My manager asked all the right questions. I still didn't trust him.

I want to tell you about a manager I had years ago.

He was, on paper, excellent. He ran calm, well-prepared 1:1s. He asked the textbook questions. "How are you doing? What's on your mind? Is there anything I can do to support you?" He nodded in the right places. He took notes.

And I didn't trust him. Not even a little.

I remember sitting across from him, more than once, thinking very clearly: if I say the real thing, I'll lose standing. Maybe my job.

So I didn't. I gave him the sanitised version. I moved on to the agenda. I nodded back. 🙃

Psychological safety is downstream of something you can't script

Amy Edmondson at Harvard has done the career-defining work on psychological safety: the belief that you can speak up, disagree, admit a mistake, or ask a "dumb" question without being punished for it. It's the single biggest predictor of whether a team is actually high-performing, or just high-performing on the surface.

But here's the part that took me a decade to understand: psychological safety is downstream of authenticity. You can't fake safe.

You can run the right meetings. You can send the right Slack messages. You can attend the training. But if the person running the team is not someone their team can, at a baseline level, read as real, none of it lands.

Safety isn't what you say. It's what people believe you'll do when they say the hard thing.

What authenticity actually means (it's not oversharing)

Let's get this out of the way: your team does not need to know about your divorce, your insomnia, or your imposter syndrome. That's not authenticity. That's unloading. And it makes your team less safe, not more.

Authenticity in a leadership context is narrower, and more boring, and much harder. It looks like this:

1. Saying "I don't know," and meaning it. Not as a humility move, but because you actually don't know.
2. Owning a mistake in real time. Not in a rehearsed statement three weeks later after someone from comms has edited it.
3. Naming an emotion honestly when it's relevant. "This one is landing hard for me, give me a second."
4. Being consistent when no one is watching. Which, in the age of Slack leaks and screenshots, is always.
5. Changing your mind publicly when someone on your team was right and you were wrong.

None of these are techniques. You can't roll them out as a Q3 initiative. They are functions of who you are when the room gets uncomfortable.

Why the "right questions" stop working

Here's the thing about the manager I didn't trust: his questions were fine. His technique was fine. What was missing was any sense that he had ever been uncertain, wrong, or inconvenienced by the truth.

Everything he said had the faint sheen of having been rehearsed for a promotion panel.

And human nervous systems are unbelievably good at picking that up. Your team can read the difference between a leader who is genuinely curious and a leader who is performing curiosity as part of the job. They clock it in milliseconds. They just don't tell you they clocked it.

They protect themselves instead. They give you the sanitised version. They move on to the agenda. And three quarters later, they leave for "personal reasons." 🥲

The practice: One Small True Thing

You don't have to overhaul your personality. You don't have to do a TED Talk about your childhood. You just have to do one small, honestly uncertain or imperfect sentence per week, out loud, in front of your team.

"I don't actually know the answer to this yet. I want to think about it before I give you a half-formed one."

Or: "I made a call last Thursday I'd make differently now."

Or: "This reorg lands differently for me than I expected. I want to sit with that before I ask you to."

That's it. One small true thing. You go first, because your team will only go as deep as the most senior person in the room has already gone.

It feels absurdly small. It is not small. It is the entire thing.

A small admission of my own

I spent a long time, early on, trying to be the version of a facilitator I thought I was supposed to be. Calm, measured, standing at the front of the room with the right questions already in the right order.

It made me a worse facilitator. It made the room quieter. It made the work weirdly lonely.

The thing that finally shifted it wasn't a course. It was permission, from a coach of my own, to stop performing competence in every sentence. To say "I don't know yet" out loud. To name when something was landing hard for me too. To let a room see the working-out, not just the polished question.

They didn't need me to be more impressive. They needed me to be more findable.

How about you? When was the last time a leader said something to you that made you feel, in your body, not your head, actually safe to speak freely? What did they say?

I collect these, and one of them always ends up in a future edition (anonymised, with love).

Sending a slightly more honest exhale than usual,

P.S. Module 7 of my 8-week Emotional Intelligence in Action programme is called Speaking Unarguably, the session where your senior leaders practise doing this in front of each other. It is the single most uncomfortable, most useful afternoon of the programme. If you want the real thing for your leadership team, write to contact@zen-and-go.de.

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