Founder of Elevation Occupational Psychology | Business Psychologist | Author | Teaching Fellow | Project Manager | Consultant | Coach | Researcher
Rachel Smith’s research into workplace silence found a calculation about power, trust and consequence, and her argument is that organizations keep examining the wrong side of it.
“People can be perfectly capable of having the conversation and still decide that having it is not worth the perceived risk.” Rachel Smith is describing the employee who says nothing about a health condition or an adjustment that is not working, and the explanation organizations reach for when they notice the silence: low confidence, weak communication skills, something missing in the person. Her doctoral research on difficult conversations at work points somewhere else, at a calculation the employee has already finished and the organization has never read.
Rachel Smith founded Elevation Occupational Psychology and is first author of a peer-reviewed 2025 scoping review summary on difficult conversations at work.
Avoidance Is an Appraisal, Not a Missing Skill
Everything decisive happens before anyone speaks. That is what sits underneath Smith’s scoping review summary and her doctoral work. “People are often doing considerable psychological work before they speak, assessing the situation, the relationship, the risks and possible consequences, rehearsing different approaches and deciding whether they feel able to act at all,” she says.
“People are making an appraisal before they speak. They are considering who they need to talk to, the power that person holds, the quality of the relationship, how personal the issue is, what they might have to disclose and what could happen afterwards,” Smith says. Where the subject is health, disability or identity, the disclosure is more personal and the uncertainty larger. The verdict fits the environment it was run in. “If previous experience tells someone that their manager becomes defensive, disclosure could change how their capability is perceived, confidentiality may not be respected, or raising the issue is unlikely to change anything, choosing not to speak can make sense,” she says.
Rachel Smith took on a client managing a long-term health condition whose Occupational Health adjustments were recommended but not consistently implemented, and who had been advocating for them long enough to be exhausted by it. “There wasn’t one obvious problem, there were lots of interconnected barriers,” she says. “They already knew how to communicate their needs, so my role wasn’t to give them a script. It was helping them make sense of the situation, prepare and rebuild some confidence.”
“I don’t have a numerical outcome because this wasn’t a formally measured intervention. What I saw was greater clarity and confidence around how they wanted to approach the situation and what they were no longer prepared to keep taking responsibility for,” Smith says. The exhaustion had a history behind it. “How exhausting repeated self-advocacy can become. Sometimes people aren’t avoiding a conversation because they lack confidence. They have already had the conversation several times and are tired of not being heard.”
The Manager Had Seconds. The Employee Had Weeks.
Smith has been on the disclosing side of one of these conversations herself. She had spent considerable time working out what she was comfortable sharing about her health and how to explain what she needed. “The response wasn’t deliberately unkind, but it quickly became focused on what my health might mean for my ability to work and what I might no longer be able to do. I remember leaving the conversation feeling that the perception of me had shifted. I had gone into it as a capable professional trying to explain what I needed to continue working effectively, but came away feeling that my health had suddenly become the most important thing about me,” she says.
“The employee may have spent days or weeks deciding whether to disclose something, while the manager has had seconds to process it,” Smith says. One party arrives rehearsed, the other improvises, and that improvisation sets the terms for everything the employee brings back later.
Conventional approaches, in Smith’s reading, leave that asymmetry alone: they “focus heavily on what somebody should say while paying much less attention to whether they feel able to say it in the first place.” What she built runs earlier. “I translated this into the Conversation Compass, which provides a map to help individuals navigate a difficult conversation rather than a script for having one,” she says.
Eight Lenses HR Teams Can Steal Before the Next Disclosure
The Compass runs eight lenses over a conversation before it happens: Purpose, why this conversation and why now; People, who is involved and whose risk is greater; Pressures, the constraints shaping the exchange; Pattern, what has happened before and what it teaches both sides to expect; Presence, how the person wants to show up; Protection, the boundaries, safeguards or support needed; Practice, the norms that should guide the interaction; and Post, what has to happen afterwards. Rachel Smith works it through in coaching, on a conversation that has not happened yet.
- First, change the question the organization asks about its own silence. “The question should not simply be ‘Why didn’t they speak?’, but ‘What did they believe would happen if they did?'” Smith says. The second question produces answers a policy can act on: a manager who reacted badly last time, a confidentiality breach, a previous request that went nowhere.
- Second, put the training budget on the receiving side. “Organisations spend a lot of time encouraging employees to speak and comparatively less time asking whether managers know how to receive challenge, disclosure, vulnerability or uncomfortable information without becoming defensive, dismissive or immediately trying to fix it,” Smith says. The instruction is to audit that side before commissioning another course for the speaking side.
- Third, do not lead with the script, since the words are rarely the missing piece. What runs instead is the preparation: “We can explore what is making it difficult, what they are concerned about, what they can and cannot control, what preparation or support they need and how they want to approach it,” Smith says. Purpose, People, Pattern and Protection, worked through in advance, do what no form of words rehearsed in a training room can.
When the Disclosure Lands, the First Response Sets the Terms
- Fourth, slow the first response down. A manager who has seconds to process what an employee spent weeks preparing does not need a perfect answer. “You don’t need to have the perfect response, but curiosity, listening and giving yourself time before jumping to conclusions can make an enormous difference to what that person takes away from the conversation,” Smith says.
- Fifth, sort the load and then close it. Smith’s own revision of the coaching case is a sequence any manager can run in a follow-up meeting: “I’d probably slow things down more. With so many barriers, I would spend more time helping the person separate what needs attention now, what can wait and, importantly, what isn’t theirs to fix.” The Post lens finishes the job. A recommended adjustment that never reaches implementation is the previous experience the next appraisal will be run against.
Smith’s case to the manager weighing whether to open one of these conversations at all: “Don’t let your discomfort or fear of saying the wrong thing stop you having the conversation, but remember that how you respond can shape whether that person ever feels safe bringing something difficult to you again.”
Who Is Dr. Rachel Smith, the Researcher Behind the Conversation Compass?
Dr. Rachel Smith, PhD, GMBPsS, AFHEA, CBP, is a Business Psychologist, the founder of Elevation Occupational Psychology, and a Teaching Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, based in the United Kingdom. She founded Elevation in September 2021 alongside an internship and doctoral research, began taking paid consultancy work in 2022, and since 2023 has worked with approximately six organizations across the hospitality and charity sectors on research, workshops and consultancy, alongside seven individual coaching clients navigating health conditions at work.
She is first author of “Let’s Talk, Difficult Conversations at Work: A Scoping Review Summary,” published in 2025 in Occupational Psychology Outlook, the peer-reviewed British Psychological Society journal, and first author of a 2022 systematic literature review on the signals, barriers and components of difficult conversations about alcohol at work, published by Drinkaware and not peer reviewed. She is a collaborating author on a second Drinkaware report from the same year. Her doctoral research at the University of Hertfordshire, on how people experience, appraise, approach and avoid difficult conversations at work, has now been awarded following completion and approval of her post-viva amendments.
At Hertfordshire she leads five core MSc modules across the online MSc Social and Organisational Psychology and MSc Psychology Conversion programmes, among them Well-being at Work, Culture Change and Leadership, and The Workplace and Psychology. In March 2022 the university’s Life and Medical Science faculty gave her its Postgraduate Student Achievement Deans Award, on the basis of outstanding achievement on the MSc Occupational Psychology programme she completed in November 2021.
Smith is precise about what she is and is not. Elevation provides business and occupational psychology-informed consultancy, and she does not use the HCPC-protected titles Occupational Psychologist or Practitioner Psychologist. Her Business Psychologist status was awarded by the Association for Business Psychology in 2026. Living and working with cancer has informed her understanding of vulnerability and disclosure at work, one perspective among the evidence rather than the engine behind it.
The work is not a better script. It is a shorter distance between what an employee has already worked out and what an organization is prepared to hear.
Dr. Rachel Smith, PhD, GMBPsS, AFHEA, CBP, is a Business Psychologist, the founder of Elevation Occupational Psychology, and a Teaching Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, based in the United Kingdom. To connect with Rachel or learn more, visit https://www.elevationoccpsy.com/ or find her on LinkedIn.
