesting.
Part of my curiosity too came in looking at many of the stories in the book that have a certain moral elevation, or at least inspiration, to them. Some of the more famous ones, such as [Enron whistleblower] Sherron Watkins, pointed toward “speaking up” as a colloquial way to talk about this type of independent thinking.
How do you define success for someone who decides to speak up at work or be a “lone voice” for change?
I share a framework in the book that focuses on some of the possible outcomes. A better decision in an organization would be an obvious one. Another positive outcome could be an innovative improvement. It could have positive career outcomes for the individual if it works out. In the best case, it could result in greater motivation or satisfaction if the individual is able to create a change. In some cases and stories, these positive outcomes are true.
There are also outcomes around expressing values, having a sense of procedural justice. A story about a whistleblower in a research unit comes to mind. The individual really valued truth and was compelled to speak up about possible data fabrication or data manipulation, even as other graduate students chose not to speak up. This idea that “you tried” and you have a clear conscience—“you can live with yourself”—is value expressive, worth something to many people.
How does this book, and the data in it, add to or augment what we think we know about change leadership in teams and organizations? What is new here?
A lot of the change management and leadership literature assumes you have some positional authority, that you’re a CEO. Most of the stories in this book are about people who did not have positional authority, so they were taking a risk in some way. So this adds more, and specifically qualitative, work to the field of employee voice, as most of that previous work is quantitative studies.
Who is the book for? Who is the book not for?
The book is for early to mid-career professionals who do not have considerable positional authority. If you have innovative ideas, but don’t feel like you’re successful in getting them heard or adopted, these stories and frameworks can help.
For senior leaders who are wanting to work on and nurture employee voice, you can find it helpful to think about ways to break through conformity amongst your team. For leaders who feel they are the last person to hear the truth, this can help you find ways to facilitate innovation and risk-taking in your organization.
In the book, you dig deep into how individual, team, and organizational dynamics can affect how successful a person is in speaking up. What are some additional factors you think are relevant, perhaps outside the scope of this book, that affect individuals’ success or lack thereof?
Identity and culture, dominance and non-dominance, are relevant factors alongside positional power in organizations. For members who are outside the dominant [gender, racial, ethnic] identity group, they can see things differently and may not have the same conformity pressure if they don’t feel like they are risking being pushed out of the group. But of course it’s a double-edge sword, because the same thing that helps you see differently can also be challenging to getting you heard. For example, the story about Wendy Addison [who exposed LeisureNet, “South Africa’s Enron”] details how her exclusion from the “old boys’ club,” as the only woman on the executive team, helped her to see things more clearly but hurt her when she tried to speak truth to power.
Did any of your findings, or work on the book, change your mind or challenge any assumptions you had prior to doing the research?
Whistleblowing and independent thinking in organizations are more rare than I thought they were prior to doing this work. Certainly most of us can think of big examples, famous whistleblowers. That’s relatively rare; I thought it would be more common. What is more common, and is great, is where folks are speaking up but they are less of a lone voice. They’re speaking up for a perspective that is shared by others on their team.
How does the book inform your work as a Northwestern MSLOC faculty member?
Our MSLOC students are part of the core audience for this book. It’s meant for them. My hope is that the stories are helpful; many of us can learn a bit better from stories. And these stories can be inspirational for our students to learn about different perspectives and surface new ideas. It can help our students who are taking actions in their organizations and those who are coaching clients on leading change. These are important tools and tactics for our students, both in their coursework and as practitioners in their workplaces.
Besides reading your book, if you were to assign some homework to professionals looking to lead change as independent thinkers, what would you encourage us to do?
For some action homework, I’d borrow from Wendy Addison’s point about simply inducing a conversation in a reasonable manner. You don’t have to try to control the outcome, just bring up the idea or topic to have a conversation you haven’t had before.
For some reading, if you share my fascination with independent thinking, I’d recommend a few other books: Originals by Adam Grant, In Defense of Troublemakers by Charlan Nemeth, and Choosing Courage by Jim Detert.
To hear more from Ryan, check out his August 2023 episode on Beautiful Questions with Tuli & Alma, a podcast hosted by two Northwestern MSLOC alumni, Tuli Skaist and Alma Quiroga.