4. Are leaders tired of psychological safety?

If you are a senior leader, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve heard the phrase psychological safety, maybe more times than you can count. And while it explains an awful lot, it’s still hard to know how that actually helps.

Well that kind of fatigue is legitimate. Because knowing that psychological safety matters is not the same as knowing HOW to build it, without exposing yourself in ways that feel genuinely risky.

Google’s project Aristotle, which studied 180 teams, identified it as the single most important condition for team effectiveness. The evidence is overwhelming. So the real question is not whether it matters. It’s how you get there from where you are.

And if you want, you can build on Project Aristotle in a safe way.

With your current colleagues, talk about your own experiences elsewhere, outside your current team. When did you feel safe as part of a team somewhere else? And when didn’t you feel safe? And the objective is not to change anything, just to start sharing those experiences and having that kind of conversation.

3. Are there any signs of low safety in your team?

There are behaviours that show up in senior leadership teams that are easy to misread: someone who over-prepares for every meeting; a colleague who has become quietly detached, not quite present in the room; an anxiety that sits just under the surface, showing up as irritability or excessive caution.

These aren’t personality quirks or performance issues, they’re signals. And what they’re often signalling is that someone in the team doesn’t feel safe enough for people to show up as they really are. And a CEO might be observing these behaviours in their team or experiencing them personally without ever having connected them to what’s actually going on underneath.

So to explore this yourself, practise looking for what’s underneath those behaviours. For example, if someone is being too detached or too careful, what are they protecting themselves from?

2. Your team’s real business isn’t being done as a team

The real conversations in most senior leadership teams aren’t happening in the meeting. They’re happening in one-to-one calls beforehand, in corridor exchanges afterwards, in messages sent that evening. And everyone in the team and beyond knows it

That matters because those conversations, however honest and necessary they feel, can’t be worked with collectively. They fragment the team and the rest of the organisation along fault lines that never get directly addressed.

And there’s a personal cost too. Sustaining the performance in that leadership room day after day, while the real dialogue happens everywhere else is quietly exhausting.

If you want to explore this some more, start with your own examples. When have you short-circuited what should really have been a whole team conversation for the sake of speed, convenience, or brevity?

1. Your team looks functional; but is it all just an act?

Many senior leadership teams look functional from the outside. Meetings happen. Decisions get made. People are professionally courteous with each other, but that’s often exactly what it is. Just an act, a performance. And the gap between the performance and the reality underneath it is costing the organisation more than most people realise.

When the team space becomes performative, the rest of the organisation reads it and reads it accurately. The misalignment that nobody’s naming in the room doesn’t stay in that room, it travels. And what looks like a well-functioning leadership team at the top can be quietly generating confusion, mixed messages, and lost momentum all the way down.

You can explore this in one-to-one conversations with colleagues and staff. Take one real live project and ask people their views, especially about what they believe it’s designed to achieve. Any misalignment or lack of clarity often shows up very quickly here.