Building Psychological Safety? Start with Your Executive Team

The psychological safety that drives innovation across your organization must begin with the group least likely to embrace it—your C-suite executives.

Walk into any boardroom, and you’ll likely witness an unspoken contradiction. The executives who expect bold thinking from their organization are the same ones who measure every word they say. Discussions play out like performances rather than genuine dialogue, with executives positioning themselves strategically rather than engaging authentically.

Psychological safety—the shared belief that you can speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes without fear of negative consequences to your status or career—is essential for organizational agility. When executive teams operate without it, the consequences cascade throughout the organization, undermining efforts to build psychological safety elsewhere.

The result? Stalled decision-making, stifled innovation, and slower reactions to changing conditions—at every level.

Why Executive Teams Struggle with Psychological Safety

Executive teams face unique challenges when it comes to managing team politics:

1. Tension between Competition and Collaboration

The competitive drive that propels leaders to the executive level can become an obstacle when they arrive. Paradoxically, the traits that help executives advance individually (ambition, competitiveness, and strong advocacy for their ideas) can actively work against the collaborative mindset needed for executive team effectiveness.

We’ve seen this play out in real-time in our consulting work. In one organization, the executive team was debating whether to sunset a low-performing line of business. Although one executive passionately argued for discontinuation, others held back, sensing the CEO’s fondness for the product. They privately agreed that cutting the product made sense, but remained silent in the meeting. The result? A half-hearted commitment to a decision they didn’t believe in.

2. Career Path Conditioning

In too many organizations, executive career paths reward certainty over curiosity and decisiveness over deliberation. When leaders reach the C-suite, they’ve spent decades in environments where expressing doubt or uncertainty could derail their advancement. This conditioning creates powerful barriers to the vulnerability that psychological safety requires.

So executives adapt. They learn to speak in declarative sentences. To swap questions for statements. To project confidence, even when deep down they’re unsure. Over time, they forget that asking a so-called “dumb” question can be the smartest move in the room.

3. High Stakes and Intense Scrutiny

Executive decisions carry enormous consequences for organizations, employees, and sometimes entire industries. This weight of responsibility, combined with intense scrutiny from boards, shareholders, and employees, creates powerful incentives to minimize any perception of uncertainty or fallibility. In this pressure cooker environment, the perceived cost of admitting knowledge gaps or mistakes feels extraordinarily high. Executives worry that acknowledging limitations might diminish their influence or authority.

One CEO, in the middle of a conversation about low morale and execution delays, cut off the discussion with, “I’m tired of hearing excuses. We’re not going to discuss this any further. Just get it done.” The conversation stopped, but so did the willingness to surface root causes. In the name of decisiveness, the team lost access to the truth.

73% of C-suite leaders rarely, if ever, work together on projects or strategic initiatives.

4. Functional Identity vs. Enterprise Perspective

Executives often rise through functional excellence—being the best marketer, technologist, or operations leader. Their identity and expertise remain deeply rooted in their functional background. Yet, effective executive teams require members to transcend these identities and adopt an enterprise-wide perspective.

Deloitte’s research on what they call the “symphonic C-suite” found that while 85% of organizations rate C-suite collaboration as “important” or “very important,” achieving this harmony remains elusive. Shockingly, 73% of respondents said that their C-suite leaders rarely, if ever, work together on projects or strategic initiatives. In boardrooms across the globe, executives struggle to balance advocating for their functional areas with the broader enterprise needs—especially when resources are constrained.

Signs Your Executive Team Lacks Safety

How can you tell if your executive team is operating without psychological safety? Look for these warning signs:

• Meeting Theater. Executive meetings become performances rather than honest discussions. Leaders position themselves strategically, carefully managing impressions rather than engaging authentically. Their questions primarily highlight their knowledge or advance their agenda rather than explore uncertainties.
• Private Disagreement. When executives nod in agreement during meetings but voice significant concerns afterward, it signals a lack of psychological safety. This pattern creates dangerous decision-making blind spots, as the team cannot address objections or concerns they never hear. It also slows implementation when privately dissenting executives fail to fully commit to the decisions made.
• Information as Currency. In psychologically unsafe teams, knowledge becomes power to be selectively shared. Executives withhold critical information that might benefit colleagues or the organization but could dilute their own influence. This hoarding behavior can have cartoonish consequences. At one organization, a meeting of middle managers revealed that three separate departments were working on the same project—all because their executive leaders weren’t communicating.
• Selective Questioning. Teams lacking safety develop subtle norms about which questions are acceptable and which are off-limits. Fundamental assumptions remain unexamined, while discussions focus on details unlikely to create discomfort. This selective questioning prevents the team from addressing the most consequential aspects of strategic decisions—the uncertainties that most deserve executive attention.

The CEO’s Critical Role

The CEO serves as the executive team’s primary architect of psychological safety. Their responses to disagreement, uncertainty, and failure establish the unwritten rules more powerfully than any stated values or principles.

Research on hierarchical attention demonstrates that people pay disproportionate attention to their leader’s mood—which have real effects on a team’s mood, group affective tone, and team outcomes. A CEO’s reaction to a dissenting view or unexpected problem receives heightened scrutiny and outsized interpretation. A momentary flash of annoyance, a dismissive comment, or even a nonverbal signal can permanently alter team dynamics in ways the CEO may not recognize.

In one team we coached, we noticed that executives consistently addressed comments and questions only to the CEO, even when their points were more relevant to their peers. We gently reflected this back: “I notice that most of you are directing your comments to the CEO rather than each other. Why do you think that is?” That observation unlocked a cascade of realizations. By deliberately shifting their posture and speaking directly to each other, the team uncovers dependencies and solves problems faster—and the tone of their meetings transformed. They were also less likely to be unduly influenced by the CEO’s preferences, whims, and pet projects—managerial courage vital to building cultures that balance responsible stewardship with open innovation.

Practical Strategies for Building Executive Team Psychological Safety

Building psychological safety at the executive level doesn’t happen overnight, but focused strategies can accelerate progress:

1. Implement “Big Dumb Questions”

Create explicit permission for executives to ask fundamental questions that challenge base assumptions. These questions sound basic—even stupid, on the surface—but often uncover critical insights that more sophisticated inquiries miss.

For example, during a discussion about declining customer retention within a particular segment, a Big Dumb Question (BDQ) might be: “Do we really care that these customers are leaving?” If those customers are unprofitable or misaligned with the company’s strategic direction, it might not make sense to spend time and resources retaining them. But until you ask the BDQ, you’re likely to chase solutions in search of problems.

The power of this approach comes from legitimizing questions that executives might otherwise withhold for fear of appearing uninformed. By making it explicit that such questions are not just acceptable but valuable (“Does anyone have any BDQs?”), you create space for foundational questions that often lead to breakthrough thinking.

2. Adopt Role-Based Thinking Approaches

Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats framework creates a powerful structure for examining problems from multiple perspectives without personal attachment. When the entire team simultaneously uses the “black hat” of critical thinking, the “green hat” of creative exploration, or the “white hat” of data analysis, the conversation becomes about the process rather than the person. This approach works because it separates the person from the perspective, allowing executives to temporarily step outside their functional roles or personal stakes. A CFO can comfortably explore creative possibilities wearing the “green hat” without compromising their identity as a financially disciplined leader. Similarly, a typically optimistic CEO can thoroughly examine risks without appearing to waver in their confidence.

3. Establish Psychological Contracts

Develop explicit agreements about how the executive team will interact, particularly around disagreement and uncertainty. These contracts shift challenging behaviors from personal criticism (“you’re being too negative”) to a mutual commitment (“we agreed to voice concerns directly in the meeting, not afterward”).

Effective psychological contracts address specifically how the team will:

• Handle disagreements during and after meetings
• Respond to unexpected problems or failures
• Balance advocacy for functional areas with enterprise needs
• Distinguish between exploratory discussions and decision-making

The power of these contracts comes from making implicit expectations explicit and creating clear norms that the team can collectively reinforce rather than leaving each executive to navigate unspoken rules.

Moving Forward: A Whole-System Approach

Building psychological safety is not a one-time event but an ongoing commitment. The most effective approach combines top-down modeling by the executive team with skill-building throughout the organization and system redesign to reinforce psychological safety.

This whole-system approach recognizes that psychological safety emerges from both leadership behaviors and organizational structures. While executive modeling creates permission for psychological safety, systems and processes must support rather than undermine these behaviors.

Organizations that build psychological safety from the executive team outward create a powerful competitive advantage. In a business environment characterized by volatility and ambiguity, the ability to surface the best thinking—regardless of where it originates—becomes a critical strategic capability.

If you want to build a culture where innovation thrives, problems are identified early, and the best ideas win, don’t start with an organization-wide initiative. Start with your executive team.

The psychological safety you build there will catalyze transformation throughout your entire organization.