When the Unsafe Behavior Lives at the Top: What Your Engagement Scores Are Really Telling You
Learn why addressing issues of lack of psychological safety is more complex than a simple team-level training.
Fernanda Brasileiro
6/25/20265 min read
There is a conversation happening in boardrooms and HR strategy sessions across the country right now. It usually goes something like this: "Our engagement scores show low psychological safety. We need to do something with the team."
A workshop gets planned. A new Slack channel gets created. Someone adds "speak up culture" to the next all-hands agenda. And six months later, the scores look exactly the same.
What most organizations miss is that you can't create psychological safety for others if you don't embody it yourself. And when the dysfunction is coming from the top, no amount of team-level programming will fix it. The work has to start with the leader.
What Psychological Safety Actually Is (And Isn't)
Psychological safety is a term most famously researched by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson. It refers to the shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks within a team. It means people feel safe to speak up, admit mistakes, ask questions, and offer dissenting opinions. It means people feel safe bringing their real thinking into the room without fear of punishment or humiliation.
What it is not is a team personality trait or a culture you build through icebreakers. It is a climate that grows or erodes depending on the behaviors leaders model every single day.
This is where it gets uncomfortable: many organizations focus psychological safety initiatives at the team or middle management level. Doing so overlooks the ways that senior and executive leadership might be actively undermining it from above.
When the Unsafe Behavior Lives Upstream
Middle managers are often caught in an incredibly difficult position. They're expected to build trust and openness with their direct reports. They're simultaneously navigating leadership above them that may be modeling the opposite. When a senior leader responds to bad news with blame, punishes honest feedback with exclusion, or uses subtle passive-aggressive behaviors to keep people in line, that signal travels down the org chart fast.
The manifestations of psychologically unsafe leadership culture are not always loud or obvious. Retaliation does not always look like someone getting fired. Sometimes it looks like:
A person being removed from a key project after they raised a concern.
Criticism that is intolerant or disproportionate
A leader who cannot receive feedback without becoming defensive, dismissive, or punishing
Passive-aggressive responses, cold shoulders after difficult conversations
Inconsistent warmth depending on whether someone agreed with the last decision
These behaviors teach people that:
Bringing problems to the surface is more dangerous than hiding them
Honesty is not safe here
Or create an environment where people learn to manage perception rather than do their best work
These patterns may feel manageable or even normal from the inside. But they accumulate. The result is a team that has learned to be quiet, compliant, and careful. This may look fine on the surface until the moment the organization actually needs creativity, candor, or courage.
Mini Diagnostic: Is Psychological Safety Missing in Your Division?
Before investing in another team-level intervention, leaders and HR professionals should take an honest look at the signals already present in the organization. Here are some questions to sit with:
1) Do people only bring solutions to leadership, never problems?
When teams consistently avoid surfacing challenges or bad news until it is already a crisis, it is often because they have learned that being the bearer of bad news is personally costly. A healthy environment allows for early, honest escalation.
2) Does feedback ever flow upward?
In divisions where psychological safety is low, feedback almost exclusively moves in one direction. If people are not pushing back, offering alternative perspectives, or naming concerns with senior leaders, they are not feeling safe to share their opinions.
3) What happens after someone disagrees?
Think about the last time a team member or peer raised a dissenting view with someone in senior leadership. What was the response, and what happened to that person afterward? The behavioral patterns that follow visible moments of disagreement are the clearest signal a team has about whether speaking up has a cost.
4) Are the same few people always in the room for key decisions?
When access to decision-making becomes exclusive or is used as a social reward for those who agree, it tells everyone else exactly how much their perspective is valued.
5) Is there a pattern of high performers quietly leaving?
Talented people with options rarely stay in environments where they cannot be honest. If exit interviews reveal themes around not feeling heard, not having a voice, or not feeling respected, that is a psychological safety problem, not a fit problem.
6) Who is absent from important conversations?
The people who have stopped volunteering ideas, stopped speaking up in meetings, or started giving short, noncommittal answers were probably not always that way. Pay attention to who has gone quiet and when that shift happened.
What Repair Actually Looks Like
Repairing a psychologically unsafe culture is not a single intervention. It is a sustained practice of changed behavior, and it has to start at the top.
The first step is honest self-assessment. Leaders who genuinely want to shift this dynamic have to be willing to look at their own patterns. How do I respond when I receive feedback I disagree with? How do I behave when a project fails or a mistake surfaces? What signals am I sending about what is and is not welcome here? This kind of inward examination is not easy, and it is not comfortable. But it is the starting point for everything else.
The second step is creating explicit opportunities for upward feedback and making them safe (actually safe). This means:
Anonymous surveys with questions that go beyond satisfaction scores,
Stay conversations that leaders approach with curiosity rather than defense,
1:1 cultures where people have consistent, private space to share what is actually true for them.
It also means that when people do take the risk of being honest, the response they receive reinforces that it was the right call.
The third step is repairing visible ruptures. When retaliation or punishing behaviors have already occurred, there is residue in the system. People remember what happened to the person who raised their hand last time. Leaders who are serious about change have to actively address that residue. Sometimes directly and publicly acknowledging that the response to a specific situation was not acceptable. Demonstrating through consistent action over time that the pattern has changed.
The fourth step is investing in middle managers as a bridge, not a buffer. Middle managers often bear the weight of both protecting their teams from unsafe dynamics above them and trying to model healthy behavior below them. Organizations need to equip this group with real support. That includes coaching, leadership development, and honest conversations about what they are navigating. Simply holding them accountable for team scores without addressing root causes is counterproductive.
The Lever Is Almost Always the Leader
If your division's engagement data shows low psychological safety, the impulse to build programming around the team is understandable. But if the behavior driving the problem lives in the leadership layer, team-level initiatives will not move the needle.
The IGNITE Framework, which I use with my clients, positions the "Together" stage of leadership growth on a foundation that starts inward. You cannot lead others toward trust and openness if you have not done the work of becoming a leader others feel safe with. That means examining your own fear of being wrong, your own discomfort with vulnerability, and the patterns you may have inherited from the cultures that shaped you as a leader.
The most powerful thing a leader can do for psychological safety in their organization is to embody it:
To model the willingness to say "I was wrong,"
to receive hard feedback with genuine openness,
to protect the people who speak up rather than making an example of them,
to create a consistent experience over time where honesty is welcomed, not weaponized.
If your engagement scores show low psychological safety, the lever is almost always the leader. I would love to talk about what that work looks like for your organization.
Fernanda Brasileiro is a leadership development consultant and coach helping mid-market organizations build leaders who create psychologically safe, high-performing teams. She works with HR Directors and CHROs through the IGNITE Framework. Connect with her at fernandabrasileiro.com.
Fernanda Brasileiro
People Development Consultant & Strategist
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