A Bending Column, a Bad Answer, and the Real Test of a Speak-Up Culture
Sean Dow was on the 22nd floor of a Manhattan high-rise last week, working on the building's sprinkler system, when he noticed something wrong with the concrete slab: cracks where cracks don't belong.
He went down a floor to get a closer look. That's where he found it: a structural column, visibly bending. See a dramatic photo here.
He brought it to the general contractor. According to Cliff Johnsen, business agent for Steamfitters Local 638, the response Dow got back was short:
“Don't worry, you'll work on the floor below.”
Yikes.
Dow didn't accept that. He kept raising the concern. Workers evacuated. The building, it turned out, was genuinely unstable, with floors sagging as much as four inches in places. Nobody was hurt. New York City has since opened an investigation into the general contractor and the developer. The developer has called the concerns “overblown.”
Embed from Getty ImagesFear Isn't the Only Thing Keeping People Quiet
Most conversations about why employees don't speak up start and end with fear. Fear of getting yelled at. Fear of being labeled difficult. Fear of losing the job. All various forms of punishment. There's a lack of psychological safety.
Fear is real, and it matters.
But in the workshops and keynotes I run, when I ask audiences directly what keeps them from speaking up, fear alone is rarely the top answer. The more common one is something quieter: futility. The belief that speaking up won't change anything, so why bother? This aligns with research by Ethan Burris and others.
Stephen Shedletzky, who wrote the book Speak-Up Culture, has a framework I come back to often:
People speak up when it feels both safe and worthwhile.
Safe means they won't be punished for it. Worthwhile means something will actually happen as a result. You need both. Take away safety and only the bravest speak up, and eventually even they stop. Or, in my experience, if it's unsafe but highly worthwhile, they'll speak up anyway.
Take away its worthiness, and you get a strange kind of silence even in places where nobody's afraid: people feel free to talk, and nothing changes, so they stop talking. We discussed this on an episode of My Favorite Mistake.
“Don't worry, you'll work on the floor below”… Nobody threatened Dow. Nobody punished him. He just got told, in effect, that his observation didn't need a second look. That's not fear. That's futility, delivered in a single sentence.
What the First Response Tells You
The most revealing part of this story isn't that Dow saw a bending column. Plenty of people notice things. It's what happened in the thirty seconds after he said something.
The first response wasn't curiosity. It wasn't “take me there and show me.” It was reassurance, offered without anyone going to look. It sounded like an assumption that things must be OK.
That's the pattern that trains people to stop mentioning what they see. Not a single dramatic punishment. Just enough small moments of being waved off that the math stops working in favor of speaking up. Dow happened to be the kind of person who pushed past that. He kept going. It was his own safety at stake.
But an organization that depends on workers being unusually persistent after getting a bad first answer isn't running a speak-up culture. It's running on luck, and hoping the next Sean Dow shows up before the next column bends too far.
Embed from Getty ImagesThe Test Comes After Someone Speaks
Every leader I've ever worked with says they want people to speak up. Almost nobody disagrees with that sentence out loud.
The real test isn't the sentence. It's what a leader does in the minute after someone actually does it.
Do you go look? Or do you tell them not to worry?
Dow's story has a good ending, and it's worth celebrating for exactly that reason. But the better question for anyone reading this and running a team isn't “would my people speak up?” It's “what happens to them when they do?” If the honest answer is closer to “don't worry, go work on the floor below” than to “let's go check,” that's worth thinking about before the next column bends and nobody happens to be as stubborn as Sean Dow.
