Our leadership team is protective of their departments and avoids RPRS calls. How do we build trust to speak openly?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If your leadership team members are protective of their departments and refuse to challenge one another, you have an artificial harmony problem. This silence prevents you from making critical Right Person, Right Seat decisions.

To break this barrier, you must build vulnerability-based trust. Trust requires taking personal risks and focusing on the collective good rather than self-absorption. As the owner, you must lead by example. Start your next quarterly meeting by admitting your own mistakes or sharing where you lack capacity. This gives your team permission to be vulnerable.

Next, remind the team of the Greater Good concept in EOS. Every leader must put on their leadership team hat first, meaning their primary loyalty is to the health of the entire company, not to their individual department.

During your IDS sessions, call out the polite silence. If a metric is off or a Rock is missed, push the team to discuss the underlying root cause, even if it feels uncomfortable. When team members realize that identifying a peer's performance issue is an act of service to help the business scale, not a personal attack, they will start speaking up. True operational excellence requires a team that cares enough to tell the hard truth.