Why "Everyone Knew" is a Leadership Failure
Inspired by my conversation with Jamie Klingler, Why Care? Season 7, Episode 63
In Episode 63 of Why Care?, campaigner Jamie Klingler made a point that should unsettle any leader who doesn’t place emphasis on workplace safety.
Reflecting on patterns she's seen across institutions from policing to corporate life, she described the open secret: the whisper network of "never be alone with him”, "never share a taxi with him”. Men know. Women know. Everyone knows. And still, nothing changes until something goes wrong and only then is there an organisational intervention.
Psychological, this is know as diffusion of responsibility, a well-documented phenomenon in behavioural science where the more people who share knowledge of a problem, the less any single person feels accountable for fixing it. It is enhanced when hierarchy and power is present. In organisations, this shows up as exactly what Klingler describes: widespread informal awareness, paired with formal institutional silence. Everyone assumes someone else, e.g. HR, a manager, "the system", will deal with it. No one does.
This has been illustrated time and time again, most recently in what has been uncovered about Jeffrey Epstein. Women who were trafficked by him have spoken up and explained that they had to be seen by doctors and nurses who must have seen what was going on and must have known, yet stayed silent. This is diffusion of responsibility compounded by fear of power: the more powerful the figure at the centre, the more individuals convince themselves that someone else (someone with more authority, more evidence, or less to lose) will be the one to speak up.
Each person's silence becomes rational in isolation, even as it adds up to collective complicity. The same dynamic plays out in organisations on a smaller scale: when the person of concern is senior enough, "surely someone above me will deal with it" becomes the quiet, shared excuse that lets harm continue unchecked.
Jamie’s observation, in essence, is that policy doesn't change behaviour - consequence does. She points out that initiatives like #MeToo often strengthened non-disclosure agreements and exit processes without stopping the underlying conduct, because the organisational response is engineered to manage risk to the institution, not to interrupt the behaviour itself.
For business leaders, the practical implication is uncomfortable but clear. Psychological safety, the evidence-based driver of high-performing teams, isn't built through sheep-dipping people through training. It's built by visible, costly action even if it means losing a high performer to protect everyone around them.
The behavioural science is straightforward: people calibrate their own conduct not by what's written in a handbook, but by what they watch leadership tolerate. If the approach is repeatedly to “manage it quietly”, the lesson learned across the organisation is that quiet management is what happens to victims too.
The question worth sitting with isn't whether your organisation has a policy. It's whether your people would say leadership has ever actually acted on what everyone already knew.
Nadia Nagamootoo is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, executive coach, and author of Beyond Discomfort. She is the host of Why Care? Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.