The Trust Gap: Moving Your Team from 20% to 80%

This article is adapted from Ted's Smart Thinking podcast episode 368: The Trust Gap: Why Are Your Students/Teams Holding Back?.

I worry about people's willingness to take risks and be authentic all of the time.

That single thought keeps me up at night. Because here's what I know after years of working with leaders in classrooms, boardrooms, and conference rooms across the country: when people don't feel safe being themselves, you get a bunch of compliant complainers who feign enthusiasm in front of their boss, their teacher, their teammates. They show up, but they're only giving you 20% of what they've actually got.

Twenty percent. One fifth of their energy. One fifth of their creativity. One fifth of their potential. Why? Because at some point, something happened in that microculture or macroculture that made it weird to be themselves. Someone put them down. Someone picked on them. Someone gossiped. And nobody called it out.

So people get defensive. They hunker down. They start looking for evidence of how they're being mistreated or how others get what they want. It's confirmation bias at its finest, and it's such a weird way to live. Yet all of us get into these funks with others, and we just don't know how to break out.

When Your Leader Throws You Under the Bus

Recently, I got a phone call from a teacher I'll call Marcia (because my favorite aunt is Marcia). She's in a graduate program getting her master's degree in leadership. Her ultimate goal? She wants to be a principal.

Her principal had asked her to create a professional development opportunity for the entire high school staff. The project? Introduce the concept of restorative justice, a process where people involved in or impacted by someone's poor decision work through it together in an effort to come to closure and forgiveness. It's a common practice in schools around the world, and depending on the culture, it can be something people really embrace or something they resist.

Marcia put her heart and soul into this four-hour training. She designed role-playing activities. She created presentations. She was nervous because she knew her school's culture could be challenging when it comes to change, but she felt confident because she was one of them, a colleague who understood the terrain.

The training went pretty well, in her eyes. But toward the end, some staff members got a little brisk. Challenging. They started questioning the philosophy and directing their questions at the principal: Whose idea was this? Is this something we have to do? Why are we even doing this? What's the problem we're trying to fix?

After a few of these questions, the principal had had enough. And for some reason, he said out loud: "Well, this was Marcia's idea and I just wanted to support her. Marcia and I will meet and fix the mistakes from her presentation and training and we'll get back to you."

Both the staff and Marcia were stunned.

Did their leader just make Marcia the scapegoat for his initiative?

Answer: yes.

When Marcia called me, she was driving home, devastated. She couldn't believe it. Her colleagues were angry at the principal, and she was hurt. The principal was nowhere to be found at the end of the day. Marcia felt betrayed and lost all respect for her leader.

The Fall to the Bottom of the Pyramid

Let's break down why this matters so much. You probably remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs from Psychology 101. At the base of the pyramid are physiological needs: breathing, food, sleep, water. The absolute basics. The second level is safety and security. Security of body, meaning you feel safe in different environments. Security of employment, resources, family, health, property.

The third level is love and belonging. Do you have friendships? Meaningful relationships? A sense of connection? Then comes self-esteem. Confidence. Achievements you're proud of. The respect of others. This is crucial, because in the absence of it, we get stuck at the base of the pyramid instead of working our way up to the top.

At the very top is self-actualization. That's where we find morality, creativity, spontaneity, the ability to problem solve, the willingness to accept facts. That's where we become confident yet humble human beings who have the willingness to take risks to make our own lives better.

When that principal blamed Marcia, he sent her falling to the bottom of that pyramid. She was just trying to find her breath and survive in the moment. She no longer felt safe with her principal.

And here's what happened next:

Marcia did something called hunkering down. She didn't fix the project with more creativity. She became obsessed with avoiding any other public reprimand from her principal. She stopped taking risks and only followed established protocols. "I will only do what has to be done," she told me. She didn't want anything to do with him anymore.

The silence of her colleagues irritated her too. The rest of the staff had witnessed the exchange. They learned that speaking up or presenting a new idea now carried a very high social cost. In the following weeks, brainstorming sessions became monologues only led by the principal. Who's going to speak in that environment if they think the principal is going to blame them?

Trust eroded. The principal's deflection felt like a character judgment in front of everybody. Marcia didn't know where she stood, either with the principal or her colleagues. And she didn't want to continue walking around the building like it was her funeral, with everybody looking at her with big sad eyes and sometimes saying, "I'm really sorry that happened to you."

This eventually transformed the entire workplace. Any disagreement became a personal threat for Marcia, leading her to a full retreat. A culture emerged: Why would we do anything new around here if he's just going to blame us?

That's not allowing people to feel safe. And that's how you get a 20% culture.

The Missing Ingredient: Predictability

Why was this happening to Marcia and the staff? One key component of psychological safety is predictability, either positive or negative. No one saw coming that the principal was going to blame Marcia for the angry staff who were just questioning him, not her or the process. When the principal got under heat, he turned the heat the other way.

In the absence of feeling predictable, you don't know if you should run into the storm or away from it. And in Marcia's case, it would be hard for the principal to recover in her eyes, unless of course he became aware of the conditions that he had created.

Marcia is any of us. A student in a classroom who might be harshly corrected in front of the entire class. A person on the field being yelled at by the captain or the fans or the coach. A colleague in a boardroom who brings up an idea but gets shouted down or met with sarcasm. A manager being evaluated who hears critical terms they'd never heard before.

Any of us at any moment can find ourselves on the receiving end of something troubling or upsetting, and then we create narratives in our minds that trap us in a doom cycle of seeking confirmation of our biases. And then, boom, we're only willing to give 20%.

What Psychological Safety Really Means

Psychological safety is the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In the environment, you can do what you need to do. You can say what you need to say. You can throw out crazy ideas.

Where it thrives, individuals feel confident that they won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. But where it doesn't exist, it's a struggle.

Now here's the thing: we're all responsible for the psychological safety of everyone in every environment we're in. It wasn't okay for the teachers to talk to the principal the way they did, and it wasn't okay for the principal to blame the teacher for the initiative that he started.

At the end of the day, we need a respectful environment, strategies and expectations, and to clearly call out what's expected. Because a behavior ignored is a behavior reinforced. And if we continue to ignore it, all we're going to do is create a 20% environment.

Learning is inherently messy for all of us. It requires acknowledging a gap in our knowledge. Did you hear that? We have to be able to admit we don't know. And if it's not safe to do that, it's not going to happen.

What Psychological Safety Unlocks

For Learning:

When you create psychological safety, you destigmatize failure. When the fear of retribution is removed, mistakes are treated as data points rather than character flaws. This encourages people to experiment, take risks, be innovative. It increases inquiry. People are more likely to ask challenging questions, leading to deeper discussions and understanding of complex systems. And it enables knowledge sharing. In unsafe environments, information is often hoarded as job security or weaponized. But in safe environments, people openly share insights and lessons learned.

For Teams and Collaboration:

High-performing teams aren't necessarily those with the smartest individuals, but those who collaborate with the most fluidity. There's a great concept called Radical Candor. It's when teams can engage in productive conflict. They debate the idea, not the person, leading to more robust decision making.

I'm blessed to work with someone who's really, really good at this. She'll just lead out by saying, "Well, I don't necessarily agree. And here's why. But I can live with whatever the decision is." It's a master class in how to bring up a point, contradict what's going on, but then make it safe to walk away. It's wonderful.

True collaboration with safety ensures that quiet voices or dissenting opinions are heard in the room. This prevents groupthink, where teams make suboptimal decisions just to maintain harmony. That's 20%. We don't want that.

And here's my favorite: cognitive load reduction. Brain load reduction. When we aren't wasting mental energy managing the image of ourselves or seeking biased confirmation or fearing that we'll look ignorant if we ask questions, we can dedicate 100% of our bandwidth to the task at hand. How can you give your all if you're worried about what other people are thinking?

The Seven Questions That Change Everything

So what can we actually do? We can use assessment tools and ask questions about safety, then discuss them. Remember, a question not asked remains unanswered. We ignore our problems away or we can address them. Those are the two choices we always have.

This tool comes from Amy Edmondson's incredible book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth. These seven questions can be used with anyone in any environment, and you can even break them out. You don't have to ask them all at one time.

For each question, people rank their answer on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being disagree, 5 being agree). Then, critically, they discuss what's going well (the plus) and what needs to change (the delta). Remember, delta is change, not what you don't like or whom you don't like. It's what needs to be changed.

Question 1: If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.

After people rank their answer, they talk about what's going well and what needs to change. In this particular question, one of the changes could be: when mistakes are made, the whole team needs to own it.

Question 2: Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.

Plus example: I really appreciated last week when Karen brought up three issues, nobody jumped on her, and we ran right into problem solving. Delta: We need a process on paper so that it's safer to bring up issues without just having to say them out loud. We should collect them in advance or put them on the wall.

Question 3: People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.

Different can be different in opinion, different in beliefs, different in values.

Question 4: It is safe to take risks on this team.

This is going to be really powerful to collect. In your classroom, on your team, in your faculty, on your staff, do they feel that they can take risks? And if not, why not? What are the pluses and the deltas?

Question 5: It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.

This is one of the most important questions for me personally. Pride gets in the way. Biases from past experiences get in the way. If people feel they can't ask for help, it's because of conditions they've either created in their own minds as a result of evidence they've collected, or routine and regular behaviors of others.

Think back to seventh grade when it was cool to be dumb, when kids were walking around like "school's stupid." It's incredibly uncomfortable to turn to a colleague and ask for help. Your students, your team members, they can tell you: here are the conditions you need to create for me so that I feel more comfortable asking you for help. Not everyone can ask for help. There's sometimes a level of pride that's so strong, people would rather fail than ask someone else for help.

Question 6: No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.

Sometimes people feel they're in a political environment where others are trying to undermine them. The constant competition that can occur where people aren't going to work too hard to make you look better because that might make them look worse. This is a really important piece to find out, understand, and hear what's going well and what needs to be changed.

Question 7: Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

This is super important if we want to race to the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs for others. If somebody feels like they're completely underutilized, they may be in the wrong job, the wrong position, in a classroom where no one's seeing their potential. An unanswered question is never answered. If this person says, "Working in this classroom, on this team, with my colleagues, nobody lets me do anything I'm good at," that's really important to know because that's why they're operating at 20%.

When it's all over, there are three final things to ask:

1. Please give examples of behaviors that create safety in the workplace so we can find out what they are, continue to do them, and reinforce them.

2. Give examples of behaviors that need to change.

3. Please provide solutions, strategies, tactics to support increases in psychological safety. What are your ideas?

The best formulas come from the wisdom of the crowd. If we can utilize their ideas, there's going to be more ownership and we're going to race to 80%.

How It Ended with Marcia

You're probably wondering what happened. In the end, Marcia had a difficult conversation. She went to her principal, explaining what had happened and discussing how she felt betrayed in her failure. However, she had filled out the form I just described, which was actually the spark for this entire conversation.

She needed to take action. She needed to build empathy. And she needed to ensure that she could be herself. She needed to do that quickly because it's really uncomfortable to be in the workforce or a classroom or office if you don't know where you stand.

So she took the tool, filled it out for herself, and used that given situation as the example. In a moment of significant courage, she brought it back to her principal and shared the results with him. She brought the things that go well, discussed the changes that could be made, and did not complain, but brought solutions and ideas.

The principal, as she described, was stunned. He got up, closed the door, and then broke down. He shared how he feels in staff meetings, always on the defense, never understanding where the fits of rage and criticism come from. He explained that in that moment, he felt an opportunity to save the day for the staff. He'd been feeling guilty for a week and told her how proud he was of Marcia for coming to his office.

He asked her for and was given forgiveness. And then they went to problem solving.

It's kind of ironic that they were working on principles of forgiveness and restorative justice, and then they came to it on their own. As they problem solved, they fixed their relationship, bringing forward strategies and the ability to move forward together.

That's how we move from 20% to 80% in authenticity, energy, and commitment.

Your Turn to Be a Buffalo

Many times we're afraid to ask these questions because we fear the answers. It's easier to just let it all lie and then ignore the reality. But that is the classic way to get more of what you're getting.

We need people who are willing to show up in any environment and be at 80 to 100% all of the time. We need people who can feel comfortable and safe around us and around each other. And we need leaders to recognize that they may be creating situations that are uncomfortable for other people.

You use this tool and then what? Think about how to apply it in your purview, those in your control. All you need to do is follow the advice that you're given from them and make the adjustments in your leadership first. Because remember, the only way to change others is to first change yourself.

Here's what you're going to do this week: Look at this tool. Figure out how to apply it wherever you are. Then go to it. Make the work environment safe. Make it fun. Make it engaging. And you're going to do all that by following their advice.

Think about how to employ this. Think about what you're going to do. Think about making work fun by making it safe, making work engaging by making it comfortable, making life empowering by modeling how to be a Buffalo leader, and then charging into the needs of everyone around you.

Because you must answer the questions as well as ask them.

You need to take the assessment to figure out where you stand amongst the teammates you're on or serve with. Because a question unasked is a question never answered. And then your mind will start creating other narratives, looking for biased evidence to confirm your narrative and drive you crazy.

This week, and every week, be like Marcia. See the storm, get coached, and go to it with courage and a process. And finally, charge into it with conviction.

That's how buffalo lead. That's how we move from 20% to 80%. That's how we create workplaces and classrooms where people can be authentically, courageously, beautifully themselves.