Dr Nate Zettner

speaker

232 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 26 Jul

Dr Nate Zettner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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This Working Life · The dangers of silence at work · 26 Jul 2026 podcast

Good day, Lisa.

Thanks for having me here.

There are so many reasons and motives for why people would remain silent, but maybe before we get that it'll be good to kinda define a little bit what silence means.

So it is the intentional withholding of opinions or concerns in the workplace.

We have to remind ourselves that it's a conscious decision that we're making, that we do have something to say, and we're intentionally, consciously withholding them for c many, many different reasons.

And that's where it leads to the motives or the categories that you're talking about.

So two of the main reasons for why people often remain silent in the first place is often around the feeling that their ideas or their concerns.

Or their opinions or suggestions are gonna be futile.

So they believe that what they say will not amount to anything in the workplace, or no one's gonna listen to them, and no change is gonna come about, anyways.

So they choose to kind of just withhold that.

And another main reason is around what we call this defensive mode of silence or this quiescent mode of silence.

So people are remaining silent because.

Because of fear or feeling that if they say something, this could harm them or lead to negative consequences for them as well.

So those are kind of the two main reasons, but there are also many other ones which I would often call quite dangerous as well.

So there is what we call this deviant type of silence where you

Know something and you're intentionally withholding it to harm other people.

So you might harm your teammates, you might harm your boss, for example, by not sharing certain pieces of information.

And this relates to another one, which I think this one is quite evil, is around like being opportunistic because you're you're holding this information and you kind of know more than others.

So when the opportunity is right, you're saying things that will

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