A temperature check with 25 leaders

The Comfort Trap

Are you still allowed to be demanding?

Somewhere in the last few years, “I don’t feel safe” started doing a second job. Hold a standard, name a gap, ask for better, and the language can come straight back at you. I do not know how widespread that is, or whether I have it the wrong way round. So I am asking 25 leaders who carry demanding work what they are actually seeing.

25 minutes · anonymous

Take part

If you lead a team and this is live in your world, I would like to hear about it. Especially if you think I have the premise wrong.

Choose a time that works for you

Microsoft Teams, at a time that suits you. Nothing is attributed to you unless you ask.

A tightrope walker balancing a pole with SAFETY on one end and CHALLENGE on the other

What I am curious about

Three hunches I am carrying in.

I use psychological safety. I teach it. I think it is one of the most useful ideas in modern management, and I am not here to tell you it was a mistake. These are three things I suspect are happening. I am not attached to any of them, and the fastest way to find out whether they hold is to ask people who are actually leading teams.

1

The word got captured

The original idea was about interpersonal risk. Can I admit a mistake here. Can I ask the question that makes me look slow. Can I tell my boss they are wrong. In practice it has drifted to something quite different: I should not feel uncomfortable at work. Those are not the same thing, and the second one quietly kills the first.

2

Half the model got dropped

Safety was never meant to travel alone. It came paired with a genuinely high standard; it was the thing that made a demanding environment survivable, not the thing that replaced it. What got implemented in a lot of organisations is the safety half on its own. High safety and low challenge is not a learning culture. It is a comfortable, but boring one.

3

Nobody says this one out loud

The vocabulary has become available to anyone who does not want to be asked for more. Raise a standard and it can come back as a safety concern, and almost no organisation has a mechanism that tells the two apart. So leaders soften it, then soften it again. The person who pays is not the frustrated manager. It is the employee going quietly backwards while everyone tells them they are doing fine.

Uncomfortable and unsafe are not the same word. We have built a lot of workplaces that cannot tell the difference.

What taking part involves

Twenty-five minutes. No preparation, no agenda.

I ask a handful of open questions about how this is playing out where you work, and then I mostly listen. You do not need to have it worked out. Half-formed is useful; that is usually where the honest bit lives.

25 minutes on Microsoft Teams

At a time that suits you. No preparation needed. I record it so I am not scribbling, and the recording is only ever seen by me.

Anonymous by default

Nothing is attributed to you or your organisation unless you specifically ask to be named. Say something and think better of it, and it is gone.

You hear what I hear

Once I have done the twenty-five, I will come back to you with what I am hearing across them. Most leaders find that more useful than the conversation itself.

Disagreement welcome

I am particularly keen to hear from you if you think I have this back to front. If everybody agrees with me, I have learned nothing.

Who I am looking for

People who actually manage people.

Choose a time that works for you

Not a people leader?

Tell me anyway.

The interviews are for people who manage teams, but the experience of this is not limited to them. If you have been on the receiving end, or you think the whole argument is wrong, I want to read it. Everything sent here is read by me and treated as anonymous.

Got it.

Thank you. I read every one of these, and the good ones shape the questions I ask next.

Where I think out loud

This is the kind of thing I chew on every Thursday.

Only Human is a short read every Thursday: one idea about leadership, belonging, and the human stuff at work, grounded in behavioural science and written to be used. If the question at the top of this page is one you have been sitting with, it is probably your sort of thing.

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Twenty-five leaders. Twenty-five minutes each.

I do not want the tidy answer. I want the thing you cannot say out loud at work.

Choose a time that works for you