THE SILENCE THAT COMMANDS MORE THAN ANY CEO

There is a peculiar violence that cuts across contemporary organizational spaces and is almost never named: the violence of what cannot be said.
Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone knows a decision is wrong, yet no one dares to name it directly? Have you ever felt that subtle discomfort when someone raises a real problem and the entire room quietly changes the subject, as if nothing had been said? Have you ever seen the weary look of someone who has given up bringing certain issues to the table because they have learned, through almost imperceptible signals, that this particular topic “must not be touched”?

These moments are not isolated accidents of poor communication. They are symptoms of something structural: an economy of silence that operates as an invisible force, determining what is thinkable, what is sayable, what is tolerable within the boundaries of professional coexistence. It is not merely a matter of omitted information or opinions withheld out of shyness; it is an entire implicit architecture that teaches—without ever needing to declare it explicitly—which truths are allowed to circulate and which must remain buried.

When someone realizes the current strategy is failing, yet everyone around them acts as if everything is fine, what exactly stops that person from speaking? When a leader makes decisions visibly driven by ego or personal insecurity and the entire group performs agreement, what is really operating there? When there is an elephant in the room that everyone sees but no one names—be it a toxic dynamic, obvious favoritism, a naturalized injustice—what precisely sustains that tacit pact of non-naming?

And when you begin to pay attention not only to what is said, but to the very way in which certain topics, certain disquiets, certain truths remain perpetually outside the field of possible speech, you stand before something far more revealing about the nature of that organization than any official statement of values could ever offer.

Because organizational silence is not absence; it is dense, charged, signifying presence. It is a form of communication that speaks through what it refuses to say, that reveals through what it conceals, that screams through what it withholds. Every word left unpronounced in a meeting, every disagreement swallowed, every uncomfortable truth that circulates only in corridors yet never reaches the rooms where decisions are made—all of it composes a parallel text, an underground narrative that tells the real story of how that collective functions, far beyond the official fictions it tells about itself.

And here lies something that most approaches to organizational communication fail to grasp: silence is not a problem of individual communicative skill. It is not that people “don’t know how to express themselves” or “need to develop courage to speak.” Silence is, first and foremost, a symptom of relational configurations and power structures. It is the visible manifestation of invisible dynamics that determine who has the right to name reality, who may question what is established, which truths are tolerable and which must remain unsaid so that the system can continue operating as it does.

When someone falls silent in a meeting, swallows a disagreement, or chooses not to raise something they perceive—even knowing it will be poorly received—that person is not merely making an individual choice of self-censorship. They are responding, in a perfectly rational way, to an implicit calculation of the consequences of breaking the silence. They are reading, often unconsciously yet with precision, the signals the environment emits about what happens to those who dare say what must not be said. And if silence prevails, it is not because courage is lacking; it is because there is an abundance of lucidity about the costs of speaking.

Entire organizations can operate under tacit regimes of silencing without this ever appearing in any handbook, without any explicit policy prohibiting certain conversations. Silencing does not need to be declared to be effective; it works through a thousand micro-signals: the glance that shifts away when someone touches a delicate subject, the slightly irritated response that punishes an uncomfortable question, the way certain people are systematically ignored when they speak while others are heard even when they say banalities. Through these minimal gestures, a pedagogy of silence is built—a collective learning about what is safe to say and what is dangerous to name.

What makes this dynamic particularly insidious is that, once established, it becomes self-perpetuating. The more people fall silent, the more natural silence appears, the harder it becomes to break it. What began as a rational response to real risks gradually turns into habit, into a crystallized relational pattern, into a “way of functioning” that no one questions anymore because no one remembers it could be otherwise. Silence ceases to be choice and becomes atmosphere—something everyone breathes, yet no one can see.

It is worth noting that there is another layer of complexity that deserves attention: not all silence is the same. There are silences that are forms of resistance—when someone refuses to participate in a farce, when they choose not to legitimize a process they know is rigged, when their silence is the only form of dignity left in the face of configurations they cannot transform. And there are silences that are forms of complicity—when we remain silent in the face of injustices we witness, when we let subtle violences pass because denouncing them would be uncomfortable, when our omission sustains structures we claim to reject.

The difference between these silences lies not in the absence of speech, but in the power relations each silence expresses. The subordinate’s silence before a superior who tolerates no contradiction is qualitatively different from the superior’s silence who chooses not to see what it would be their responsibility to confront. One is a symptom of powerlessness; the other is an exercise of power through the refusal to know. Mature organizations must develop the capacity to distinguish between these different natures of silence if they are to have any chance of transforming their communicative dynamics.

For when a leader says “I want everyone to feel free to speak openly,” while all their concrete past reactions to disagreement have shown exactly the opposite, they are not creating openness; they are adding another layer of violence. The violence of demanding that people ignore what they know about how that space really works and act as if the official declarations were true. It is asking them to pretend they do not see what they see, to pretend they do not know what they know, to participate in a collective performance of authenticity in which everyone knows real authenticity would be punished.

And here we reach a crucial point: you do not transform patterns of silencing through calls for courage or assertiveness training workshops. You transform them only by changing the relational and power structures that produce them. Only by demonstrating, through repeated actions over time, that the cost of speaking has decreased and the cost of remaining silent has increased. Only by patiently and consistently building new patterns of response to what is said—especially to what is difficult to hear.

This demands something most organizations are unwilling to do: it demands that those in positions of power develop the capacity to be challenged without retaliating. It demands they learn to receive criticism, disagreement, uncomfortable truths as valuable information about blind spots rather than as attacks on their authority. It demands a profound transformation in their very relationship with vulnerability—because allowing others to say what you would prefer not to hear is a radical form of vulnerability that few leaders can bear.

Yet there is another dimension of organizational silence that deserves exploration: the dimension of what remains unsaid because we lack the language to name it. There are experiences, perceptions, intuitions that circulate at a pre-verbal level—you feel something is wrong, that a dynamic is dysfunctional, that a decision makes no sense, but you cannot articulate exactly what. In environments where only what can be clearly argued has legitimacy, these nebulous yet often accurate perceptions remain outside the conversation—not because they are censored, but because they find no form of expression.

Organizations that develop communicative maturity learn to create spaces where the still-unarticulated can begin to take shape. Where it is legitimate to say, “I can’t quite name what bothers me, yet something in this proposal doesn’t add up.” Where vague perceptions can be placed on the table so the group, collectively, can help give form to what each person feels but none can formulate alone. This requires tolerance for the ambiguous, the imprecise, the processual—qualities rare in organizational cultures obsessed with clarity and objectivity.

And when you begin to pay attention to patterns of silence in an organization—when you develop sensitivity to who speaks and who does not, what is spoken about and what is not, in which contexts silence increases and in which it decreases—you are, in fact, conducting an archaeology of the power structures and collective fears that organize that space. Because silence is not random. It distributes itself systematically, following lines of hierarchy, gender, race, seniority—all the markers through which power and privilege are unevenly distributed.

There are voices that are systematically silenced even when they speak: they are heard yet not listened to, permitted yet never taken into account, granted formal right of expression yet never able to actually influence decisions. And there are voices that echo even when they whisper—amplified, interpreted generously, finding space and resonance regardless of content. This unequal distribution of the capacity to signify, to make a difference through speech, is one of the most sophisticated ways structural inequalities perpetuate themselves in organizations.

But what makes silence particularly complex is that it is not always and only negative. There are silences that are forms of care—when you choose not to say something true yet unnecessarily cruel, when you protect another’s vulnerability by not publicly exposing what you know, when you recognize that speaking at certain moments would itself be a form of violence. And there are silences that are forms of wisdom—when you sense it is not yet the right time for a conversation, that certain truths need preparation, that there are rhythms and timings that must be respected for something to be truly heard.

Relational maturity, therefore, does not lie in eliminating all silence in favor of an impossible and probably undesirable total transparency. It lies in developing discernment about when silence serves the health of the system and when it serves the maintenance of dysfunctional dynamics. It lies in learning to distinguish between the silence that protects and the silence that paralyzes, between the silence that respects and the silence that silences, between the unsaid that enables coexistence and the unsaid that prevents transformation.

And when we think about the broader context of human relations—not only in organizations, but in every space where we constitute one another—we discover that silence is always relational. You do not fall silent into a void; you fall silent in relation to someone who could listen and chooses not to, or who would listen yet in a way that would put you at risk. One person’s silence is always a response to the other’s mode of presence. Transforming patterns of silencing therefore demands transformation at both poles of the relation—as much in the one who falls silent as in the one who, through their way of being present, produces the silencing.

Here lies a truth that is rarely named: every prolonged silence in a relationship is a form of shared loneliness. Two people can be physically close, can work together, can occupy the same space for years, and still inhabit radically separate universes of meaning because what would matter most to say remains perpetually outside the field of the sayable between them. And this relational loneliness—this being-together yet fundamentally isolated—is one of the most painful forms of human suffering, and one of the most normalized in organizational contexts.

Because we have learned to live with it. We have learned to function in environments where we know only the surface of one another, where professional relationships are sustained through careful mask management, where everyone knows that what appears in official interactions is merely a carefully edited fraction of everything we think, feel, perceive. And we call this professionalism, maturity, the ability to separate personal and professional—when it may simply be a sophisticated form of relational impoverishment that we have normalized because we cannot imagine an alternative.

Yet there are organizations—rare ones—that develop a different quality of presence. Where people learn to be with one another in ways that allow more of the human to appear without dissolving boundaries or losing focus. Where it is possible to bring doubts without being seen as incompetent, fears without being seen as weak, disagreements without being seen as disloyal. Where silence can be inhabited together—not as escape from difficult conversation, but as part of the conversation, as a moment of gestation of meaning that precedes the word.

And perhaps one of the most sophisticated abilities anyone can develop—whether as leader, colleague, or human being in any relational context—is the capacity to be present to another’s silence without needing to fill it hastily. To bear the discomfort of the unsaid without forcing premature verbalization. To recognize that internal processes are unfolding at their own pace, and that sometimes the best way to create conditions for something to be said is simply to be present, available—without demanding, without pressing, without interpreting silence as rejection or as a problem to be solved.

Because there is a fundamental difference between the silence that occurs because there is no safe space for speech and the silence that occurs because the space is safe enough—safe enough that one can dwell in the still-unformulated without hurry to turn it into discourse. The first silence is a symptom of diseased relations; the second is the expression of relations mature enough not to need to fill every void with words.

Thus we arrive at an understanding that completely transforms how we think about organizational communication: the goal is not to eliminate silences, but to transform the quality of silences. To create environments where people fall silent not out of fear, but out of choice. Where they can decide what to share and what to keep not because they will be punished for speaking, but because they have developed discernment about when speaking contributes and when it merely pollutes. Where silence ceases to be forced absence and becomes chosen presence.

This demands a revolution in how we understand what makes an organization “communicative.” It is not the quantity of words exchanged, not the frequency of meetings, not the existence of open channels. It is the quality of the relational space that allows both speech and silence to be genuinely chosen rather than compulsory. It is the possibility for each person to consciously navigate between saying and withholding, knowing that both have their place and legitimacy depending on context, moment, and specific relationship.

In the end, what we discover is that paying attention to silence—to what is not being said, to what cannot be said, to what is being actively silenced—is not a technical skill of reading non-verbal cues. It is an ethical stance of recognition that every human relationship operates on multiple layers simultaneously, and that often what remains unsaid carries more truth about the nature of that relationship than everything explicitly communicated.

Organizations that develop this awareness stop trusting only what is officially declared and begin investigating the patterns of what remains systematically outside conversation. They stop blaming individuals for “not expressing themselves” and start interrogating the relational structures that make certain speech acts impossible or dangerous. They stop seeking technical solutions to communicative problems that are, in reality, symptoms of power configurations no one wants to name.

Because in the end—and this is the most uncomfortable truth about organizational silence—it rarely exists because people do not know what to say or how to say it. It exists because they know perfectly well what would happen if they did. And as long as that clarity about the consequences of breaking silence is not confronted, every initiative to “improve communication” will be, at best, ineffective, and at worst, additional forms of violence that pretend not to know what everyone already knows: that silence is not an individual choice, but a collective response to structures we prefer not to transform.

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Did this reflection destabilize your certainties about how your organization truly communicates?

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