Why your team won't tell you what they really think

Whether you have noticed or not, your team may not feel comfortable telling you what they really think. Why aren't they pushing back? Why does the hard stuff only come out in the car park conversations that you are not privy to? Why did you find out about the problem three weeks after the person who saw it coming first did?

The answer is almost always the same, and it has almost nothing to do with them.

"your team's silence may well be about you"

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, built one of the most psychologically safe creative cultures in modern business. He did not start with grand gestures.

He started by confronting what was broken. Early Pixar had a hidden problem. The biggest threats to the creative work were not loud disagreements. They were silence, fear, and the slow erosion of safety. Catmull recognised he had allowed, and in some ways created, a culture where people protected their work rather than opened it up.

Rather than a culture overhaul, he began dismantling hierarchy in small specific ways. Removing class structures. Making sure technology and art had to work together. Ensuring film leaders held creative authority without being second-guessed. These were the easier climbs. Small, careful moves to rebuild trust before asking anyone to go higher.

Only once that foundation was solid did Pixar create the Braintrust, a recurring meeting with no hierarchy, no formal power, and one core rule: say the truth, early. Directors brought their most broken, unfinished work and invited honest scrutiny. It is not the manager's job to prevent risks, Catmull said. It is the manager's job to make it safe to take them.

THE IDEA

Here is how I want you to think about the work. Building safety in a team is like becoming a rock climber.

First, you confront the fact that past practices have damaged the gear. You check for hairline cracks, worn ropes, missing pieces. You look honestly at the moments you made someone feel smaller, and you own them. Most leaders skip this step and wonder why the team won't climb. Maybe they just don’t feel safe, based on what they have seen happen in these rooms in the past.

Second, you build skill on routes that are simpler than what you've attempted before. You practise new moves in low-stakes conversations. A better question in a one-on-one. A genuine 'I got that wrong' admission in a team meeting. A deliberate pause before you jump in with the answer.

Only then do you take on the exposed routes. Opportunities for your team to be truly vulnerable and feel supported in the middle of it. The real feedback. The hard conversation you have been avoiding.

The research is pretty blunt on why the order matters. Edmondson's work on psychological safety shows that leader behaviour is the biggest factor in whether safety exists. Google's Project Aristotle, studying over 180 teams, found psychological safety was the single greatest predictor of team effectiveness.

None of that data is new. What surprises leaders is the direction of the flow. Vulnerability does not bubble up. It flows down. And it flows from you first, so you need to demonstrate vulnerability, before anybody is going to believe that it is safe to do so.

The single thing to try this week

This is the week for you to be a little reflective. Pick one moment in the last month where you made someone on your team feel smaller. You will know the one. It will be the meeting that ended flat. The feedback that landed wrong. The comment you made in front of the group.

Find the person. Name what you did. Apologise and avoid explaining your way out of it. Just tell them you saw it, you understand how it might have landed, and you are working on it.

Then do nothing else. Let them decide what to do with it.

You cannot legislate safety. You cannot programme it. You can only model it, and model it first.

The team climbs at the speed of the leader willing to check their own gear.Brad