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HR leaders are doing the math on whether to speak up about issues like layoffs, benefit changes, DEI, and other charged workplace issues. For many, silence can feel like the safest option.
Radical Candor author Kim Scott argues that calculation is incomplete.
Her message to HR: silence is not a risk-free strategy. When leaders avoid hard conversations, they may sidestep short-term backlash, but they also create deeper problems inside the organization, including confusion, mistrust, uneven standards, and performance issues that are harder to fix later.
“If you do a pure ROI calculation, it’s not worth it to speak up, but you’ve got to do a different kind of calculation in this environment,” Scott told me and my
Fortune colleagues last week. The risk leaders often focus on is reputational. But she argues that the real cost is something more value-driven: “The cost to your soul of remaining silent is not something you need to pay.”
Speaking up, Scott says, may require some linguistic agility. When certain terms become politically charged, she recommends changing the language rather than abandoning the work. Instead of “bias,” she now uses “unintended offenses.” Instead of “prejudice,” she says “intolerant beliefs.”
But silence doesn’t just show up in how leaders talk about external issues. It’s embedded in how they manage their teams.
Scott sees another form of silence corroding workplaces: the avoidance of honest feedback. Too many leaders today withhold criticism to protect others’ feelings or their own reputation. The result, Scott says, is an endless “silence and rage cycle”: an employee underperforms, leaders seethe quietly, nothing changes, and results in frustration.
For CHROs, Scott’s warning is that silence is not neutral. Whether leaders are softening language around DEI or avoiding direct feedback with underperformers, the instinct to stay quiet can create the very problems HR is tasked with solving: mistrust, inconsistent standards, stalled performance, and messy escalations. Her argument is that candor is more than a management virtue—it is a workplace risk-control strategy.
“As soon as someone does something that really bothers you, you need to say it,” Scott says. “The sooner you say it, the less likely you are to say it explosively. You’re most likely, the very first time, to say it well.”
Kristin StollerEditorial Director, Fortune Live Media
kristin.stoller@fortune.com
