Somewhere in the 1980s, a company did something generous and learned something terrible. Semco granted two weeks of paid paternity leave to every new father. Not one man took it. The reason, as Ricardo Semler has told it, was fear of what the boss would think. Out of that came a rule worth more than the benefit itself: a benefit nobody dares use is not a benefit, it is decoration. He pointed at the modern analogue himself, unlimited PTO that nobody dares take.
The men who declined that leave are grandfathers now. Many of them, asked about the old workplace, will say some version of “we just got on with it,” usually with pride, sometimes aimed at younger workers who seem to talk about feelings a great deal. It is worth taking that sentence apart, because it contains a factual claim about the past, and the factual claim is testable.
Silence was not stoicism; it was pricing
“We just got on with it” implies the problems were spoken of by no one because they were felt by no one. The alternative reading is that the problems were felt and the speaking was expensive. The paternity story settles which reading is right, in at least one company: the desire to be home with a newborn plainly existed, and the price of revealing it, in the boss's estimation of you, was set too high to pay. Silence was not the absence of things to say. It was a market where saying them cost too much.
Modern research has measured what that market does to the people in it. A meta-analysis by Hao and colleagues, aggregating 168 samples and 63,134 employees, finds employee silence associated with worse job attitudes, lower well-being, and worse performance. The same literature makes a subtler point: silence and voice are not simple opposites; the forces that suppress speech (fear, inhibition) are distinct from those that invite it (autonomy, support). Which means a workplace does not get voice by ceasing to punish it. It gets voice by actively making it safe, and the older workplace did neither.
What the silence actually cost
Amy Edmondson's foundational study of 51 work teams gave the phenomenon its name and its price tag. Psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk, predicted learning behavior: asking questions, admitting error, flagging problems early. Learning behavior, in turn, is what connected safety to performance. Run that logic backwards over four decades of “getting on with it” and the cost comes into focus. Every defect a machinist saw and did not mention, every process a clerk knew was broken and worked around, every warning that died in the parking lot was subtracted from performance, invisibly, year after year. The silent workplace did not avoid the cost of speaking. It paid the larger cost of not learning, and booked it under headings like scrap, rework, and turnover.
And it paid privately, too. The generation that could not take paternity leave also could not say “I am drowning” or “this schedule is breaking my marriage.” The well-being findings in the silence literature are the statistical echo of thousands of those unsaid sentences.
The elder's advantage in fixing it
Here is the strange asset the senior generation holds: they are the only people who know, from inside, the difference between a rule and the fear that enforced it. A younger manager reads the old handbook and sees policies. The veteran remembers which policies were real and which were theater, who actually decided things, and exactly what happened to the last person who spoke up. That memory is a demolition map.
It also suggests where to aim. The Semco lesson was not “offer better benefits.” It was: watch what people do not dare use, and treat that as the diagnostic. A team where nobody takes the leave, uses the anonymous channel, or contradicts the founder in a meeting is running the old market at new prices. The veteran who says, out loud, “I never took the leave, and I should have,” does more to reprice that market than any poster about speak-up culture, because the cost of silence is best explained by someone holding the receipts.
Getting on with it was real, and it built a great deal. But it was a tax, not a virtue, and the people who paid it are the most credible witnesses that the next generation should not.
Sources
- Edmondson, A., Administrative Science Quarterly (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Field study of 51 teams: psychological safety predicts learning behavior, which mediates its effect on team performance. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999
- Hao, L. et al., Journal of Business and Psychology (2022). When Is Silence Golden? Meta-analysis of 168 samples, 63,134 employees: silence is associated with worse job attitudes, lower well-being, and worse performance; silence and voice are distinct constructs. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10869-021-09788-7