Speed of Safety
Think about the best team you have ever been part of. Not necessarily the most talented collection of people, or the one with the flashiest resources or the most impressive title on the org chart. The team where something just worked. Where people were honest with each other. Where someone could say "I don't know" or "I got that wrong" and nobody flinched. Where the best idea won, regardless of who had it.
What made that team different?
And now think about the worst team you've been part of. Where the meetings were exercises in careful performance. Where credit was hoarded and blame was shared generously. Where people said one thing in the room and something completely different in the car park afterwards. Where you were permanently slightly on guard, never quite sure where you stood.
Same people. Different team. Completely different results. What changed?
Trust. And trust is just safety between people who have to work together.
Teams change at the speed of safety.
Why Your Team Is Probably Performing Below Its Potential
Here is something I share from stages all over the world and it lands every single time. Most teams are not underperforming because of a skills gap. They are underperforming because of a safety gap. People are holding back. They are protecting themselves. They are giving you a carefully edited version of their thinking because the environment, consciously or not, has taught them that full honesty is risky.
And you cannot get extraordinary performance from people who are partially switched off.
Google spent years and millions of dollars studying what made their highest-performing teams different from their average ones. They called the research Project Aristotle, and what they found was not what anyone expected. It was not the smartest teams that performed best. It was not the most experienced or the most credentialed. It was the teams with the highest psychological safety. The ones where members felt safe to take risks, to speak up, to be vulnerable with each other without fear of being humiliated or dismissed.
In other words, the teams that trusted each other.
Trust Does Not Just Happen
We tend to talk about trust as though it is either there or it isn't. As though some teams are lucky enough to have it and others just aren't. But trust is not luck. It is a culture that someone built, usually a leader, through hundreds of small daily choices that told people: you are safe here. Your honesty is welcome here. Your mistakes will not define you here.
Think about the leaders you have trusted most in your career. Were they the ones with all the answers? The ones who never showed doubt? I doubt it. The leaders people trust most are the ones who were honest when something wasn't working. Who said "I was wrong about that" without it costing them their credibility. Who created a room where the truth could actually be told, because they modelled it themselves.
Trust flows downhill. When a leader trusts their team with honesty, the team learns that honesty is safe. When a leader admits a mistake, it gives everyone else permission to be human too. When a leader responds to bad news with curiosity instead of punishment, people start bringing them the real news instead of the edited version. And that is when a team starts to actually function.
The team that can tell each other the truth is the team that can solve anything.
A Question Worth Sitting With
When was the last time someone on your team told you something you didn't want to hear? And when they did, what happened next? Did they feel glad they said it? Did it change anything? Or did the silence in the room afterwards teach everyone present that honesty comes with a cost?
Because your team is learning from every single one of those moments. They are building an internal map of what is safe to say, safe to try, safe to admit, safe to question. And they are adjusting their behavior accordingly, often without anyone realizing it is happening.
The beautiful thing is that this can change. And it can change relatively quickly, because when people feel a genuine shift in safety, they respond to it. Not always immediately, and not without some healthy scepticism at first, but they respond. People want to trust. People want to contribute fully. People want to be part of something that feels honest and real.
They just need to know it is safe to do so. And that is a decision you make every single day, in every single interaction.
The question is not whether you can build a high-trust team. You absolutely can. The question is whether you are willing to go first.
About Amanda Gore
Amanda Gore is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker, CEO of The Joy Project, and author of Joy is an Inside Job. She works with organizations across the globe to build leaders who create cultures where people feel safe enough to bring their best. Find out more at amandagore.com
