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7 Things Leaders Can Do to be Refreshingly Different

Lead Change Blog

Political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann calls this behavior the spiral of silence. Effective leadership is delivering both results and relationships, which sometimes requires putting ourselves in the lonely but necessary place of speaking and acting differently. Audre Lorde, poet and activist.

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Spiral of Silence

CO2

The Spiral of Silence, a mass communication theory introduced by Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann in 1974, suggests that the more prevalent and popular a position is, the more people fear opposing that position in public. Yammer and private blogs can provide an anonymous space for employees to speak out. They fear social rejection.