To learn three practical interventions, skip to “What Actually Moves It” below.
A leader I worked with recently stood up at an all-hands and said, with complete sincerity, that he wanted people to challenge him. He meant it. He had spent years reading about flat organizations and managing up, and he really did believe the best ideas should win regardless of who held them. He told his team the door was always open. Then he sat back down and waited for the candor to arrive.
It did not arrive. Six months later he was frustrated, half-convinced he had hired a roomful of people who simply would not speak.
There is a scene in the movie “Mean Girls” he would not have enjoyed having pointed out to him. Amy Poehler plays Regina George’s mother, who wants very badly to be one of the cool teenagers in her own house. She hovers in a velour tracksuit, offering cocktails to high schoolers, snapping photos, and delivers the immortal line: “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom.” The reason it makes everyone wince is that the harder she insists, the more obvious it becomes that she has no idea how she is actually landing. The teenagers are not fooled for a second.
A great many well-intentioned leaders are running this exact play, and the more enlightened they believe themselves to be, the more likely they are to run it. The reasoning goes: I see my team as equals, I am genuinely open, I am not one of those bosses. And because the openness feels so true on the inside, they assume their people feel it too. Nine times out of ten, they don’t. The leader has decided, privately, that the hierarchy does not apply to them, and has mistaken that private decision for a shared reality. The team is still reading the room the way humans have always read rooms. The cool mom is the only one who thinks she is cool.
Underneath the cool mom problem is a precise and very common mistake. The leader assumed that wanting candor, and announcing that he wanted it, was roughly the same as getting it. He treated the invitation as the intervention.
It is something else entirely. The invitation is the easy part. What he was actually up against was not a communication problem. THIS IS KEY: He was actually in an uphill battle with several million years of evolutionary biology, two or three decades of his employees’ personal history, and the plain fact that he signed off on their raises.
Consider what an employee’s nervous system is doing when a person with power over them asks for honest feedback. Robert Sapolsky’s decades of work on primate hierarchies make it hard to avoid the conclusion: we are status-scanning animals, and the scanning is neither optional nor conscious. Before any of us form a sentence in a meeting, some older part of the brain has already located the dominant figure in the room and run the math on the risk of crossing them. That calculation is faster than thought, and while you can decide to override it, you cannot decide not to run it.
Layer onto that what each person carries in. By the time someone reaches your team, they have spent a lifetime learning what authority does when you contradict it. A father who went cold. A volleyball coach who benched the kid who questioned the drill. A boss two jobs ago who smiled, said “great point,” and then iced them out for a quarter. These are not abstractions; they are live wiring, and you are speaking into a history you had no part in writing and cannot see.
And then there is the part that no amount of “culture work” erases: your employee needs the job. You hold something they depend on. That is not a flaw in your organization. It is what employment is.
None of this means the project is hopeless. It means it is real, and real things require more than announcements. Here are three interventions that actually move it.
What Actually Moves It
First, name the whole thing out loud, plainly, and keep naming it. Not as a values statement. As a description of reality everyone in the room already half-knows. Something close to: “I have more power in this relationship than I sometimes act like, and that shapes what you’ll feel safe telling me, whether either of us wants it to or not. I’m not going to pretend that’s not true. I’d rather we both work with it.” This does something a thousand open-door speeches cannot. It shows people you can see the actual dynamic they are living inside, which is the first evidence they have that you might be safe to test. Most leaders avoid saying any of this because they fear that naming the power gap will only make it more real, that putting the hierarchy into words will reinforce it. The reverse is what happens. The dynamic is already there, operating on everyone in the room whether anyone speaks it or not. Refusing to name it does not shrink it; it leaves it running in the dark. Saying it plainly is what begins to loosen its grip.
Second, treat this as development, for them and for you, not as a memo. Your people often lack the vocabulary and the practice to disagree with power skillfully, because nobody ever taught them and most environments punished the early attempts. That can be developed. They can learn to separate an observation from an accusation, to make a clean request instead of swallowing a resentment, and they need low-stakes reps to practice before the stakes are high. The harder development is yours. Telling your team once that you want feedback and considering the matter handled is like watering a plant a single time and wondering why it died. The real work is learning to notice, in the moment, whether your way of listening is opening the conversation or closing it. The flash of defensiveness in your reply. The way you started explaining before they finished their sentence. The face you made. Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety is unambiguous that safety is built or destroyed in exactly these micro-moments, not in policies. Your team is reading your reaction to the first honest thing anyone says, and deciding from it whether a second honest thing is worth the risk.
Third, and this is where most organizations stop short, change the architecture, not just the behavior. Most of what leaders reach for still depends on someone choosing to be brave in the moment, and the moment is exactly when the old wiring takes over. The sturdier action is to build the honesty into the structure, where it keeps working after everyone forgets. Start with a pattern hiding in plain sight: the more power a person holds, the less anyone ever evaluates them, until you reach the person at the top, who is reviewed by no one. That asymmetry is the whole problem in miniature, and you can close it on purpose. If you run the place, arrange to be evaluated by the people you lead, or by one trusted outside person, precisely because otherwise it never happens, and make it a standing part of how things run rather than a favor you ask when you happen to feel secure. The same principle reaches the smaller calls: no single person should get the last word on everything, and the person your team is meant to bring problems to should not be someone whose own standing depends on keeping you happy. None of these are reminders to behave well; they are constraints that hold when goodwill runs out, which is the only kind that survives a bad week. Pair them with one habit worth the discipline it takes: close the loop in public. When someone risks telling you something hard, act on it where others can see, or say plainly why you will not, because the fastest way to end candor for good is to let the first honest thing anyone offered disappear without a trace.
Notice what becomes available on the other side of this. The decision that does not blow up six months later because someone told you the truth while it was still cheap to hear. The person who was halfway out the door, certain no one was listening, who stays because once, visibly, you listened. You stop mistaking silence for agreement, which is the most expensive error a leader can make, because it is the one you never find out about until it is far too late.
Note: This document was developed with the assistance of AI as a thought partner.
