Not in Charge and Feeling Out of Control? It Helps to Speak Out : Workplace: Employees should be courageous enough to let their bosses know their concerns, one author says.

If you go home tonight griping about your job again, the fault could be with you, not your boss.

Could be that you aren’t taking enough responsibility for “changing those conditions in the office rather than being victimized by them,” said Washington-based management consultant Ira Chaleff.

“I’m not saying it’s easy to do. I’m saying it’s really tough. But with the right skills and attitudes we have more power to influence conditions than we believe,” said Chaleff, who works with Fortune 500 companies and elected officials.

Good leaders are made more effective when their followers speak up and speak out, he says.

In a new book, “The Courageous Follower” (Berrett-Koehler), he says that courageous employees “value organizational harmony and their relationship with the leader, but not at the expense of the common purpose and their integrity.”

“They are willing to stand up, to stand out, to risk rejection, to initiate conflict in order to examine the actions of the leader and group when appropriate,” he writes.

Unfortunately, Chaleff said he’s “somewhat stunned” to discover how reluctant people in large corporations are “to tell their manager or their manager’s manager their perceptions of the way their business functions.”

In cases where the boss “would harshly rebuff you,” Chaleff said he can understand such timidity. “But in most environments, it’s really not that way.

“I find when you push people a little and say, “Why aren’t you more direct?’ you find they’re not so afraid of being fired summarily. It’s more that they’re concerned about being marginalized--pushed out of the loop if what they say is a bit uncomfortable.”

The result is the employee who comes home griping night after night.

“They wind up living with stresses they don’t necessarily have to live with when their team could do better if the dialogue was really opened,” he said.

The key, Chaleff explained, is “to have individuals examine themselves to find the bit of extra courage it takes, and to give them the skills to speak up effectively.”

Employees often are treated badly by overbearing managers because they allow it, Chaleff said.

“Instead [of taking abuse] it would be better if I drew a line and I said, ‘Excuse me, I understand what you’re saying is important, but I’m not prepared to listen to it when you’re yelling. I’m going to excuse myself and when you’re prepared to have a dialogue I’ll address your concerns.’ ”

Chaleff said, “It’s been my experience that when the person comes out and apologizes, and says, ‘Let’s talk this through’ from then on out you have a different relationship.” This will help both the employee and the leader.

Employees, Chaleff said, need to ask themselves, “How do I have to act so that we both get what we want and the organization is getting what it needs from us?”

If you work for a successful organization, you could find it’s tougher to make changes because such companies are susceptible to so-called “groupthink.”

“When we fall into groupthink we believe, ‘Our strategy is always right and anything we decide on is brilliant.’ ” When the leaders of these companies get no critical followership from their staffs, Chaleff explained, they become “less and less connected to the reality of their customers and constituents.”

In most of the larger companies, the author said, “with six or seven management tiers, we’re all followers and we’re all leaders, so we have to learn to play both roles well.”