Why People Stay Silent at Work: My New Psychological Safety Course
Someone in a meeting sees a problem coming. Maybe it's a risk in the plan, an assumption that doesn't hold up, or a direction that doesn't feel right. They don't say anything. The meeting moves on, and the moment passes.
Most leaders have seen this happen, and many of us have been the person who stayed quiet. That silence is the subject of my new course, Leading with Psychological Safety, which is now available from TKMG Academy.
Here's the preview video:
Safe and Worthwhile
People speak up when two things are true: it feels safe, and it feels worthwhile. Stephen Shedletzky frames it this way in his book Speak-Up Culture, and it's become the organizing idea for how I teach this topic.
Most of the attention on psychological safety goes to the first condition, and that makes sense. If people expect to be ridiculed, punished, or quietly excluded for raising a concern, many of them won't raise it.
The second condition gets less attention, and in my experience it matters at least as much. If people have spoken up before and nothing happened, they learn that it isn't worth the effort. Nobody punished them. They just stopped bothering.
Researchers James Detert and Ethan Burris have identified fear and futility as the two main reasons people hold back at work. When I polled about 600 people about times they stayed quiet, futility was a factor for 84% of them and fear was a factor for 54%. Only 16% pointed to fear alone. [VERIFY]
Leaders should take that seriously. A leader can work hard to reduce fear and still get silence if people don't believe anything will change.
Why This Matters for Lean and Continuous Improvement
Lean depends on people raising problems. Kaizen, andon systems, gemba walks, and daily huddles all assume that people will point out what isn't working. When people stay quiet, the practices keep running but the improvement stops. You can have a huddle board full of metrics while nobody mentions the problem everyone knows about.
As I've written before, psychological safety isn't the same as comfort. It doesn't mean lowering standards or avoiding disagreement. In a Lean culture, people need to feel safe challenging the status quo, which is the fourth and highest stage in Timothy R. Clark's model. Even a small kaizen suggestion implies that the current method could be better. That's a challenge, even when it's a friendly one. (For more on this, see my guide to psychological safety in Lean organizations.)
What's in the Psychological Safety Course
The course has 13 lessons and runs about an hour. It's also available in Spanish. It covers:
- What psychological safety is, and common misconceptions about it
- Timothy R. Clark's four stages of psychological safety: inclusion, learner, contributor, and challenger safety
- Two reasons people stay silent: fear and futility
- Four leadership behaviors that build psychological safety: Model, Encourage, Enable, and Reward
- How to assess progress, for the organization and for individual leaders
The course is for senior leaders, frontline managers, continuous improvement professionals, consultants, educators, and anyone who wants to build a culture where people speak up to improve how work gets done.
Learners who pass the final exam with a score of 80% or higher earn a course completion certificate and a Credly digital badge.
No Tidy Formula
There's no tidy formula in this course. Leaders build psychological safety through specific behaviors, repeated over time. Because the behaviors are specific, leaders can practice them, see how people respond, and adjust. That sounds a lot like PDSA applied to leadership behavior.
Coming in Early 2027: The Book
The course draws on my upcoming book, The Silence Tax: How Lean Leaders Can Drive Out Fear and Futility, which comes out in early 2027. The book goes further into why fear and futility keep people quiet and what leaders can do about it, with more stories and examples than an hour of video allows. I'll share more here as the release gets closer.
Thanks to Karen Martin and the TKMG Academy team for their partnership on this course.
You can learn more and purchase the course here: Leading with Psychological Safety at TKMG Academy
If you've seen a leader make it easier, or harder, for people to speak up, I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
New book coming early 2027: The Silence Tax
Most of the posts I write about fear, futility, and psychological safety come back to one question: what happens after somebody speaks up? When the answer is nothing, people stop. That silence has a cost, and leaders pay it without ever seeing the invoice.
The Silence Tax: How Lean Leaders Drive Out Fear and Futility -- it's a practical guide to what leaders do differently, starting this week.
