I get this question a lot. Some version of it comes up at nearly every conference Q&A, in coaching calls, and in emails from CI practitioners. Sometimes it's about an executive who blames people whenever something goes wrong. Sometimes it's about one who shuts down dissent, overreacts to bad news, or publicly criticizes people who surface problems. The specifics vary, but the core question is the same:
“How do I influence a senior leader whose habits are damaging psychological safety — when they outrank me and don't see it as a problem?”
I've never had a fully satisfying answer. And I want to be honest about that upfront, because I think the Lean and CI community sometimes dances around the tensions here. We offer tidy frameworks and hope they'll be enough. Often they're not.
So let me try to say what I actually think, which is messier than what usually ends up in a conference presentation.
You Can't Coach Someone Who Hasn't Asked for Coaching
This is the part that gets skipped over too quickly. A mid-level director trying to shift a senior VP's deeply ingrained leadership habits is, from the exec's perspective, someone with less experience telling them they're doing it wrong.
That's how it feels to them. And they're not entirely wrong about the dynamic, even if they're wrong about the substance.
Thirty years of reinforcement is powerful. If an executive has risen to a senior role while managing through intimidation, blame, or control, the evidence — from their vantage point — says their approach works. They got promoted. The organization survived. The people who couldn't handle it left, which the exec may interpret as proof that the culture is fine and the weak ones self-selected out.
Cheryl Jekiel, who wrote Let Go to Lead and has worked closely with former Toyota leaders, put it well in a conversation we had: people change when they're ready. You can't force readiness. She learned that partly from her background in motivational interviewing, and the parallel is worth thinking about. You can talk at people all day, but it usually makes things worse.
That doesn't mean CI practitioners should give up. It means being clear-eyed about what you're up against.
The “Open Door” That Isn't Safe
Blame is the most common version of this problem, so let me use it as the example. A blame-oriented executive will say, “We have an open-door policy. Anyone can come talk to me.” And they believe it. They may genuinely believe their door is open.
But an open door is not the same as a safe door.
If the last three people who walked through that door with a problem got grilled about why they let it happen, the door might as well be locked. The same applies if they got a dismissive wave-off, or if their idea was taken and handed to someone else without credit. People learn fast. They learn from watching what happens to others, not from reading the policy manual.
And here's where it gets really tricky: if you try to point out that a problem festered because people were afraid to surface it, a blame-oriented exec will often just blame the people who didn't speak up. “They should have said something. That's what the open-door policy is for.” The destructive habit absorbs the feedback and redirects it. It's remarkably self-reinforcing.
As Stephen “Shed” Shedletzky frames it, speak up is a culture, not an instruction. You can't say “speak up” if you haven't created the environment in which it's actually safe and worth it.
Your Discomfort Is the Data
If you're a CI director and you feel like it's risky to challenge your executive's behavior — that feeling is information. It's not weakness. It's not a failure of courage.
It's data about the culture.
The same system that makes frontline workers afraid to surface problems is probably making you cautious about raising this issue with your boss. The fear operates at every level. I've heard from senior leaders who don't feel safe pushing back on their CEO. That's not uncommon, and recognizing it honestly is more useful than pretending it away.
In the work of Timothy Clark, he describes four stages of psychological safety — inclusion, learner safety, contributor safety, and challenger safety. Challenger safety is the hardest to build and the first to disappear. If you don't feel safe challenging the status quo with your executive, you're experiencing exactly the deficit you're trying to address for others.
A Systems Thinking Question
We wouldn't blame a machine for producing bad output when the process feeding it is poorly designed. We'd look at the inputs, the conditions, the design of the system.
So why do we treat human behavior differently?
When a frontline worker makes an error, the systems thinker asks: what about the process, the training, the design of the work, or the pressure they were under contributed to this? When an executive defaults to blame or intimidation, it's worth asking a similar question. What about their system — their incentives, their information flow, the way results get reported to the board, the leadership models they grew up with — reinforces the behavior?
I'm not saying this to let anyone off the hook. But understanding the system that produces the behavior is more useful than just wishing the behavior would stop. Kathy Miller, a senior leader I spoke with on my podcast, made an observation that stuck with me: people overreact when they're depleted. Time pressure, fatigue, too many competing demands. That doesn't excuse bad behavior, but it does point toward systemic factors rather than just individual character.
Things That Sometimes Help
I want to be careful here, because I've seen all of these work in some situations and fail in others. There's no formula. But here's what I've seen move the needle sometimes:
Create experiences instead of lessons. A structured gemba walk where an executive hears directly from frontline workers can shift something that no article or book ever will. But it has to be genuine, not a curated tour. Kathy Miller told me she can tell the difference immediately — whether leaders are seeing things as they really are, or being shown a version. The experience has to be real, or it reinforces the executive's belief that everything is basically fine.
Find the one who's curious. In most leadership teams, there's usually one person who shows flickers of interest in a different way of operating. Invest there. Help them see results. Let their experience create peer influence. Trying to convert the most resistant executive first is almost always the wrong strategy.
Protect your people. Even if you can't change the executive's behavior, you can buffer the people below you from some of it. You can model different behavior in your own team. You can respond to mistakes with curiosity instead of judgment. You can build a subculture where it's safe to surface problems, even if that safety doesn't extend to the whole organization. That's not a complete solution, but it's not nothing.
Things That Almost Never Work
Sending articles or books. I say this as someone who writes books, so believe me, I wish it worked. But an executive whose habits are damaging psychological safety isn't going to read an article and have a revelation. The problem isn't information.
I'll admit to having made this mistake in 1995 or so, when I was starting my career at General Motors. The plant was no longer living by the Deming-inspired “Livonia Philosophy.” Executives blamed workers for everything. I remember angrily photocopying a few highlighted pages of Out of the Crisis and putting it in all of the managers' physical mailboxes in the mail room (yeah, I'm that old).
Read more: The GM Quality Death Spiral: When Leaders Blame Workers for the System They Designed
Read more via the Deming Institute blog: The Failure of “The Livonia Philosophy” at my GM Plant
HR-driven leadership programs that feel like compliance training. When the message is “you need to be a better leader” wrapped in corporate packaging, most seasoned executives tune it out. They've sat through dozens of these.
Any approach that requires the exec to first admit their behavior is a problem. That's asking them to concede the argument before you've even made it. It almost never happens voluntarily, and the more you push for it, the more defensive they get.
The Uncomfortable Part
Some executives won't change. Recognizing that isn't failure — it's honest assessment.
The real question then becomes: can you build something psychologically safe within your sphere while playing a long game? Can you demonstrate results that eventually create pressure for a broader shift? Or is your energy better spent elsewhere — in a different part of the organization, or a different organization entirely?
I don't say that lightly. Leaving feels like giving up, and CI people are wired to keep improving, to keep trying. But staying in a system that won't let you do meaningful work has costs too — to your career, your health, and your own belief that things can be different.
A participant on Katie Anderson's Japan Study Trip shared something with me: “The biggest challenge is our blame culture. It's easier for people to do nothing because they don't get in trouble. But if they make a mistake, they get punished. And our company is successful enough that there's not a compelling reason for top leaders to change the culture.”
That last sentence is the killer. When the organization is profitable despite the dysfunction, the urgency to change is low for the people at the top. The costs are real — disengagement, hidden problems, missed improvement — but they're largely invisible to executives who aren't looking for them.
What I'd Ask You
I've shared what I've seen work and what I've seen fail. But I know this is a question where practitioners in the field have more direct experience than any one person.
What have you tried? What's worked for you? What hasn't? If you've found a way to influence an executive whose behavior was undermining psychological safety — or if you've made the decision that your energy was better spent elsewhere — I'd genuinely like to hear about it.
