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The necessity for organizations to embrace “speaking up” is broader than “speaking truth to power.” Speaking up is about improving group performance by engaging in open dialogue—across all levels of rank, position, and tenure—to ensure that organizations have all available knowledge when addressing challenges. Unfortunately, people often refrain from speaking up and voicing new ideas in order to avoid contradicting a superior or embarrassing a colleague. But while keeping quiet can work for self-protection, it does little for group problem solving and helping organizations avoid mistakes. Leveraging her experience across industry, government, and academia, the author debunks two myths: that speaking up is about having courage, and that only lower-level employees worry about speaking up. This article explains how members of an organization can embrace speaking up by developing dialogue skills and increasing psychological safety while implementing teaming routines (e.g., quarterly dinners and council meetings) that provide the opportunity to speak up. It highlights the author’s work with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency to illustrate the benefits of speaking up in a real-life setting. Ultimately, when an organization’s members have dialogue skills, feel psychologically safe, and work in a group where teaming routines support speaking up, needless mistakes are avoided, time is saved, and knowledge is available to make informed decisions.

Knowledge sharing allows teams and individuals to more quickly develop solutions to difficult problems, reduce costly duplication of effort, and create new, innovative solutions through collaboration. But, as this former George Washington University professor turned academic points out, most knowledge sharing practices neglect the group or individual who will receive and hopes to leverage the knowledge. Written to help the reader empathize with and understand the particular needs of the knowledge sharer, this article suggests what organizations and managers can do to support the particular needs of the other, important component of the knowledge equation, the knowledge receiver. (NOTE: Ms. Dixon's book, Common Knowledge, was chosen as The Globe and Mail's Report on Business's Best Business Book of 2000.)