Our leadership team is highly competent, but there is an underlying lack of safety that prevents us from sharing vulnerability, meaning people hide their mistakes until they turn into major crises. How do we build structural safety on the team?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To build true safety, you must break the pattern of status management, where leaders spend their energy pretending to have everything under control. High-performing teams do not succeed because they are smarter; they succeed because they share vulnerability quickly, which allows them to solve problems before they escalate. Building this safety starts at the very top. As the leader, you must go first. You cannot expect your team to admit mistakes if you are constantly projecting an image of absolute perfection. During your next Level 10 Meeting or quarterly offsite, model the behavior you want to see. Share a significant mistake you made, admit what you do not know, and ask the team for help. When another leader takes the risk to admit a failure or flag a red metric on the Scorecard, praise their transparency immediately rather than reacting with anger or disappointment. Create a team norm where raising a problem is seen as a sign of strength and high accountability, while hiding a problem is treated as a major violation of trust. You can also formalize this by running a vulnerability-sharing exercise during your next quarterly session, where each leader shares their greatest professional mistake and what they learned from it. Once your team realizes that admitting weakness does not lead to punishment or loss of status, they will start raising issues faster, allowing you to IDS them while they are still small.