Professional sport isn't simply a harder version of a normal workplace. It's a different kind of organization, and sometimes the clearest way to understand it is to look at one small moment: someone knows something, and they have to decide whether to say it. You'll see staff members not flagging problems, players not disclosing injuries, and people staying quiet when they ought to speak up. Often the conversation then turns to what's wrong with that person, whether they're committed enough, resilient enough, or able to handle the pressure.
But put yourself in that person's position for a moment and think about what might happen if they speak up. They could lose playing time, damage a relationship, or become the person everyone sees as difficult, and if they do say something, there's a real question about whether anything will change. When speaking up comes at a high cost and seems unlikely to make a difference, people may decide to stay quiet. That decision can make sense, even when we wish they had made a different one.
I call this the silence calculus, the calculation someone makes about the cost of speaking and the likelihood of being heard. It doesn't tell us exactly what someone is thinking, but it gives us a reason to look at the conditions around them before deciding that the problem sits with the person. In professional sport, those conditions matter more than we tend to allow for.
Much of the management advice we're familiar with assumes people have reasonably stable jobs, that their performance is evaluated in private, and that there's time to make decisions. In professional sport, a person's livelihood depends on a body that wears down with use, and their career may last years rather than decades. Their performance is judged live, sometimes by millions of people who can watch the replay as often as they like without knowing what's happening behind it. So when we bring a workplace culture program into sport, we need to understand the workplace we're bringing it into.
There are at least eight pressures I think we need to consider: people working on different timelines, more people competing than there are places available, the body as the workplace, selection that begins in childhood, differences in power, inherited habits, constant turnover, and the effects of sustained stress on the brain trying to manage all of this. These pressures don't happen separately. They interact, and the way they interact will look different in every organization.
Take the body, for example. In most jobs, you use tools to do your work, but in sport your body is the tool. If you're hurting, you're also thinking about whether you can play, whether someone else will take your place, and what this might mean for your next contract, so saying "I'm hurt" can carry consequences well beyond the medical room.
In 2015, concussion researcher Emily Kroshus and her colleagues published a survey of college athletes. They asked about pressure to keep playing after a hit to the head, including pressure from coaches, teammates, parents and fans, and they asked whether the athletes would report symptoms during a game. Athletes who reported more pressure from those groups combined were less likely to say they would report symptoms, while pressure from the coach alone didn't show the same association.
We have to be careful with what we take from this. A survey can't establish cause and effect, and college athletes aren't professional athletes. What caught my attention was that fans were included, because people who never enter the medical room can still be part of what an athlete is considering when deciding whether to disclose an injury. By the time someone asks what hurts, the athlete may already have decided how much they're going to say.
Power works in a similar way. A coach decides who plays, how much they play, and what role they have, and they may also influence whether a contract gets recommended. If speaking up could affect any of those things, you're going to think carefully before doing it. A 2014 review of research on speaking up at work describes a pattern where greater differences in power tend to be associated with more silence. Most of that research comes from workplaces outside sport, and it can't tell us what any one person will do, but it helps us think about what might make speaking up difficult. People also learn from experience, so if you raise a concern and you're told not to step on anyone's toes, you'll remember that the next time you have something to say.
We also need to consider where the information sits. The athlete knows what hurts, and the trainer may know what's happening in the room. From what I've seen, people can have information the organization needs without having much authority to do anything with it. And the consequences of speaking up aren't the same for everyone, because they can change depending on race, gender, and whether you're someone the organization has traditionally made room for.
For women working in men's sport, I can tell you from experience that you learn the codes quickly. You learn how to enter a conversation, how much you can say, and how to say it so that people will hear you. Most of the men are decent people, and many are great people, but they're working within a system that was established before you arrived, and some of the ways things are done have never needed to be questioned by the people who are comfortable there. That's part of what makes habit difficult to change. People may not see the problem because, for them, it hasn't been a problem.
This is what I mean when I say dysfunction is adaptation. Before we describe someone's silence or an unreported injury as a character flaw, we need to ask how that behaviour might help them manage the situation they're in. That doesn't make the behaviour safe, and a decision can be understandable and still put someone at risk. But asking people to be braver doesn't change what they're risking.
So before we decide what to do, we need to understand what's happening. As a doctor, I take a history before making a diagnosis. I want to understand how someone got here, what they've been experiencing, and what might be contributing to the problem, and we need that same curiosity when we look at an organization. Otherwise we can introduce a safety program without understanding the culture it's meant to work in, or create a reporting channel without understanding why some people will never use it. An urgent medical, welfare or safeguarding concern needs immediate action, of course, but the work of understanding the organization still needs to happen.
That means asking questions people can answer from their experience, because if something has always been part of your environment, you may not think to call it a problem. You may just think that's how sport works. In the late 1990s, Alfred University surveyed college athletes across the United States. Athletes were given a list of things that might happen to new players, including being yelled at and acting as a veteran's personal servant, and were asked which they had experienced. Separately, they were asked whether they had been hazed. About 80 percent reported at least one experience that met the study's definition of hazing, and twelve percent said they had been hazed.
These were self-reports from college athletes a generation ago, so they don't tell us what's happening in your team today. But they do show why we need to think carefully about the questions we ask. If you ask whether there's hazing in an organization, someone may say no. If you ask what happens during a rookie's first month, they may describe something that gives you reason to look more closely. People don't have to use the word we're looking for to tell us something we need to hear.
We also need to be clear about what the research can tell us. Direct research on elite sport is more limited than people often assume, and much of this thinking draws on work from other settings, including hospitals, aviation, ordinary workplaces and neuroscience labs. A 2025 opinion article by sport psychology researchers described a search of one database for psychological interventions with elite athletes, and eleven studies across twelve years met its criteria. The silence calculus and the eight pressures haven't been tested as measures either. They're a way to organize our thinking and guide our questions, so they can help us look, but they can't give us a diagnosis.
For me, that's where understanding a high-performance culture begins: looking carefully at what people are working under and how they've learned to respond. Think about the last person who went quiet in your organization, what it might have cost them to say something, what they had seen happen to other people who spoke up, and whether they had a reason to believe anyone would do something with what they shared.
If you haven't asked them, making time for that conversation would be a useful place to begin this week.
Prefer to listen? Listen to Episode 1 — 25 minutes ↗. You can also find it on Spotify ↗, Apple Podcasts ↗, Amazon Music ↗, Overcast ↗ and Pocket Casts ↗.
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Dr. MCB
P.S. This series draws on the book Madeline Antony and I wrote, The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership (Routledge). You can find the book here ↗.