Psychological Safety in Workplaces

Real conversations at work feel rare. Lately, in my work with employees and leaders, I’ve noticed a troubling pattern: real conversations don’t happen. Instead, people get stuck in confrontation, cynicism, or silence. This pattern reminded me of a powerful chart I often use with executives to talk about this. It shows that real conversations—where tough topics are discussed productively—only happen when two things are present: high psychological safety and strong relationships. Too often, teams fall into one of these traps instead: (a) Cynicism (low safety, low relationships)—where skepticism and disengagement take over. (b) Omerta (low safety, high relationships)—where people stay silent to keep the peace. (c) Confrontation (high safety, low relationships)—where people speak up but without trust, so nothing moves forward. There are three practical steps to create real conversations that turn constructive discrepancies into progress: (1) Create a norm of curiosity. Ask, “What am I missing?” instead of assuming you’re right. Curiosity keeps disagreements productive instead of combative. (2) Balance candor with care. Being direct is valuable—but only when paired with genuine respect. People engage when they feel valued, not attacked. (3) Make it safe to challenge ideas. Model the behavior yourself: invite pushback, thank people for disagreeing, and reward those who surface hard truths. When safety is high, people contribute without fear. Where do you see teams getting stuck? What has helped you foster real conversations? #Leadership #PsychologicalSafety #Communication #Trust #Teamwork #Learning #Disagreement

Would you believe me if I told you that around half of the women in your team are reluctant to raise problems, concerned that this will impact their leader's perception of them? Our Three Barriers research found that women are very cautious about raising issues, negativity or even raising concerns due to the belief that this can cause repercussions for their career progression. In my line of work and research, I am very aware of the gendered expectations and behaviours that women will adopt within a workplace and how there is a narrow acceptable operating range of behaviours available to women. Too assertive and you're aggressive. Too warm and you're not decisive enough. Too confident and you're arrogant. But nearly half of women actually withholding issues in their role due to these fears, that's startling. What can organisations do? 🔶 You can create a a culture of psychological safety to enable employees to speak up. Leaders role modelling vulnerability themselves, and responding positively when others display vulnerability, helps to show that it is safe. 🔶 You can encourage allyship so that issues raised are supported by others. Equip employees at all levels to demonstrate allyship. 🔶 You can counteract gender biases by changing processes and systems. Audit your talent procesess, frameworks and cycles for biases and stereotypes and counteract them. This will also helo to nudge behavioural change at scale. #EDI #GenderEquity #ThreeBarriers

When did “Work From Home” turn into “Hand over your laptop so we can spy on you”? I came across this post today where a recruiter proudly shared an interview story. The candidate was fine with the role, excited even—until the recruiter mentioned that the company would be installing a tracking software on his personal laptop. The candidate refused. And the recruiter framed it as: “Gen Z doesn’t want accountability.” Let’s be real for a second— This isn’t about accountability. This is about privacy and trust. No professional should have to surrender their personal device just so a company can run fishy monitoring tools. If you don’t trust your people, no software will fix that. Work from home doesn’t mean employees should be treated like potential fraudsters. It means giving them the same respect, autonomy, and responsibility as in-office staff—without invading their personal space. The irony? The recruiter saw this as a “red flag” for the candidate. But honestly, it’s the company that looks like a walking red flag. If your culture runs on micromanagement and surveillance, you don’t need better software. You need better leadership. 👉 What do you think—was the candidate right to walk away? #WorkFromHome #Privacy #Recruitment #WorkCulture #TrustInTheWorkplace

As International Women’s Day nears, we’ll see the usual corporate gestures—empowerment panels, social media campaigns, and carefully curated success stories. But let’s be honest: these feel-good initiatives rarely change what actually holds women back at work on the daily basis. Instead, I suggest focusing on something concrete, something I’ve seen have the biggest impact in my work with teams: the unspoken dynamics that shape psychological safety. 🚨Because psychological safety is not the same for everyone. Psychological safety is often defined as a shared belief that one can take risks without fear of negative consequences. But let’s unpack that—who actually feels safe enough to take those risks? 🔹 Speaking up costs more for women Confidence isn’t the issue—consequences are. Women learn early that being too direct can backfire. Assertiveness can be read as aggression, while careful phrasing can make them seem uncertain. Over time, this calculation becomes second nature: Is this worth the risk? 🔹 Mistakes are stickier When men fail, it’s seen as part of leadership growth. When women fail, it often reinforces lingering doubts about their competence. This means that women aren’t more risk-averse by nature—they’re just more aware of the cost. 🔹 Inclusion isn’t just about presence Being at the table doesn’t mean having an equal voice. Women often find themselves in a credibility loop—having to repeatedly prove their expertise before their ideas carry weight. Meanwhile, those who fit the traditional leadership mold are often trusted by default. 🔹 Emotional labor is the silent career detour Women in teams do an extraordinary amount of behind-the-scenes work—mediating conflicts, softening feedback, ensuring inclusion. The problem? This work isn’t visible in performance reviews or leadership selection criteria. It’s expected, but not rewarded. What companies can do beyond IWD symbolism: ✅ Stop measuring "confidence"—start measuring credibility gaps If some team members always need to “prove it” while others are trusted instantly, you have a credibility gap, not a confidence issue. Fix how ideas get heard, not how women present them. ✅ Make failure a learning moment for everyone Audit how mistakes are handled in your team. Are men encouraged to take bold moves while women are advised to be more careful? Change the narrative around risk. ✅ Track & reward emotional labor If women are consistently mentoring, resolving conflicts, or ensuring inclusion, this isn’t just “being helpful”—it’s leadership. Make it visible, valued, and part of promotion criteria. 💥 This IWD, let’s skip the celebration and start the correction. If your company is serious about making psychological safety equal for everyone, let’s do the real work. 📅 I’m now booking IWD sessions focused on improving team dynamics and creating workplaces where women don’t just survive, but thrive. Book your spot and let’s turn good intentions into lasting impact.

Here’s what I learned from researching why there are so few senior women.. In the late 1990s, I undertook a major research project examining why a prominent tech organisation had minimal women in senior leadership. 💡 The conclusion challenged assumptions: the company wasn't discriminating. Instead, their entire operational culture - policies, promotion processes, unwritten norms - favoured a single archetype. The 'work hard, play hard' employee for whom work was life. This model suited some individuals. But it excluded many capable people and, critically, didn't optimise performance or business outcomes. And this is the case in countless organisations today. The recommendations then focused on structural interventions: flexible working arrangements, equitable parental leave, transparent promotion criteria. Various organisations implemented some of these changes. Twenty-five years later, the evidence suggests limited impact. Women CEOs declined from 28% to 19% between 2023 and 2024 (Grant Thornton International Business Report, 2024). Progress has reversed. Through three decades of resilience research, organisational consulting, and executive coaching, I've observed a consistent pattern: ❗Accomplished women leaders are declining senior positions. Not from inability or lack of ambition, but through informed choice about unsustainable cultural demands and behavioural norms. ❌ They're declining cultures that require suppressing their humanity, carrying disproportionate caring responsibilities, conforming to narrow leadership templates, prioritising short-term metrics over sustainable success, and excluding emotional intelligence from professional competence. The business case for change is robust. Research demonstrates that gender-diverse executive teams consistently outperform homogeneous ones across multiple performance indicators. But we can't achieve that diversity by simply setting targets while continuing to reward the same narrow set of behaviours. We must fundamentally alter what we recruit for and reward, and the psychological safety to be human. Hustle culture doesn't optimise performance - it degrades it. Exhausted brains make worse decisions. Burnout isn't a badge of honour; it's a design flaw. ✅ We need work cultures built for how humans actually thrive. Where empathy and emotional intelligence are assets, not liabilities. Where having a life outside work isn't seen as lack of commitment. Where multiple leadership styles are valued. This isn't gender opposition - it's about recognising that balanced leadership perspectives create healthier organisational ecosystems. For everyone. If we aspire to organisations that genuinely thrive and contribute positively to broader society, we need culture redesign based on human sustainability, not inherited industrial models. ⁉️ The question isn't why women decline these opportunities. It's why our leadership cultures make that the sensible response.

Women are not the only ones who scapegoat. But in many workplaces, the way women do it is harder to see and even harder to name. Female relational aggression is an under-recognised force driving women out of workplaces and keeping them out of leadership. It hides behind the language of care, values, and belonging. It looks like mentorship, inclusion, and team culture until it becomes exclusion, silence, and quiet reputation damage. You expected competition from men, not cruelty from women. You thought the women’s network was a place for mentorship, not surveillance. But somewhere along the way, belonging started to feel like walking a tightrope. You watched how quickly support could turn into scrutiny. How easily warmth could harden into exclusion. How someone who once championed you began to whisper doubts about you. This is how female aggression hides in plain sight. It does not shout. It smiles, includes, praises, and then withdraws. It protects its image while eroding yours. And when the damage is done, it calls the fallout “miscommunication” or “a mismatch of values.” This pattern doesn’t just harm individuals. It keeps competent women from advancing. It rewards manipulation. It fills leadership pipelines with women who can perform empathy but not practise integrity. We keep saying women are kept out of leadership by men. But many are kept out by women who learned to turn belonging into social control. Until we face that, we will keep losing the women who could have changed the culture. 📫 I help professionals outsmart toxic systems, emotionally unhook from the cycle, and design their next moves strategically so they stay ahead of the game instead of being played. If this is your experience of women, reach out. 🔗 We don’t talk about woman-on-woman aggression because it disrupts the story that women are always safer with women. This denial is how the pattern survives: https://lnkd.in/gTS33hu2

When women speak up about male violence, harassment and abuse, some men don't like it. Some men will try to undermine you, attack you, make unfounded accusations against you to throw you off track as you defend yourself (including that you hate men), or even publicly humiliate you. I experienced this last week when a troll decided to write a number of hyper sexualised comments about me in the chat box during a webinar on....wait for it...how men can play their part in tackling male violence against women and girls. Talk about proving why this is a big issue that needs to be dealt with, and showcasing the lengths that some men will go to to harass and abuse. Its something I've experienced on every social media platform when I've spoken up about systemic gender based inequality, male violence against women, victim blaming or my personal experiences. I've been accused of hating men, not paying enough attention to men's issue aka whataboutery, of over inflating the issue despite backing up what I write with research and stats, and more. When the abuse is sexual in nature, it's rarely about sex itself. The real aim is to wield power, to dominate..the desire to destabilise, undermine, silence and put you in your place. This is one of the reasons why a culture of sexualised or objectifying banter in an office can have a significantly negative impact on the women in the office. They will feel unsafe and unvalued, and know that their career progression is limited there as they aren't taken seriously. No wonder our Sexualisation of Women in the Workplace survey and report showed that 50% of women have considered or left a job because of being sexualised. The report download link in the comments. What happened last week failed to silence me. It has strengthened my determination to stop women being sexualised, and to do what I can to support companies with their gender balance and culture so that women can thrive and succeed. Tips for online events: - Safeguard your space. Have a moderator take charge of who joins the call, monitor what people are showing on their screens and typing in the the chat. Consider locking the webinar/meeting 5 minutes after it has started to prevent unwanted strangers joining. Adjust your settings so that people can not automatically join. - If you get a troll and you are the host, do not ignore it. Many people may have seen it and be distracted or potentially upset. Pause the conversation to acknowledge it and reassure everyone it has been dealt with, and the perpetrator removed. Daniele Fiandaca did this extremely sensitively on Monday. - Afterwards, provide people with information about where they can get support if they have been triggered. There are lots of places for free support/resources to get help around sexual or domestic violence, and mental health support. - Check in with the target of the abuse afterwards. #culturechange #genderbalance #diversity #allyship #maleallies #vawg #womenleaders

They’re not just coming for your data. They’re coming for your people. Your lead engineer. Your director of BD. Your intern with way too much access. Foreign intelligence services, corporate spies, activist insiders, disgruntled employees—today’s threat actors aren’t just breaching firewalls. They’re breaching trust. And here’s the (really uncomfortable) truth: They’re better at human intelligence than most organizations are at protecting it. But here’s what I learned from my years in espionage (the real kind—not the Netflix version): You don’t just protect systems. You protect humans. Because humans hold the keys. Humans make mistakes. And humans—when motivated, disgruntled, pressured, or flattered—can be turned. If your business involves: ✔️ Proprietary tech ✔️ Intellectual property ✔️ Foreign suppliers or manufacturing partners ✔️ Government contracts ✔️ Competitive R&D ✔️ Foreign competitors ✔️ M&A activity ✔️ High-value talent with global access …then congratulations: you’re a target. So why don’t you have someone in the C-suite who thinks like the adversary? We need to talk about the Chief Counterintelligence Officer—the CCO. Not a rebranded CISO. Not a part-time legal hat. A strategic, human-centric role focused on: ✔️ Insider threat mitigation ✔️ Corporate espionage awareness ✔️ Supply chain risk intelligence ✔️ Human risk management and behavioral security ✔️ Internal trust + external threat navigation It’s the next evolution of enterprise risk leadership. Because you can’t defend against human-driven threats with network maps alone. Security used to be about tech stacks. Now? It’s about people, psychology, and protection strategy. If you employ humans, you need a human-centric defense strategy. And that starts with someone at the top whose full-time job is to see what others miss. Because when you understand how human vulnerability meets foreign interest, you stop waiting for the breach—and start preventing it. Cybersecurity ≠ Counterintelligence. It’s time boards and C-suites stopped confusing the two. If you're not thinking like a spy, you’re playing defense in someone else’s game. And make no mistake: Someone is already playing. #InsiderThreat #HumanRisk #CorporateEspionage #Leadership #CISO #Cybersecurity #TradeSecrets #Counterintelligence #BoardEducation #ModernSecurity #SpycraftForBusiness

The high-performing jerk will break your company. Read on… Every company has faced this person. The one who delivers results… and wrecks everything else around them. They hoard knowledge. They work late into the night to look heroic. They don’t build teams—because their power lies in being the one-man army. They refuse feedback. They ignore structure. They report only to power—and treat every task as a favour, not a responsibility. And yes, they deliver. Numbers, projects, visibility. But at a cost no one sees upfront. I’ve dealt with this kind many times in the teams I’ve led. And every time, I’ve tried to get them to align to a broader culture—or face the consequences. I’ve never seen a complete 180-degree change. But more often than not, they eventually exit, knowing this is not the place for them. And when they do, it’s like a toxic weight lifts off the team. Most of them aren’t evil. Just wired to see performance as power. And power as protection. Once, thanks to someone like this, the company lost money and reputation. They walked away untouched. But the wreckage was left behind. Few years back, a high performer on my team once cried in a 1-on-1 saying they couldn’t work with this jerk anymore. Juniors were breaking down. I know colleagues who went to therapy—real therapy—just to deal with the stress this person created. Everyone knew. But no one had the fight to let them go. Because the fear was always the same: “What if the whole thing collapses if they leave?” Here’s the truth: it already has. They erode trust. Destroy culture. Push great people out. And by the time you fire them, it’s too late. The damage is already deep. But the real problem isn’t just the jerk. It’s the system that protects them. Because somewhere along the way, we started confusing damage for drive. We started valuing outcomes over behavior. Results over respect. And that’s how we ended up rewarding the person who burns the building down—as long as they do it while hitting targets. I’ve seen this in every function for the last 27 years — tech, sales, marketing, ops. No team is immune. My advice to young founders and managers: Don’t manage the jerk. Don’t tiptoe around the “rockstar.” Let them go. You want high performers? Build the kind who scale trust—not just tasks. Who grow people—not just outcomes. Because you’re not building an empire. You’re babysitting a bomb. And eventually, it explodes—in attrition, anxiety, and a culture no one wants to inherit. Firing them is hard. But rebuilding with the right people? That’s how real teams and real companies are made. I know this is a bit controversial but I thought this is a debate/conversation worth having. How have you dealt with this: would love to know in the comments. I have failed multiple times … succeeded a few times. It’s a tough one! (True story: I was once penalised in my appraisal for losing a seemingly HiPo jerk 🤣)

I usually refrain from sharing political or religious opinions on LinkedIn. I have always believed this platform should remain professional, focused on work and ideas. But the recent brutal murder of Sana Yousaf in Islamabad has shaken me deeply, not only because of the tragedy itself but because of the way people are responding to it. What has truly triggered me is the silencing of women who are raising their voices through LinkedIn about the unsafe environment for women in Pakistan, both in public spaces and in the workplace. The moment someone calls out this issue, the backlash begins, sadly often from men, urging them not to “generalize,” not to “defame” the country. This kind of response is exactly why many women stay silent about workplace harassment too. When they speak up, they are told it didn’t really happen, or that it wasn’t that serious, or that they are simply exaggerating. What people don’t realize is that every time a woman is harassed, assaulted, or worse, murdered, it sends shockwaves through all women. It makes them feel less safe, more anxious, and more silenced. And when society responds with denial or blame, it reinforces the idea that their voices won’t be heard, and justice won’t be served. We need to face the truth: Pakistan ranks among the worst countries in the world for women’s safety. We have hit rock bottom on the global gender gap index. These are not myths or isolated stories, these are facts. If we want to move forward as a society, we must first acknowledge the problem. Silencing women does nothing but perpetuate the culture of fear, shame, and silence. So, please, if you cannot be part of the solution, at least don’t be part of the problem. Listen when women speak. Support them. Stand by them. Real change starts with accepting that we have a long way to go and that we can only get there by raising our voices together. #LetWomenSpeak #WorkplaceHarassment #GenderEquality