Speak Now, or Forever Temper Your Feedback

Two meetings in, nobody said anything.

When I took over chairing the board, I kept the meeting flow the previous chair had put in place: same process, same pacing, same structure, while a new set of board members found their feet alongside it. Changing it hadn't seemed necessary, and for two meetings, nothing suggested otherwise. If ignorance is bliss, I was having a wonderful month.

Then, in the post-board debrief after the second meeting, one of the incoming board members said he needed to say something...

The flow wasn't quite right.

We were trying to cover too much in the time we had.

It could be better.

What happened next was a bit of a comedic moment. As soon as he'd finished speaking, I felt something closer to a collective exhale than a reaction in the room. Then everyone else started agreeing, adding their own version of the same observation. It turned out almost the whole board had been thinking some version of this for two meetings. Nobody had wanted to be the one to say it first, and I apparently run a more convincing poker face than I'd realised, given how badly I'd wanted someone to.

Courage, it turns out, didn't arrive as a personality trait that one board member happened to have and the others didn't. It arrived as a decision, made once, in a specific moment, by someone who felt the same hesitation everyone else did and spoke anyway. Everything that happened afterward (the agreement, the additional feedback, the visible relief in the room) was a direct consequence of that one act, not evidence that some people are simply built braver than others.

I'd assumed, going in, that people stayed quiet because they didn't want to challenge a process that predated them, or rock a boat they'd only just climbed onto. That assumption wasn't wrong. But what surprised me was how little it actually mattered once I saw it from the other side. I didn't want a process preserved out of politeness. I wanted the meetings to work, and I needed their honesty to make that happen. The thing everyone was protecting me from was the thing I'd actually been waiting for. Turns out I can handle more bluntness than two meetings' worth of politeness gave me credit for.

Then it got easier. Not just for him. For the whole board.

Feedback that had taken two full meetings to surface the first time started showing up readily in the debriefs that followed. The first act of speaking up hadn't just solved the immediate problem with the meeting flow. It had changed what the room believed was possible to say.

It got easier so quickly, in fact, that I had to start tempering it. Speaking up, it turns out, was only ever half the lesson. I'd spent two meetings wishing someone would just say something. Once they started, I briefly found myself wishing for the opposite problem back. Not every piece of feedback that came pouring in needed to be acted on the moment it arrived: some needed more context, some belonged in a different forum altogether, some simply needed time. Creating the conditions for honesty doesn't mean giving up on shaping what happens once it arrives. A chair, it turns out, is part referee and part dam.

We talk about building courage like a muscle, but building the muscle is only ever step one. The harder, less celebrated work is learning to keep training it well once it's strong, directing it rather than either suppressing it or letting it run unmanaged. A leader's job was never just to open the door for someone's first moment of honesty. It's also to be standing there afterward, helping decide what happens with everything that follows it through that door.

I think about that board moment whenever I'm tempted to believe that the right culture simply produces outspoken people, as if courage were a switch that flips once and stays flipped.

It isn't.

It's closer to a habit that compounds: harder the first time than it will ever be again, but still something that needs tending, directing, and occasionally (gently) slowing down.

So if you're sitting in a room right now, holding back the version of feedback that board member finally gave (the one everyone else is already agreeing with, just not out loud), it's worth asking what you're actually protecting. The silence rarely protects the person it feels like it's protecting. And the first time you break it is always going to be the hardest part. After that, you're just learning how to use what you've built.