Silence is a communication decision and it is frequently the correct one. It is also the decision most easily reached for the wrong reasons, because it costs nothing today and its costs arrive later attached to something else.
Four legitimate reasons
Somebody else’s privacy. An employee’s medical situation, a student’s circumstances, a personnel matter concerning a person who cannot respond publicly. The organization’s own reputational interest may point toward disclosure and that is not a reason to disclose.
You do not know yet. Speculation stated by an institution becomes fact within a day and requires correcting later, and the correction is a second story. Saying nothing is a defensible interim position, provided you say that you do not know rather than saying nothing at all.
Speaking would damage somebody with no say. A statement that clears the organization by locating fault with a junior employee may be accurate and is rarely proportionate.
It is genuinely not the institution’s business. A nonprofit is not obliged to hold a position on every contested matter, and for a 501(c)(3) there are constraints worth understanding with counsel. Declining to comment on something outside your purpose is not evasion. It is accuracy about what the organization is.
The illegitimate ones, which look identical
Each of these is usually experienced by the person making it as one of the four above.
It might blow over. Sometimes true. The problem is that this is indistinguishable from the first legitimate reason while you are inside it, and the window in which you could have framed the event closes while you wait to find out.
Anything we say can be used against us. True of every statement ever made. Held consistently, this produces an institution that never speaks and is understood to have something to hide.
We are waiting for the investigation. Legitimate as to conclusions and not as to facts. An organization can say what happened, what it is doing in the interim, and that findings will follow, without prejudging anything.
Nobody has asked. The most common of all. Something is known internally, no external party has raised it yet, and silence gets treated as the default rather than as a choice. It is a choice, and it is being made repeatedly.
Silence is not neutral
The assumption that saying nothing leaves the situation untouched is the error underneath most of this.
Where something has happened and people know about it, an account will exist. If the institution does not supply one, it will be assembled from partial information by people with no obligation to be fair. That version then becomes the baseline, and everything the organization says afterward is a response to it.
The question is therefore not whether to speak. It is whether your account is in circulation before somebody else’s has settled.
Say why you are not speaking
Where silence is right, the reason for it almost never is, and this distinction resolves most of the difficulty.
No comment is read as concealment. This concerns an individual employee and we do not discuss any employee’s situation publicly, including this one, is a complete statement that gives up nothing and leaves the institution looking principled.
The same applies to the other three. We do not know yet and will not speculate; the report is due the fourteenth. This is a matter for the court and anything we say becomes part of it. That is outside what this organization exists to do.
Each is quotable, each closes the question, and each is available in situations where the substance genuinely cannot be discussed.
The test
Two questions, and both are uncomfortable in the specific way that makes them useful.
Who is being protected? If the honest answer is the organization’s reputation or your own position rather than a third party or a legal process, the silence is not principled and everybody will eventually be able to see that.
And: would this decision look defensible if the whole file were published? Because in a public body it may be, and in a private one it may still be, and silence maintained for defensible reasons survives that exposure while silence maintained for convenient ones does not.
The pattern matters more than the instance
Any single decision to stay quiet is defensible in isolation. What accumulates is a record.
An organization that speaks readily about ordinary things, including unflattering ones, has credit available when it says a particular matter cannot be discussed. One that speaks only about achievements has established that its silence is selective, and the selective silence is then read accurately.
Which means the capacity to be believed when you decline to comment is built during periods when nothing is wrong, and cannot be constructed during the situation where you need it.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD