You probably believe your executive team has Psychological Safety.
Most of my clients do.
They’re fooling themselves.
Not because people don’t speak up. Quite the opposite. Meetings are respectful. Feedback is encouraged. Different opinions are welcomed. On the surface, everything looks exactly as Psychological Safety is supposed to look.
The illusion only breaks when someone touches one of the team’s implicit assumptions.
Every executive team develops them. Shared beliefs about what can be questioned, who can be challenged, which topics are safe to explore, and which are better left alone. Nobody writes these rules down. Nobody talks about them. Yet everyone knows exactly where the invisible boundaries are.
This is where many leadership teams quietly confuse Psychological Safety with collective comfort.
They reassure each other that everything important can be said, while unconsciously protecting the very assumptions that matter most. They become remarkably harmonious, remarkably reasonable—and remarkably good at avoiding the conversations that would actually change their trajectory.
I’ve watched executive teams lull themselves into that comfort for years. Until reality eventually interrupts the illusion. Markets shift. Performance declines. Talent leaves. Customers notice. Suddenly the issue everyone had sensed for months can no longer be ignored.
Like The Emperor’s New Clothes, the problem was never that nobody saw it.
The problem was that everyone knew the price of being the first to say it.
This is where most Psychological Safety initiatives fall short. They work on behavior when the real work begins beneath behavior - in the assumptions people hold about authority, conflict, status, certainty, and power.
Because under pressure, you don’t lead from the communication model you learned in a workshop. You lead from the beliefs your nervous system has learned to protect.
And there is another irony.
Organizations ask leaders to stay curious, reflective, and open. At the same time, they reward certainty, speed, decisiveness, and closure.
I call this the Courage Tax.
The moment you challenge the team’s hidden assumptions instead of reinforcing them, you start paying it.
That is also the difference between Absencing and Presencing.
Absencing protects the existing story because certainty feels safer than reality.
Presencing stays with reality long enough for something genuinely new to emerge - even when that makes you slower, less certain, or temporarily unpopular.
Before you tell yourself your executive team has Psychological Safety, ask yourself one question:
Which truth has everyone in the room already seen—but nobody is willing to name because the Courage Tax has become too high?