Your people know exactly what’s wrong. Why aren’t they telling you?
Psychological safety gets filed under employee wellbeing. That is a category error, and an expensive one.
Let me start where you actually are.
Your top concerns are efficiency and revenue, closely followed by cost. I’m not going to argue with that, and I’m not going to ask you to care about something softer. I’ll stay inside your frame the whole way — and then ask you one question you won’t like.
Give me a number
How confident are you that your sales and marketing people are doing everything they can to bring in higher revenue?
A number. Not a speech.
Whatever you said, it wasn’t 100. Nobody says 100. So the real question is the next one: why isn’t it? And set aside the truism that nothing ever is. What specifically is missing? Most leaders can answer this — better lead generation, better follow-through, sharper use of technology.
Now do the same on cost. You and your team have identified savings. You’ve implemented them. How satisfied are you with that implementation?
Again, not 100.
So on both of the things you told me matter most, there is a gap between where you are and where you believe you could be. You know the gap is there. You probably can’t fully explain it.
Who knows the work better?
Who understands the work better — the people actually doing it, or you and your leadership team?
Every leader answers this immediately, and they all answer it the same way. The people doing it.
They know which part of the process is broken. Which tool is missing. What a competitor is doing that you aren’t, and what you’re doing that has stopped working. Which of last year’s cost initiatives quietly became a workaround. Which customer objection has never once been escalated.
So: how confident are you that they are telling you?
Not that they could. Not that there’s a survey, a skip-level, an open door. How confident are you that they are actually saying the thing they already know — to you, in time for you to act on it?
In most organisations, the honest answer is: not very.
They are not slacking
This part gets misheard, so let me be precise.
Your people are not withholding effort. They are working hard, most of them harder than you think. You are getting their hands and their hours in full.
What you are not getting is their judgement. Their read on what is actually wrong. Their idea for the better way. Their warning that the plan has a hole in it.
And they’re not withholding it out of disloyalty. They’re withholding it because they have made a quick calculation about how it will land. What happens to the person who says this? What will it cost me — this quarter, at appraisal, in the next restructure?
That calculation takes about a second. It happens thousands of times a week across your organisation. And every time it resolves the wrong way, something you needed simply does not arrive.
That is the gap between your number and 100.
The name for this
You have probably heard the phrase by now. Psychological safety. It has become a buzz phrase, which is a shame, because the thing itself is not complicated.
It comes down to one question: do people believe their voice is welcome and valued — irrespective of the content of the message? Good news or bad news. Agreement or challenge. And is it genuinely true that there is no penalty for saying it?
That’s all it is. Not comfort. Not everyone being nice to each other. Not the absence of disagreement — the opposite, in fact. Just: is your voice welcome here, and is it safe to use it?
If the answer is no, then the biggest and most impactful project available to you is not the next system or the next restructure. It is a culture in which people already know what you need to know, and don’t say it.
A session that solved nothing — and changed everything
An example, because this can sound abstract.
A large global organisation had a problem between its global function and its regional teams. Missed handoffs, duplicated work, decisions relitigated. It had been running for months.
They had explanations. It was the operating model. It was the reporting structure. It was the systems. And in the quieter conversations, it was certain individuals.
What it actually was: a global-versus-regional deadlock. Two groups, both competent, both acting rationally inside their own incentives, neither able to say out loud what they thought of the other.
We ran one session. That session did not solve the problem — I want to be accurate about this, because the version where a consultant walks in and fixes it in an afternoon is not what happened. What the session did was get the whole group to see it, name it and accept it, together, in the same room, at the same time. They stopped calling it a systems problem and called it what it was.
That was the unlock. The acceptance is what made the global rollout possible, and the rollout is what solved the problem.
Nothing new was discovered that day. Every fact in the room had been sitting inside somebody’s head for months. What changed was that it became sayable.
The best objection I get
Let me put the strongest counter-argument in front of you, because I have heard it from people I respect.
A leader once said to me: I understand you. I don’t deny what you are saying. But the ownership lies with me and my team. If we do our work right — if we get the strategy right and the tactics right, and the people who have to execute it execute it right — then everything should go fine.
That is not a foolish position. It is the position of someone who takes responsibility seriously, which is precisely what you want in a senior leader.
My answer was a joke, and an instruction to sit with it. Think about it, I said. There is an old line that man’s plans are material for God’s laughter. I have extended it: God laughs harder when our plan includes many people.
She was not convinced. I did not expect her to be, and we left it there.
She called me about two weeks later and opened with this: Sri, I had an epiphany. I cannot hope to know what’s happening at the coal face unless the miners tell me. And right now there is nothing in my plan that ensures they tell me. That is what’s missing, and I want to include it. Can you help me?
Nothing I said in that first conversation changed her mind. What changed it was her own question, asked in her own words, a fortnight later.
And notice what she had not concluded. She had not decided her plan was wrong, or that her team was failing, or that she needed a culture programme. She had found a missing component. She had a plan for strategy, a plan for tactics, a plan for execution — and no plan at all for the information on which all three depend.
That is the whole argument, and she made it better than I did.
There is also a second argument for all of this, and it has nothing to do with revenue or cost. I make it with almost every leader I work with, usually right after this one, and it tends to land harder than any number I can put in front of them. It deserves its own space, so I’ll set it out separately. In one line: when you make a person feel their voice is not wanted, you are not managing them badly. You are dehumanising them.
What this actually asks of you
Not a programme. Not a survey. One question, asked properly, in your next leadership meeting:
What do you know about this business that you don’t think I want to hear?
Then stop talking. Let the silence sit, however long it takes.
Eventually someone will risk an answer. And here is the part that matters: everyone in that room will be watching what you do next. Not your words — your face. Your first three seconds. Whether you explain why they’re wrong.
Whatever you do in that moment is your culture. Not the values on the wall. That.
Srivatsa Kadaba has spent 20+ years turning around low-performing leadership teams inside Global Fortune 500s. Formerly with HSBC and AOL; Founding Director of Mokita Learning Solutions. He is building Create Space, a private tool that shows leaders how they actually show up in their own meetings.
Comments
Sri reads every comment himself. Comments appear here once he has read and approved them, so there is a short wait before yours shows up.
No comments yet — yours would be the first.