Building the Conditions for Real Candor Across Teams and Hierarchies
Updated: Aug 11
Written by Daniela Aneva, Executive and Team Coach
Daniela Aneva is widely recognized for helping leaders and teams perform at their best. She’s an executive and team coach, an organizational development (OD) consultant, and a small business owner, known for practical, people-centered work that drives real behavior change and measurable results.
Ask most senior leaders whether psychological safety matters in their organization, and they will say yes. Ask whether their teams feel genuinely safe to speak, to surface problems, challenge assumptions, admit mistakes, and disagree with authority, and the answer becomes far more complicated. Psychological safety is one of the most cited concepts in organizational development and one of the least well implemented. The reason is structural, we treat it as a behavioral disposition when it is, in fact, a systemic condition.
Amy Edmondson's landmark research established that psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, is the single strongest predictor of team learning and performance. Google's Project Aristotle, studying hundreds of internal teams, arrived at the same conclusion. What neither finding fully addressed is how psychological safety travels, or fails to travel, across the boundaries between teams, and how the broader system either enables or systematically undermines it. That is the territory this article explores.
Why safety is a system property, not a team property
The conventional model of psychological safety treats it as something a manager creates within their team. The manager is curious rather than defensive. She invites challenge. She does not punish honest mistakes. The team, in response, becomes more candid. This model is accurate as far as it goes, but it stops at the team boundary, and in complex organizations, the team boundary is not where safety lives or dies.
Consider what happens when a team with strong internal psychological safety sends its representative to a cross-functional governance meeting dominated by a leader who operates by intimidation. The representative returns carrying the anxiety of that encounter, and that anxiety seeps back into the team's culture. Or consider the team whose internal norms encourage candor, but whose escalation processes make it dangerous to surface bad news upward. The team learns to be honest internally and performative externally. Over time, internal safety erodes too, because people understand, implicitly, that their honest assessments will eventually have to survive a system that does not reward them.
Psychological safety, at the systemic level, is the degree to which the entire organizational environment, not just individual teams, consistently signals that speaking truth is more valued than managing appearances. Creating it requires intervention at multiple levels simultaneously.
The four levels of systemic safety work
Individual leader modeling: Leaders who demonstrate vulnerability, acknowledge what they do not know, and respond to challenge with genuine curiosity rather than defensiveness set a tone that cascades. This is the most visible level and the one most often addressed in leadership development. It is necessary but not sufficient.
Team norms and rituals: Explicit agreements about how the team will handle disagreement, mistakes, and difficult feedback are most effective when co-created by the team rather than imposed, when they are revisited regularly rather than set and forgotten, and when they are tested, deliberately and gently, by leaders who notice when a norm is being bypassed under pressure.
Cross-boundary structures: The forums, processes, and rituals that govern how teams interact with each other and with senior leadership send powerful signals. Retrospectives that genuinely surface systemic problems, not just individual team performance. Inter-team dialogues designed for honest inquiry. Escalation channels that do not punish the bearer of difficult news. These structures send systemic signals about whether candor is actually valued, or merely declared.
Organizational consequence systems: The deepest and most durable level is the consequence system. Who gets promoted? Who gets sidelined? What happens, in practice, to the person who raised an uncomfortable truth three years ago? Employees have long memories and sophisticated pattern recognition. If the consequence system rewards political astuteness over honest contribution, no amount of leadership modeling or team ritual will create genuine safety. This is where culture is truly set, not in values statements, but in decisions.
"Safety that stops at the team boundary is safety in name only. The system will always find a way to teach people what is actually true."
Practical interventions for systemic safety
Conduct a safety audit systemically
Most engagement surveys ask whether people feel safe. Few ask where safety breaks down and why. A systemic safety audit goes further, it maps the moments, forums, and relationships where candor reliably disappears. Is it in all-hands meetings? In cross-functional project reviews? When certain leaders are in the room? When certain topics arise? The pattern of disappearance is more informative than the aggregate score because it reveals the specific structural or relational conditions that are generating unsafe signals in an otherwise well-intentioned system.
Design for productive disagreement
One of the most reliable safety signals in an organizational system is whether disagreement is normalized and productive, or whether it is treated as friction to be minimized. Teams can be coached to develop explicit disagreement protocols, structured approaches to surfacing and working with differing perspectives that make it procedurally clear that challenge is welcome.
The Thinking Environment framework, developed by Nancy Kline, offers one model. Structured debate formats, devil's advocate roles, and pre-mortems are others. What matters is that the team has a form, so that disagreement does not have to be improvised in the moment of tension, when the pull toward compliance is strongest.
Create cross-boundary truth-telling forums
Many organizations have retrospectives within teams. Far fewer have genuine forums where teams can tell each other, and tell senior leadership, what is actually happening at the interfaces. Where is the handoff breaking down? Where is the system asking teams to do contradictory things? Where are the unspoken conflicts that everyone navigates privately? Building these forums, and designing them carefully so they produce insight rather than performance, is one of the highest-leverage investments a systemic team coaching program can make.
Attend to the aftermath of candor
The moment that defines a safety culture is not when someone speaks a difficult truth. It is what happens next. When a team member flags a serious problem in a leadership meeting and the response, however unintentionally, closes down rather than opens up, that moment is remembered and shared far more widely than any values statement about transparency. Coaching leaders to notice and actively manage the aftermath of candor, to visibly honor the contribution, to follow through on what was raised, and to ensure the messenger is not penalized, is not soft work. It is the most strategic safety investment available.
Safety as practice, not destination
Psychological safety is not a state organizations achieve and then maintain. It is a practice they engage in continuously because the pressures that erode safety, performance anxiety, competitive threat, leadership transitions, and organizational change, are also continuous. The systemic team coaching lens adds a crucial dimension, safety is not just what happens inside teams, but what the whole system teaches people about the cost and value of honesty.
Organizations that treat safety as a systemic practice, attending to all four levels consistently and over time, do not just improve team performance metrics. They become places where the best thinking happens in the room, rather than in the corridor afterward. That is the organizational condition that makes everything else possible.
Read more from Daniela Aneva
Daniela Aneva, Executive and Team Coach
Daniela Aneva is an international executive and team coach, coaching supervisor, professional speaker, and author. With over 25 years of executive experience in multinational organizations, Daniela has supported the growth of more than 5,000 leaders and teams across the globe. She is a council member at Forbes, a mentor at Rice University’s Doerr Institute, and has co-authored books with Brian Tracy, Jonathan Passmore, and contributed to Team of Teams by Peter Hawkins and Catherine Carr.
