We have taught people to speak up. The harder test is whether leaders will act on what they hear, and why hierarchy and seniority make that harder, not easier.
A concern is raised through the proper channel. It involves someone senior, someone the organisation values and relies on. The details are uncomfortable, and the implications are worse. A policy exists. A process starts. And in that moment, the real test begins. And it belongs to the leader who now has to decide what to do with what they have just heard.
We have spent years teaching people to speak up. The harder question, the one that decides whether any of it matters, is whether leaders act on what they hear.
The half we haven’t built runs on leadership judgment
Australia has invested heavily in the speaking-up half: policies, hotlines, training, codes of conduct, board committees. Much of it works. But a reporting channel is only a mechanism. What turns it into culture is what happens after a disclosure lands. A concern rarely fails at the hotline. It fails later, on a desk, when someone with authority finds it easier to treat as noise than as a signal worth pursuing. That half runs on leadership judgment alone, and we have barely built it.
There is hard commercial logic here. Deal with a concern early, while it is small and can be contained. Ignore it, and it grows. A confidential conversation becomes an investigation, then a matter of public record, then legal action. From there come lost clients and the revenue attached to them, regulators and governments that are harder to reassure, and capital that is harder to obtain and costs more.
ASIC’s December 2025 whistleblower report found that of 134 companies surveyed, more than one in five received no disclosures at all. That looks like good conduct. The regulator saw it differently, urging boards to ask whether people trust the channel, or have learned that using it changes nothing. Silence is easily mistaken for business as usual. Often it is the opposite. People may have stopped raising things, because raising them before changed nothing. The problems are still there. Leadership just cannot see them anymore.
The people best placed to act are the most constrained
Human behaviour follows a well-documented pattern. The more people who witness or experience a conflict, issue or problem, the less likely any one of them is to act, because responsibility feels shared. We assume this applies to crowds, and to employees at every level, not to those in charge. The reverse is closer to the truth. The forces that keep people silent grow stronger as you move up an organisation, not weaker.
The reason is structural. A leader has more of their identity, alliances and reputation bound up in the group whose conduct is in question. Acting can feel like turning on your own, and betraying those you rely on. It is hardest when the person involved is a strong performer, a long-standing colleague or a major client, and when acting would slow a commercial outcome or create conflict or doubt at the top. The person best placed to act is often the most constrained. This is how hierarchy and power shape leaders, and we should name it as such rather than mistake it for a failure of character.
An organisation works like an iceberg. Above the waterline are the things we notice: strategy, performance and productivity problems, and behaviour shaped by policy and structure. Below it sit the underlying forces of its cultural systems, human and emotional, conscious and unconscious, and for that reason often unseen. And it is these forces below the line that decide how people actually act.
A concern like this rarely arrives as a neutral piece of information. It lands as a shock, registers as a threat, and triggers real emotion: the leader may feel attacked, betrayed, angry, or wronged. Those feelings are valid. But under pressure, they pull us toward a defensive reaction, fight or flight, and in that state, we often protect something unresolved in ourselves rather than the interests of the organisation. What separates the leader who acts constructively and firmly from the leader who avoids is not the absence of that reaction. It is the ability to step onto the balcony, to observe what is happening in themselves and in the wider system, to pause and make sense of the dynamic playing out on the dance floor below, and to choose a considered position and response rather than let reactivity take over and make the issue bigger.
The person best placed to act is often the most constrained.
And here is the part that matters most. The leader who stays silent rarely experiences it as silence. They experience it as a choice that protects them: a belief that avoiding the underlying issue will preserve loyalty, that staying quiet is prudent, and that it shields the organisation. The avoidance is real, but it does not feel like avoidance from the inside, which is exactly why it persists. Ultimately, this creates cognitive dissonance for everyone. People sense that something is wrong. It does not feel right, and their instincts tell them so, yet the organisation is asking for something different: head down, look away. The result is a toxic, divided workplace, marked by ongoing ambivalence and disengagement.
Staying silent is choosing not to blow the whistle
This reframes who is really carrying the risk. We ask people at every level to take a real personal risk when they raise a concern, and many who do pay for it in strained relationships and stalled careers. Ask those who have been through it, and a striking number say that, knowing what they now know, they would not do it again.
Now hold that against a leader who sees the same wrongdoing. They have more information, more authority and more protection than the person who first reported it. And still, often, they say nothing. A senior leader who stays quiet has, in effect, chosen not to blow the whistle they already hold, while relying on people with far less power to be braver than they are.
This is where listening becomes active. Listening that produces no consequence is simply a more sophisticated form of silence. Boards are not exempt. When a serious concern reaches a director, the test is whether they treat it as a signal that demands independent scrutiny, or hand it back to the very management it may implicate and call that due process. When an ignored signal surfaces later, as it tends to, the accountability does not sit with the person who raised it or the person who buried it. It sits with the leader who had the authority to act and chose comfort.
When a concern reaches you, you are no longer a bystander to it. You are the system.
Silence builds one ignored signal at a time
None of this is new. The pattern of capable people staying quiet while something goes wrong, and the institution paying for it later, has repeated for decades, across professional services, financial services, policing, health and fast-growth firms alike. The setting changes. The mechanism does not.
Concerns rarely fail because no one hears them. They fail because the system plays them down on the way up. Each layer makes it sound smaller than the one below it, until what reaches the top is faint enough to ignore. Silence builds slowly. It is rarely the work of a few people who lack ethics and integrity, and more often the sum of many small moments where someone chose not to look. Every concern that goes nowhere teaches everyone watching that speaking up is pointless, and futility hardens into culture. Each one also draws down a reserve of trust that took years to build and disappears quickly. A workforce that has learned not to bother is invisible on any dashboard, right up until the day it is not.
What it requires is ownership. The leader has to own the concern in the narrative, saying clearly and with conviction that it is being taken seriously, and then own it through action. They cannot own it alone. The entire leadership team must move in lockstep, so that acting on the concern reads as the organisation’s position, not one person’s issue. Ownership that stays with one leader or stops at words will never cut it. The Governance Institute’s 2025 Ethics Index captures the gap. Australians rate the importance of ethical behaviour at a record high, while their confidence that it is upheld sits well below. That distance is a leadership problem.
Integrity is what you do in the first hour
Return to the leader at the desk, the concern in front of them, the discomfort still fresh. Integrity is not the value an organisation paints on the wall or publishes on the website. It is what a leader does in the first hour after hearing something they would rather not have heard. People forgive mistakes. What they do not forgive is the gap between what an organisation says it stands for and what it does when that standard is tested. That moment sets a culture.
Every organisation has a speak-up policy. Far fewer can say, with any confidence, what they would do the next time someone is brave enough to use it. When a concern reaches you, you are no longer a bystander to it. You are the system. And everyone is watching what the system does next.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Frequently asked questions
What is a speak-up culture?
A speak-up culture is one where people are willing to raise concerns and leaders reliably act on them. It is more than a hotline, a policy or a training module. A reporting channel only records a concern. What turns it into a culture is what happens after a disclosure lands, and whether people can see that raising something actually changes anything.
Why do leaders fail to act on concerns that have been raised?
Because acting is often hardest for the people with the most authority. A senior leader usually has their identity, relationships and reputation bound up in the group whose conduct is in question, so acting can feel like turning on their own. The pressures that keep people silent grow stronger higher up an organisation, not weaker, especially when the person involved is a strong performer, a long-standing colleague or a major client.
What lies beneath an organisation’s speak-up culture?
Most of what shapes how people behave sits below the surface. Like an iceberg, an organisation shows its strategy, performance and formal structure above the waterline, while the forces that actually drive behaviour – its culture, emotions and unspoken rules – sit beneath it and often go unseen. A concern is rarely just information. It lands as a threat and triggers a defensive response, and whether a leader acts well depends on their ability to step back, observe that reaction, and choose a considered response rather than be driven by it.
What does it cost a business to ignore a workplace concern?
The cost compounds over time. A concern handled early, while it is still small, can be contained. Ignored, it tends to grow from a confidential conversation into an investigation, then a public matter, then legal action, lost clients, closer regulatory attention, and capital that is harder and more expensive to raise. Ignoring a concern also draws down trust that took years to build and disappears quickly.
Does receiving few whistleblower reports mean an organisation is healthy?
Not necessarily. Few disclosures can reflect good conduct, or it can mean people have stopped raising concerns because doing so changed nothing. ASIC’s December 2025 whistleblower report found that more than one in five of the 134 companies surveyed received no disclosures at all, and urged boards to ask whether people trust the channel. Silence is easily mistaken for business as usual when it is often the opposite.
How should a leader respond in the first hour after a concern is raised?
Treat the first hour as the real test of integrity. Pause before reacting defensively, acknowledge the concern seriously, and commit to acting on it. Integrity shows in what a leader does after hearing something they would rather not have heard, and in whether the response holds up against what the organisation claims to stand for. The wider leadership team then needs to move together, so that acting reads as the organisation’s position rather than one person’s issue.
