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Hey there, innovation champions!
In a few weeks, I’m heading to Austin for the National Speakers Association annual conference.
As a member, I have access to recordings of every session. I could watch them from my couch in Mountain View, not disrupt my life, and save a few thousand dollars.
I’m going anyway.
Because the most valuable thing that happens at that conference won’t be captured in any recording.
It happens in the hallways.
The unguarded conversations between sessions. The half-formed ideas someone shares over bad coffee. The admission — said quietly, not from a stage — that a strategy everyone applauded publicly isn’t actually working.
Those conversations are different. Richer. More honest. And they’re different for one specific reason: nobody’s performing.
I’ve been thinking about why that matters — and what it reveals about what actually makes people willing to say the true thing.
The moment I became my own case study
The other day, I was on a three-way call with a client I’ll call Julie and a colleague I’ll call Mary.
Julie had brought us together because she wanted us to collaborate on something she’s building. Mary was facilitating. We were going around the virtual room, each sharing our perspective on a series of questions.
Then Mary asked me something — a question about what I’d like to contribute to bring Julie’s vision to life.
I didn’t fully understand what she was asking.
I knew exactly what to do: ask for clarification. I ask for clarification in sessions all the time. I teach people that asking questions is a sign of engagement, not weakness. I have genuinely good relationships with both Julie and Mary. I trust them.
And I froze.
Not dramatically. I didn’t go silent or leave the call. But I paused, I smiled, I stumbled, and I gave an answer that didn’t quite land — because I was too busy managing a fear I didn’t even consciously register until afterward.
The fear that Julie would think I didn’t know what I was doing.
Here’s the part that stopped me cold when I thought about it later: Julie has power over my income.
She’s not my manager. She’s a client. We have a warm, collaborative, genuinely good relationship. There’s no reason to think she would fire me for asking a clarifying question.
And none of that mattered in the moment.
Because power doesn’t care about warmth.
The relationship trap
Here’s what I think we get wrong about psychological safety.
We treat it as a relationship problem. If people feel comfortable with each other — if they like each other, if there’s trust — we assume the conditions for psychological safety are in place.
But psychological safety isn’t primarily about relationships. It’s about power dynamics.
And power dynamics don’t go away just because the relationship is good.
I’ve worked with teams where everyone genuinely likes each other. The managers are warm. The skip-level conversations happen. There are no obvious villains. And people still don’t speak up when it matters.
Because the question employees are always — always — asking, consciously or not, is: what happens to me if I get this wrong in front of this person?
The answer to that question is shaped by power, not by liking.
A manager who genuinely cares about their team can still trigger a freeze response in a direct report — not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because they hold real power over that person’s career, income, and sense of professional identity.
I experienced this firsthand in a call with someone I like and trust.
If I froze — with years of practice, full awareness of the dynamic, and a genuinely good relationship — what’s happening on your teams every single day with people who don’t have that context?
What the hallways know
The reason those conference hallway conversations feel different isn’t just that nobody’s performing.
It’s that the power differential is flatter.
When I’m talking with a peer in a hotel corridor between sessions, neither of us holds professional power over the other. The social stakes are lower. The freeze response is less likely to fire.
That’s why the honest things get said there instead of in the session room.
The same dynamic is playing out in your organization every day — just in reverse. The honest things are not getting said in meetings, in Slack threads, in all-hands sessions, because the power differential is real and your people feel it, even if nobody’s talking about it.
The insight isn’t that leaders are doing something wrong. Most of the leaders I work with are doing a lot right.
The insight is that awareness of power dynamics isn’t enough. Caring about your people isn’t enough. You have to actively, structurally create the conditions where speaking up feels safer than staying quiet.
That’s not a values statement. It’s a practice.
What I’m building
I’ve been sitting with the question of what it would look like to create more of those hallway conversations — the honest, off-the-record, peer-level ones — on a more regular basis.
I’m working on something. More soon.
In the meantime: the next time someone on your team goes quiet in a meeting, or gives a slightly-too-smooth answer when you ask for their honest take — consider that it might not be disengagement.
It might be a freeze response you can’t see from where you’re sitting.
That’s worth understanding. And it’s absolutely worth fixing.
A Note on This Practice
I’m starting to have some of these conversations on the record. More on that soon.
In the meantime: the next time you’re in a room — virtual or physical — and you feel the pull toward the impeccable, the polished, the waiting-until-I’m-sure?
Go first anyway. Imperfect. Unguarded. A little goofy.
Watch what happens to the ceiling.
