Over the years, you will have likely heard the advice that it’s important to know when to speak up and when to stay silent.
As a leader once shared with me, “I know what I think, but I’m just careful about when I say it.”
On the surface, it is sound advice. But as we got chatting, a pattern emerged.
This was a senior, experienced and politically astute leader. They knew how to read a room: who had influence, where the sensitivities sat, and when a conversation was likely to go badly.
But it turned out they weren’t just choosing their moments to speak; they were choosing silence.
In leadership meetings, they would hold back from naming the issue everyone could see. In one-on-one conversations, they would tell their team they agreed with their concerns, but with their boss and peers, they would soften their position.
Of course, none of this went unnoticed. Their team noticed the disconnect, as did their peers, who saw positions shift depending on who was present.
The gap between who the leader said they were and how they showed up widened, and that gap had a cost.
The Gradual Drift
This shift isn’t unusual. I’ve seen it countless times throughout my career, and it happens to leaders at every level, in every industry, across every kind of organisation.
It’s the drift away from saying what matters and sharing your genuine perspective. And it is rarely dramatic; instead, it comes in small, seemingly sensible adjustments.
You stay quiet in a meeting where you know you should speak. You frame your view to match your audience. You avoid the conversation that needs to happen because the timing feels wrong.
You tell yourself you will raise the issue later. Then later becomes never.
Do this once, and it may be wise judgement. Do it repeatedly, and it becomes a pattern. Over time, the adjustment becomes the default, and the default starts to look like who you are.
Oscar Wilde captured this with uncomfortable precision in De Profundis: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”1
While Wilde was writing about artistic integrity, the observation lands squarely in the workplace.
When leaders lose the thread of who they are because they stop speaking up, they become a composite of other people’s expectations. They learn what is acceptable, rewarded, risky, and best left unsaid.
Of course, leadership requires judgement. You don’t say everything you think the moment you think it. You choose your timing, consider your audience, and adapt appropriately to the context.
That contextualisation and planning are not the issue. The problem starts when adaptation becomes avoidance. When reading the room becomes disappearing into it. When fitting in becomes a permanent posture.
When that happens, you have surrendered something valuable. You have stepped away from your values and from being your authentic self.
The Alignment Gap
Authentic leadership is often misunderstood. It is not about unfiltered self-expression and saying whatever you think, regardless of impact. Nor is it a licence to behave badly and call it “being real”.
Authentic leadership is about alignment.
Professors Bruce J. Avolio and William L. Gardner, whose foundational work on authentic leadership was published in The Leadership Quarterly in 2005, describe authentic leaders as those who demonstrate self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing of information, and an internalised moral perspective2.
Put simply, authentic leaders know what they stand for, examine information fairly, act from their values, and are appropriately open in how they relate to others.
These elements are the foundations of trust.
When there is alignment between what you believe, what you say and what you do, people know where they stand with you. They may not always agree with you, but they can read you and rely on you to be consistent. They can trust that your position is anchored in something more stable than the politics of the moment.
Professor Tony Simons’ work on behavioural integrity reinforces this point3. Behavioural integrity is the perceived alignment between your words and deeds. People don’t assess your integrity mainly by your intentions. They assess it by whether your actions match what you say.
Sociologist Erving Goffman offers a complementary lens. In his landmark work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman described social life as a kind of theatre, where individuals perform different roles depending on context and audience4. He distinguished between the “front stage”, the public role we perform, and the “backstage”, where we are more private and unguarded.
What he described is natural and part of being human. We all adapt across settings because social behaviour is shaped by setting, audience and role expectations. The version of you in a boardroom or meeting room is not precisely the same as the version of you with close friends.
The issue is when the gap between the public performance and the private self becomes too wide and too sustained.
When that happens, people sense the incongruence.
They hear the polished words but feel the hesitation underneath. They see the agreement in the meeting, but remember the private disagreement in the corridor. They watch you carefully manage the room and wonder what you actually believe.
When you bring these threads together, you can see why inconsistency is so corrosive.
Your colleagues, peers, team members and those around you notice when:
- You say you value openness, but punish dissent
- You say the team matters, but go silent when they need you to speak up for them
- You say integrity is important, but shift your view when someone more powerful enters the room
Once they notice, they will start adjusting their expectations because they no longer know what you stand for. And once people start adjusting their expectations downward, your influence begins to erode.
The Trust Equation
When people know what you stand for, they know what to expect from you. They know how you’ll behave under pressure, whose interests you’ll protect, and where your line is.
That predictability makes it safe to follow you, work with you and support you.
When people don’t know what you stand for, they may still smile, nod and say the right things. But they will become more careful about what they share and manage the information they give you.
The colleagues who used to advocate for your ideas will start to hedge. The team members who once brought you the real issues start filtering what they say.
Standing Up Requires Courage
The challenge to consider is this: Do the people around you know where you stand? And not just on easy topics, but on the things that matter.
It’s easy to talk about values when the issue in front of you is uncontested. It’s easy to be courageous when the cost is low.
The real test comes when your values ask something of you. For example:
- When speaking up may affect your access to something that matters
- When naming the issue may be uncomfortable
- When holding your line may disappoint someone powerful
- When silence would be easier, cleaner and more politically convenient
These are the moments when people learn who you are. Not from your leadership philosophy, values statement or what you say in the offsite. They learn from what you do when there is something to lose. This is because influence is shaped as much by silence as by speech, a theme explored further in Between the Lines: How Words and Silence Shape Your Influence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way in Heroism: “Always do what you are afraid to do.”5
Not recklessly or combatively. But with clarity about what matters and the willingness to act on it when it is uncomfortable.
This takes a particular type of courage. The kind that says the thing that needs to be said, without grandstanding and holds a line without making it personal. It’s the kind that chooses respect over approval and knows that influence gained by abandoning your values is not influence worth keeping.
This does not mean you speak on every issue, fight every battle or turn every meeting into a test of moral conviction. Influential leaders are discerning. They know when to pause, when to listen, when to ask questions and when to let something go.
But they also know when silence becomes complicity.
The STAND Framework
Closing the gap between who you are and how you show up takes deliberate effort. A useful place to start is to STAND.
S – See yourself clearly
Leadership starts with self-awareness. Not a vague sense of your strengths and weaknesses, but a precise understanding of your values and what they look like in practice.
What do you stand for? What would you refuse to compromise, regardless of the pressure? What behaviours, in yourself and in others, tell you that something important is being violated?
If you can’t answer these questions clearly, drift becomes more likely. In pressure-filled environments, ambiguity is rarely neutral. When your values are unclear, the people around you with the most power will often decide for you.
T – Test your words against your actions
Behavioural integrity is the alignment between what you say and what you do. It is one of the most powerful predictors of leader effectiveness.
Pay attention to the moments when you say one thing in the room and something different in the corridor. Notice when you commit to something and then let it slide.
These gaps, small as they may seem, are what others use to calibrate whether you can be trusted.
A – Ask for honest feedback
You cannot fully see yourself from the inside.
The people around you, your team, peers, boss and stakeholders see things you don’t. Seek that perspective actively and then listen without defending.
Ask not just ‘how am I doing?’ but ‘where am I inconsistent?’ and ‘when do I seem most like myself?’
Importantly, if you find that people hesitate before answering, that hesitation is its own kind of feedback.
N – Navigate discomfort, don’t avoid it
The moments that most test your values and integrity are almost always uncomfortable.
The meeting where you disagree with the senior leader. The conversation where you need to name something that everyone else is ignoring. The decision where the politically safe option and the right option are not the same thing.
These are not moments to manage around or avoid, but moments to use your values to guide what you do next.
D – Decide who you are when it matters most
Decide what kind of leader people can expect from you when the room is tense, the issue is complex, and the easier option is silence.
Each time you choose the harder right over the easier compromise, you strengthen how people see you. Remember, your influence is built, decision by decision, and in the moments when staying true to your values costs you something.
The Leader Worth Following
The leaders who earn lasting influence are not always the loudest, most polished or most politically agile. They are the ones people can read, rely on and trust. They are the ones whose ‘yes’ means ‘yes’ and whose values are visible in the moments that matter.
That kind of leadership does not come from a framework or a training program.
It comes from a choice, made again and again, to be clear about who you are, what you stand for and what you are prepared to do when it would be easier to be silent.
Getting you ready for tomorrow, today®
Award-winning author and global workplace expert, Dr Michelle Gibbings, helps leaders, teams and organisations unlock strategic influence to accelerate progress.
References
- Wilde, O. (1905). De profundis. Methuen. Original work written 1897.
- Avolio, B. J., & Gardner, W. L. (2005). Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 315–338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.001
- Simons, T. (2002). Behavioral integrity: The perceived alignment between managers’ words and deeds as a research focus. Organization Science, 13(1), 18–35. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.1.18.543
- Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.
- Emerson, R. W. (1841). Heroism. In Essays: First Series. James Munroe.