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?