We talk a lot about psychological safety in HR circles. It has its own frameworks now, its own measurement tools, its own place on the engagement survey. Leaders go on training courses about it. Consultants get paid handsomely to come and assess it.
And yet, in every organisation I have ever worked in or alongside, the single biggest determinant of whether people feel safe to speak, to challenge, to bring their whole thinking to work, has never been a programme. It has never been a workshop. It has never been a carefully worded set of company values on a wall.
It has always been the person at the top.
More specifically, it has been what that person does when things go wrong. When someone pushes back. When the numbers are bad. When they are tired, or stressed, or caught off guard. That is where psychological safety actually lives. Not in the framework. In that moment.
I have spent most of my career working directly with or closely alongside founders, directors, and CEOs. And over time I have come to recognise three patterns that repeat themselves, almost without exception.
The Volcano
You know this one. The temper that arrives without warning. One minute it’s a normal meeting, the next the temperature in the room has shifted and everyone is staring at the table.
But here’s the thing that doesn’t get said often enough: for some founders, the outbursts are not just poor emotional regulation. They are, consciously or not, a tool. Anger becomes the mechanism for shutting down challenge. Frustration becomes the signal that a particular topic is off limits. People learn, fast, that pushing back comes with a cost and so they stop pushing back.
What follows is not a team. It’s a group of people who have become highly skilled at managing one person’s emotions instead of doing their actual jobs. They learn the triggers. They learn what to say and, more importantly, what never to say. They manage upwards rather than contributing honestly. And the founder, surrounded by careful, compliant silence, often genuinely believes the team is aligned.
They’re not aligned. They’re afraid.
The business cost is enormous and it compounds over time. High turnover. Constant recruitment spend. Institutional knowledge disappearing with every resignation. And eventually a crisis that several people saw coming months earlier and said absolutely nothing about, because they had already learned that honesty was not safe here.
The Ghost
This one is insidious, because it doesn’t look like a problem from the outside. The founder is busy. They’re across everything. They’re driving the business forward. What’s not to like?
What’s not to like is that their own people barely see them. And when they do, it rarely goes well.
The Ghost is the founder who is physically and emotionally absent for stretches at a time, and then reappears without warning and without context. They haven’t been in the building. They haven’t been in the conversations. They don’t know what decisions have been made, what pressures the team are under, or what progress has quietly been happening while they’ve been elsewhere. And rather than taking the time to understand any of that, they come in, assess the situation based on whatever limited and often heavily filtered information they have to hand, and start pulling levers.
Things get restructured. Priorities shift overnight. Work that teams have invested weeks in gets scrapped or redirected. And then the Ghost is gone again, leaving everyone to absorb the disruption and carry on.
The filtered information is key here. Because the Ghost almost always has a favoured few. A small inner circle who do have access, who are the ones shaping what the founder sees and hears when they do appear. Everyone else in the organisation knows exactly where that invisible line is drawn. They’ve stopped trying to get the real picture to the top because they’ve learned it won’t get there. It’ll be translated, edited, or simply replaced by whatever narrative the inner circle chooses to present instead.
The result is a team that has learned to work around the founder rather than with them. They become expert at quietly rebuilding after each disappearing act, at absorbing disruption without complaint, and at keeping their best thinking to themselves because there is no reliable, safe channel for it to travel through.
And Sometimes, It’s Both – The Combination
If you’ve worked in organisations long enough, you’ll recognise this one immediately.
The Volcano is destructive. The Ghost is destructive. But when they exist in the same person, what you have is something that goes beyond either one on its own. Because at least with a single pattern, however damaging, a team is only dealing with one thing. When the same person oscillates between absence and explosion, between disengagement and chaos, the team are dealing with everything, all the time, with no reliable ground to stand on.
The Ghost phases breed anxiety and uncertainty. And when the Volcano arrives into that already unsettled environment, without context, without having sought to understand what’s actually been happening, it is devastating. Decisions get made in anger based on incomplete information. People who have been quietly holding things together get torn apart in front of others. And then the founder disappears again, leaving the wreckage behind.
The inner circle dynamic becomes something darker here too. The favoured few aren’t just gatekeepers and they aren’t just the early warning system. They are actively shaping the conditions for the next eruption. They decide what the founder sees when they reappear. They decide what mood they’re primed in before they’ve even walked through the door. That is an enormous and deeply unhealthy amount of power to sit with a small group of people whose primary skill is managing proximity to someone unpredictable.
What disappears completely in this environment is normal, functional, adult conversation. There is no safe, consistent channel for honesty. Problems get buried in the Ghost phases because there’s no one to bring them to. Then they explode in the Volcano phases because suddenly someone is paying attention, just not in any way that helps. Just silence, then noise. Over and over again.
The people who survive longest in these organisations are not the best performers. They’re the best adapters. And that distinction matters enormously, because the business is being shaped by whoever is best at navigating chaos, not by whoever has the best ideas.
The Anchor
I’ve been lucky enough to work with leaders who get this right, and they’re worth paying attention to. Not because they’re flawless, but because of the specific, ordinary ways in which they show up.
The Anchor is not necessarily the most charismatic person in the room. They are not performing leadership. What they are, consistently, is steady. When something goes wrong they respond rather than react. When someone challenges them they get curious rather than defensive. When they don’t know something, they just say so and it costs them nothing, because their authority doesn’t depend on pretending to have all the answers.
They’re kind without being soft. Expectations are clear, difficult conversations happen when they need to, and poor behaviour doesn’t get quietly tolerated because confrontation feels uncomfortable. But the kindness is real and people feel it.
They stay visible. Not in a grand, performative way. Just present. In the building. Remembering things about people. Noticing when something’s off. The small, consistent, unspectacular acts that tell a team: you matter here, and I am paying attention.
The result is a team that actually functions like one. People bring real problems because they trust they’ll be received properly. They challenge because they’ve seen that challenge is welcomed. They stay, because staying feels worth it.
So What Does Any of This Have To Do With HR? Everything!
Because we are often the ones holding the tension between what a founder believes about their leadership and what their people are actually experiencing. And that tension does not arrive neatly, in scheduled moments we can prepare for.
With the Volcano, there is no “managing the fallout from an incident.” There is just fallout, continuously, because the incidents never really stop. Someone leaves a meeting and comes to find us. Someone sends a message after a corridor conversation that left them shaken. Someone breaks down in a one to one because the cumulative weight of walking on eggshells every single day has finally caught up with them. We are picking up pieces constantly, often invisibly, while also being expected to show up as strategic partners and have credible conversations about people strategy.
With the Ghost, we are building psychological safety action plans while knowing, privately, that no action plan will fix the real problem. We are trying to create conditions for openness and trust in an organisation where the person who matters most has opted out of the very relationships that make those things possible.
And when it’s both? We are doing all of that, simultaneously, in an environment that is constantly shifting beneath our feet. We are supporting people who are exhausted from never knowing what’s coming next. We are trying to build something stable in an organisation where stability is not modelled from the top. We are the calm that the business has no other source of, and that is an enormous thing to carry, largely alone, and largely without acknowledgement.
And we are sometimes, if we are in the right organisation with the right person, the trusted voice that tells a founder what they need to hear. That their behaviour is the pattern. That their presence or absence is either building or destroying psychological safety every single day. That no people strategy, however well designed, will deliver what they are hoping for if this does not change.
That conversation requires courage. It also requires the kind of relationship that not every HR professional is given the chance to build.
But when it lands, it changes things. Not always. Not overnight. But sometimes, genuinely, it does.
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