Tag psychological safety

The Most Important, Invisible Thing Regular Meetings Do

The important, invisible thing that regular meetings do

A clinic administrator announced a set of changes in the local newspaper. The staff who would carry out those changes found out the way everyone else in town did — over coffee, from the paper.

For days, people complained in hallways and parking lots. It went nowhere. Then, at the pointless monthly committee meeting, one senior physician said it out loud, in the room, in front of everyone. That naming set events in motion that eventually removed the administrator.

How did that happen? Because of every "pointless" meeting session that came before it. The committee had been building the team's connective tissue the whole time — badly, by accident, and without anyone naming it.

Why You Are Both Cabo Verde and Argentina

To keep on playing one must pause and reflect

On Friday, a nation of half a million people took the defending World Cup champions to extra time. And lost on an own goal in the 111th minute. Cabo Verde's story is being told everywhere as an underdog triumph, and it is one. But there's a second story sitting on the other bench, and leaders need it more. Argentina nearly lost because their winning ways had quietly taught them the wrong lesson. This post reads the same match twice: first as the underdog who builds something the scoreboard can't measure, then as the champion whose success hides its own flaws. Because if you lead anything, you are both teams at once. And the best leaders learn to see both stories.

What Silence Really Means — Humble Inquiry, Part 2

Quality questions lead to quality relationships

In Part 1, I shared the story of a night call schedule that failed because my team didn’t warn me…because I didn’t really ask them. This follow-up explores what that silence actually means: not agreement, but resignation. Drawing again on Ed and Peter Schein's Humble Inquiry, we see why physician leaders find humble inquiry especially difficult because it feels slow, vulnerable, and out of their control and how we can start practicing it today.

Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me? — Humble Inquiry, Part 1

Humble Inquiry leads to open communication

Once, when a Chief Medical Officer, I rolled out a night call schedule that failed three weeks in. The team had seen what was coming; they just didn't tell me. The reason wasn't a communication failure — it was an asking failure. Drawing on Ed and Peter Schein's Humble Inquiry, this post explores why physicians, trained to be the person in the room with the answer, struggle to ask real questions when they move into leadership. It introduces the Scheins' four types of inquiry — humble, diagnostic, confrontive, and process-oriented — and shows how most physician leaders unknowingly default to confrontive questions that teach their teams to confirm a hypothesis rather than share what they actually see.

Why Psychological Safety Is Not About Being Nice

which kind of open door do you have

A nurse once told me the truth only when the doctor in charge was away. That is what a lack of psychological safety looks like in healthcare: not loud fear, but quiet calculation. When people cannot say what needs to be said in the room, truth starts traveling through hallways and whispers. And when that happens, leaders are not hearing reality. They are hearing what feels safe.