The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

A few people that I talked to described leaders who went through all the motions of promoting psychological safety, but who in reality showed classic toxic behaviours. 

“He’d say things like ‘I might give hard feedback, but you can also give me hard feedback, and there will be no consequences’ or ‘you are all smart people and your opinion is important’.  But I don’t believe he was sincere.  I believe it was expressed as part of a desire to create an image of promotability.

It was always obvious when someone was on his shit-list.  He would walk past you and not acknowledge you and you would be invisible.  People in his inner circle would avoid communicating with you.  In meetings, he would call out specific people’s presentations with humiliating language.  The quality of the presentation was irrelevant – people knew beforehand who was going to get that treatment.”

It was not always clear if these managers were dismissive of psychological safety -- some people honestly and incorrectly believe that control and cruelty are the best way to run a tight ship -- or if they were sincere, and just completely oblivious to the effects their own behaviour was having on their teams.

This situation can happen when a company decides that fostering psychological safety is important, but does not train managers on how to do actually do it, or have effective means of assessing their progress across the org. If managers are being evaluated only on their output (“I made my staff attend a workshop”) rather than on the outcome they achieve (“employees report high levels of safety on an anonymous survey”) then these situations can persist unchecked.

People Stop Talking if You’re Not Listening

“A new senior director was assigned to lead our group, from outside the business.  The first thing she did was to schedule ‘listening sessions’ with every team, to hear what we had on our minds.  We thought this was great.  But in the 30-minute ‘listening session’, she spent twenty minutes talking.  She didn’t really seem very interested in our thoughts, just in telling us what we should be thinking instead.  It was really disheartening.  People in the meeting finally just shut up and let her talk.”

Listening is a gift – it demonstrates to the other person that their thoughts are valuable, that you are interested in them, and that you take those thoughts into consideration, even if you disagree.  This encourages them to share more information, even when the information may be difficult.  

But listening effectively is also a learned skill, and not an easy one for many people.  You need to actively pay attention to what is being conveyed, show interest and comprehension, keep your own emotional response in check, ask follow-up questions – and let go of your own agenda while you do so.  The goal is to really understand what the other person is trying to tell you, even if you think it is wrong or it makes you uncomfortable.  Only after you’ve reached understanding should you respond.  This takes practice, and for some people coaching can help.

If listening is hard for you, this article from the Harvard Business Review has some good tips on How to Become a Better Listener.

You Have to Give Trust to Get Trust

“I had a director who thought he was smarter than all the managers on his staff.  Rather than giving us the autonomy to do our jobs, he would micromanage everything, even though I and the other staff members had decades of experience in specialty fields that the director did not.  While he was friendly and open to feedback, he was also impervious to it.  I never felt unsafe speaking up, but after a while I just stopped bothering  since nothing I said had any impact anyway.  My opinion clearly wasn’t valued, so I just shut up and did what I was told (even if I knew it was going to cause a problem) until I found a way off the team.”

If you want people on your team to trust you with honest feedback, then you need to demonstrate that you trust them and value what they have to say.  This doesn’t mean that you need to agree with them all the time.  Micromanaging sends a clear message that you don’t trust the person’s judgement, and will almost always shut down psychological safety – as well as cause employee stress, reduce engagement, employee self-confidence, and productivity.

Safe is not the Same as Comfortable

“Our new manager liked to ask people to bring her difficult problems, and promised she would dig into the details with us.  But the first time someone actually raised an issue they were having, the manager immediately shut down the conversation.  This became her pattern – she could not handle any bad news or hard questions about her big plan, even though we were all trying to support her and make her successful.  She would defer any questions or issues to a later time that never happened, or she would give vague or useless advice and move quickly to the next agenda item.  Pretty soon we all stopped trying to tell her anything important.”

A leader’s anxiety response can often have a big impact on their ability to foster psychological safety.  Good conversations can often be uncomfortable – especially if you are getting critical feedback of your own work, or bad news.  As a leader you need to be able to regulate your reactions, demonstrate that you welcome even negative feedback, and sit with your discomfort as you work through the issues that need to be discussed.  An anxious leader will move to shut down discomfort right away.  (This doesn’t mean that leaders shouldn’t have negative emotions or express them – but expressing them towards people with less power can shut down valuable feedback.  So save those emotions for your spouse or friends or your coach/mentor.)

One company I dealt with had an anonymous feedback mechanism available for employees to raise concerns and ask questions of leadership.  On occasion, disgruntled employees would take advantage of the anonymity to send abusive messages to the senior staff.  One divisional leader expressed that he wanted to remove the anonymity and force respondents to use their own identity, so as to spare the senior staff from reading abusive messages.  Of course, this would prevent a lot of non-abusive people from providing valuable honest feedback as well.  The divisional leader thought this would be a reasonable tradeoff, since he wanted to encourage people to speak openly under their own names.  In this case, the leader was prioritizing his own comfort (to not read abusive messages) over the comfort of the much less powerful (to send challenging questions and feedback without personal risk).  I don’t know if this change was ever made, but if it was the senior staff lost an important channel of feedback.

Communication Style Can Matter

“I hate to say that I need pats on the back, but it is a little bit true.  Everything with my boss was transactional.  There was no acknowledgement of my work and ability.  I finally talked to her about that, and she was taken aback.  She said that she thought she’d never have to say it because it was so obvious.  I wanted more personal touchpoints, while she was all business.”

Different people have different communication styles, and when people with mis-matched styles work or live together, misunderstandings occur.  Even simple things such as how you show respect can differ culturally or even by family.  For example, for some people interrupting is rude, while for others it shows interest and engagement.  Some leaders express trust and approval explicitly and verbally, while others do it by providing more autonomy.  If you’re a person used to verbal feedback, being given autonomy can feel like abandonment.  If you want to dig into this topic more, sociolinguist Deborah Tannen has written several books on conversational style and the misunderstandings that can arise.

There are other aspects to consider, too, when communication is happening across cultural boundaries, or if one of the communicating parties is neurodivergent.  If you are a leader, check in with your team one-on-one to see if they are getting the right amount and the right kind of feedback from you.  This again demonstrates that you value them, and that you are open to feedback.  When there are disconnects, work with your team to establish shared norms.

It's not what you say, it’s what you do

“In the first team meeting with our new boss, he started off by announcing that we were all going to be open, honest and candid.  As if he got to decide that for everyone.  I actually laughed, it was so ridiculous.”

One recurring theme that came up in all my interviews was this:  the big gestures and statements that leaders make about psychological safety are fine, but they don’t actually make safety happen.  Leaders create psychological safety on their teams through the daily, small everyday interactions they have with every individual around them.  Do they show respect to everyone, no matter their rank or position?  Do they listen openly and take feedback into consideration?  Do they seek out dissenting opinions or concerns when discussing their own ideas?  How do they react to critique or hard news?  Do they shut down the toxic behaviour of others in meetings?  Do they give credit where it is due?  Do they trust and elevate their staff?  Do they demonstrate vulnerability by talking about their own development, and admitting when they got something wrong?  Do they apologize when they make mistakes?

It is only when team members see a leader demonstrating these behaviours regularly that trust is earned, and psychological safety developed.

The Leader Isn’t Always the Cause of the Problem (but needs to be part of the solution)

In meetings, the toxic behaviour of even a single team member can lead to psychological safety problems across a team.  A team member who mocks, denigrates, dominates conversations, or responds to others with sarcasm or passive agression can impact the atmosphere of meetings, cause some team members to just stop participating, or even to quit.  Sometimes these team members have been allowed to behave badly because they are considered ‘star performers’, but if you want psychological safety on your team, you cannot allow that behaviour to continue.

The immediate solution is for the leader to call out bad behaviour directly when it happens and shut it down.  This sends a strong message to the other team members that team norms are changing, and that team members will be protected.  The longer-term solution might involve setting explicit behavioural norms for the team, coaching for the person showing toxic behaviours, or in the worst cases their removal from the team.  (No amount of star performance makes up for the damage a toxic team member inflicts.)

Developing strong meeting facilitation skills can be a great investment in yourself and your team, and help you foster psychological safety.  If you don’t have those skills, you might consider bringing in someone who does, at least for your most important meetings.  These skills include techniques for keeping conversations moving, ensuring everyone can contribute and be heard respectfully, preventing the team from going down rabbit holes, and preventing problematic interactions.  There are also interesting structure and activities you can do to keep meetings inclusive and engaging, with training materials available at places like the LUMA Institute and Liberating Structures.

Sometimes You Have to Clean Up Someone Else’s Mess

“My new boss is great, but I still have some triggers from my previous [toxic] manager.  When I’m triggered, I have to do self-talk, tell myself ‘it’s not that situation, it’s not that person’ even three years later…  My new boss said that she’s never seen people so closely bonded.  My colleague said it was our shared trauma.”

As a leader, you may one day be assigned a team whose previous leadership was toxic.  A toxic leader can do damage to a team that takes a long time to repair.  Likely the team members will be in self-protection mode, not very engaged, and hypersensitive to feedback. More than one person I interviewed used the term PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) to describe the experience of having been on a team with toxic leadership.

Healing a team like that will likely take time – assuming that they haven’t become so disengaged with their work that they are actively seeking other employment already.  Your tools are the same:  showing empathy and respect in all your interactions, shutting down any leftover toxicity, and showing your own vulnerability.  You might want to talk (and listen!) openly and explicitly about the former toxicity, and work together to establish new team norms.  You may need to disassemble some processes or power structures that were based on toxic relationships.  And the team may not trust you for some time, until they see enough examples of how you handle situations.

Showing respect, vulnerability and empathy and getting nothing back – or maybe even getting leftover hostility -- can be exhausting and uncomfortable, but if you keep at it, it will eventually pay off.

Wrap Up

When psychological safety is absent from a team, it doesn’t necessarily mean the leadership is toxic.  Well-intentioned leaders can face a number of obstacles in their efforts to foster psychological safety, such as a lack of key skills like active listening or group facilitation,  or an inflexible communication style.  They may have inherited a team that is recovering from a previous toxic leader and needs time to heal.

Leaders who have trouble regulating their own anxiety response can find it extra difficult, because anxiety can lead to multiple problems: difficulty holding space for difficult conversations, lack of trust (leading to micromanagement), difficulty showing vulnerability, and difficulties doing active listening.

The fix you need, of course, depends on the problem, but I hope this article has given you some insights and resources that you can apply to your own situation.  If you are working on improving your own skills for fostering psychological safety, another resource you may find helpful is The Psychological Safety Playbook, which contains usable, real-world skills that every leader can learn and practice. 

More from John  (or follow his RSS Feed )

How do I know if my team is Psychologically Safe? - This scorecard might be for you

Toxic Legacy - Why losing toxic employees is only the first step to recovery

Why don't people participate in meetings? - Or, "Why can't I get a word in edgewise?"

Holding a Mirror to Corporate Values - Figuring out what the actual core values of your company are

Whose Opinion Matters? - How culture can make or break your decision making

Micromanagement and Psychological Safety - How a toxic management style impacts team health

The Authentic Team - The problem with bringing your whole self to work