I grew up attending all-Black, Baptist churches. But 10 years ago I found myself visiting a nearly all-White Presbyterian church in downtown Berkeley. It was a large congregation, hundreds in attendance, with a woman minister I greatly enjoyed. But it was so quiet in there, compared with my rollicking regular church experience. When prayer ended and I said “Amen” out loud, heads turned. Many heads turned.

After church, a number of people spotted me as a visitor and stopped by to shake my hand, say hello and deliver various other warm welcomes. I mentioned my voluble Amen-faux-pas to one woman and she said: “I know – it’s so quiet in here that my kids call us ‘the frozen chosen’.”

This incident came to mind a few weeks ago, when I was at a marketing industry leadership roundtable. There were maybe 15 of us in the room, all CMO types, mostly from Fortune 50 companies. People shared how hard it is to get employees to engage with company leaders and with each other: to share their thoughts, questions, ideas, concerns, successes and failures with the rest of the company. One exec mentioned how afraid employees are to speak up, for fear of being criticized, singled out or shamed. Several others said they have the same issue. Then people started trading notes on the various internal social media tools, like Yammer and Slack, that hold the space for internal conversations.

What I thought but didn’t say that day is that the problem these teams have is not a  technological problem. It’s a cultural problem. If people are afraid, it’s because they have reason to be. If people don’t share their lessons learned for fear of being singled out as having failed, chances are good that, well, they’ve seen someone be singled out for having failed.

And apparently this cultural problem is pervasive. I mentioned it to a close friend who has worked for a series of very large companies. I was  and she said: “Oh yeah, you don’t speak up or challenge leadership. I did that on my first job and was pulled aside and told that was a CLM.” “A what?” I asked. “A Career Limiting Move.”

Employees who are so repressed that they think asking a question of their manager is a CLM are the “frozen chosen” of their companies. Chosen because they brought some valuable knowledge, or expertise to the company in the first place. Now frozen because, like the parishioners at church that day, they are part of an organization where simply saying a thing, asking a question, pushing back on a planned initiative, turns heads. It raises alarm. It has an acronym. CLM.

This is cultural. Black churches have their own set of issues, to be sure. But one thing many of them do well is foster a culture of conversation. Here’s an anthropological experiment for you: if you’ve never attended a Black church, take 2 hours this Sunday and do so. You’ll learn, quick-like, that a Black church service is not a spectator sport. Black pastors are notorious for engaging their audiences in a two-way conversation. They look for, expect and sometimes flat out demand audience participation from the first note of the first song to the closing benediction.

It’s not for nothing that the saying “Can I get an Amen?” has penetrated the larger lexicon.

But it’s not just an “Amen” most Black church pastors want these days. Things I have actually heard Black pastors ask their audiences to do include: repeat after them, punch your neighbor, tell your neighbor how great they look today, touch your forehead, do a two-step, do the Electric Slide, rap along to an old Slick Rick song, and fill in the blanks of a not-so-old song by a guy the Pastor described as the “dysfunctional poet savant Lil’ Wayne”. Not to be outdone, my current pastor (who is white, but pastors a very diverse congregation) recently did a cooking demo onstage and had a few of the thousand people in the sanctuary come up to get their piece of the hero sandwich he’d constructed.

Good pastors – and great leaders – foster conversation because conversation fosters engagement. And engagement fosters excellence, joy, creative problem solving and innovation in our work. But here’s the rub: I’ll bet that, if you asked them, the execs in the room at that roundtable would say they do everything they can to encourage conversation. You can’t get people to engage in an ongoing, company-wide culture of conversation just by telling them to do so, if the rest of your organization’s culture has a chilling effect. Companies that understand how mission-critical conversation is to the health of their teams must normalize it and enculturate conversation, deeply, with their actions.

Normalize real talk. You could have put Martin Luther King, Jr. himself in that

Presbyterian church on that one day, and it would have turned the pin-drop hush into a momentary mutter, at most, because feedback was simply not a cultural norm in that church. Normalizing real, frank, two-way conversations takes intentional effort, modeling and the creation of spaces that prove, over time, to be safe harbors for free expression – and I mean safe occupationally and emotionally.

You go first. And second. And fifth, if need be. Leaders should be the first to call themselves and their challenges out, conduct public post-mortems and review the lessons they’ve learned, and not fake ones – they should take real failures or projects that didn’t quite go as planned, and say so, then work through what they might do differently in the future. When you put an idea out there, ask for pushback – literally invite people to show you where you’re missing something or thinking about it wrong.

Ask people for their thinking. For their trouble-shooting. Make – then honor – the rule that the best idea wins, no matter whose idea it is. Let employees see when the Project Manager’s idea gets roadmapped instead of the CEOs. When employees formerly known as frozen begin to thaw and share their thinking or ideas, expressly reward the sharing and the thinking, even when you have to course correct their concept to get it closer to something actionable.

Consistently demonstrate a high value on free thinking, questioning authority, pushback and post-mortems. Once people share their thinking, consistently show them that you honor it, and them for taking the risk to be vulnerable and express themselves. Allow employee’s free thinking and concepts to infiltrate your company’s language, culture, product roadmap and editorial calendar. Learn to ask more beautiful questions, in response to employees’ thoughts and ideas. Then ask them. Then do it all over again. Regularly.

“Can I get an Amen?” is anything but a rhetorical question at many a Black church. It’s a cultural reality. If your business depends on the engagement, creativity and free thinking of your teams, creating a culture of conversation must move from abstract ideal to a cultural reality in your organization, as well.