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Episode 2 of 7 in What makes a high-performance culture? Today's question: Can anyone here tell the truth?
Episode 2 of 7 in What makes a high-performance culture? Today's question: Can anyone here tell the truth?
An assistant coach who always pushed back gets shut down once, in one staff meeting, and within weeks four people in the building have gone quiet, including the ones nobody told to. By the end of the season a goalkeeper has played through an injury nobody reported. Through Marta, a composite story, Dr. MCB explains what psychological safety actually is (a belief the whole team shares, that admitting a mistake, asking a question or disagreeing won't be punished), why it isn't comfort, trust or belonging, and why elite sport produces silence even when nobody intends to: the status gap, rivals for a place, a public audience, and the simple fact that everyone watches what happens to the person who speaks first. She sorts the three kinds of silence in Marta's staff room, shows how a loud, close team can be unsafe for the truth, and gives the Sentence Test for checking whether anyone has tested your room lately. Two research stories carry the argument: Amy Edmondson's early hospital study, where the best nursing teams turned out to report the most medication errors, and the neonatal intensive care study she did with Ingrid Nembhard, which showed what a leader's invitation does to a status gap. Dr. MCB's judgement is that too many elite sport environments still make honesty costly; the way to assess your own is to look at what happens when someone speaks. Protecting honesty doesn't remove the consequences of what is disclosed, including an injury that affects availability. You don't survey your way to safety; you test it, separate the decision from the humiliation (Performance Safety), build a real route for bad news and answer it fast, and repair in public when you break it.
This series draws on The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership by Dr. Marie Claire Bourque and Madeline Antony (Routledge). Find the book.
Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. Dr. MCB is a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views expressed are her own and are not endorsed by either university. This podcast is general education, not medical advice, and does not create a doctor–patient relationship.
What are you curious about?
I'm Dr. Marie Claire Bourque, Dr. MCB. I'm a psychiatrist, and I ask a lot of questions. My favourite ones are the ones I don't know the answers to.
That's where Dr. MCB’s Curiosities starts. We take a question about neuroscience, human behaviour, clinical medicine, or something else entirely, and build a podcast episode or series to explore the answer.
I read the research and look at different explanations. What do we know? How do we know it? And what haven't we figured out yet?
You get to follow that search with me, without having to work through all the papers yourself. We'll make sense of the science in plain language, including where the evidence is uncertain or the answer is still taking shape.
You might leave with a clearer answer, a different understanding of something you thought you knew, or another question worth asking.
And if you've got a question I can't answer, send it my way. That's the engine.
Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. Dr. MCB is a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views expressed are her own and are not endorsed by either university. This podcast is general education, not medical advice, and does not create a doctor–patient relationship.
Let me tell you about Marta. She's a composite: a made-up person built out of patterns I've seen many times, with the details changed.
Marta is an assistant coach, three seasons at the same club, with a reputation in the staff room: when the game plan has a hole in it, she's the one who says so. The head coach, Marcus, doesn't always enjoy that, but it's how that staff works.
Then the team loses four in a row.
Marcus decides to drop a veteran midfielder, and he doesn't tell him. He posts the squad list, and the player finds out the way everybody else does. At the next staff meeting, Marta says what she'd normally say: people deserve to hear it from you before they read it on a list. And Marcus says: selection is mine, and if you'd rather run your own team, go and find one.
That's the whole exchange: nobody shouts, and the meeting moves on.
And Marta stops raising anything about how people get treated, but she wasn't the only one who heard that sentence. Within a few weeks, the video analyst stops pointing out when the player-load numbers don't fit who Marcus is rotating. The goalkeeping coach has a worry about the backup keeper's confidence, and keeps it to himself. A month later, the starting goalkeeper plays through a shoulder problem nobody brought forward, because by then nobody was bringing anything forward.
At the end of the season, the medical review writes two words next to that shoulder: delayed disclosure. Nobody asks why disclosure stopped, and nobody draws the line back to a squad list.
Four people went quiet, and only one of them was ever told to. That's what I want to understand today: how one sentence in one meeting can switch off the information in an entire building, and what it takes to switch it back on.
This series is about elite sport, and we're answering one big question: what makes a high-performance culture? Each episode takes one smaller question on the way there. This is episode two of seven, and today's question is the one every other answer depends on: can anyone here tell the truth?
Welcome to Dr. MCB’s Curiosities. I ask a lot of questions, and my favourite ones are the ones I don't know the answers to. So, let's find the answers!
Last time I left you with two tools and a promise. The first tool was the silence calculus, the quiet arithmetic people do before they speak: the cost of saying it against the odds that anything changes. The second was what I call speed of truth, how long bad news takes to travel from whoever sees it to whoever can act on it. And the promise was that this episode goes deeper on silence.
I think of today's question as the foundation, because this is the second layer of what I call the High-Performance Culture Operating System, and everything above it, what's broken, how we decide, whether we listen, runs on information. If people can't tell the truth, you're steering on bad data, and nothing tells you so.
The phrase for this, psychological safety, has been worn smooth: people hear it and think "nice", or "soft", or "a workshop with a flip chart".
Here's the definition I work from, and it comes from Amy Edmondson, who teaches at Harvard Business School and has spent three decades studying how teams learn: psychological safety is a belief, shared across a team, that it's okay here to take a risk with other people. That's not a physical risk, it's a risk with people: admitting the mistake was yours, asking the question that reveals you didn't understand the set piece, telling the coach the press isn't working, flagging the hamstring.
Three words in there do the work. Shared means it belongs to the group, not to one brave person. If the goalkeeper challenges the defensive setup and the rest of the back line sits there because they've learned not to, you don't have safety, you have one goalkeeper. Risk with people means it's about what happens between people when you're honest, not whether the standards are high. And belief means people don't check the policy; they check their memory of last time.
And of course the standards matter! So here's what it is not: it isn't permission to skip the hard tackle or lower the bar for selection, and it doesn't remove the consequences of playing badly on Saturday. It means honesty itself isn't punished, even when what you disclose changes a decision about Saturday.
Amy Edmondson draws this as a simple picture, and it's worth putting on a whiteboard with any coaching staff. Along the bottom you put how high the standards are, up the side how safe it is to be honest, and that gives you four boxes.
Low standards and low safety is the box where nobody cares and nobody talks. High safety with low standards is where everyone gets along and nobody gets pushed; this is the "soft" team competitive coaches fear, and wrongly assume psychological safety will give them. High standards with low safety is the box I think most elite sport lives in; call it the anxiety box. The standards are visible, sprint times on the wall, reviews with teeth, but honesty costs so much that everyone protects themselves, not the team. A midfielder spots a gap in the other side's press and says nothing, because the previous guy who suggested a tactical change was told to just do his job. And high standards with high safety is the box you want: selection is still competitive, but speaking is cheap enough that problems surface while they're still fixable, on Tuesday in the film room instead of in Saturday's post-mortem.
Now notice what's the same in the anxiety box and the box you want: players get dropped in both, and contracts run out in both. The difference isn't whether there are consequences, it's whether being honest is one of them.
One more thing, because it's the commonest mistake here: safety, trust and belonging are not the same, and if you mix them up, you fix the wrong one. Trust is between two people: has this person proven reliable to me? Belonging is inside one person: do I feel part of this? And safety is a rule of the group: what does this room do to people who speak? "We're a tight squad" mistakes closeness for safety, and the closest teams can be the most brutal to anyone who breaks ranks. "I trust Coach" is one relationship, and it says nothing about whether the third-choice keeper can report a sore shoulder. Fix a safety problem with a team-building weekend and you've made some friendships stronger and left the rule of the room where it was.
High standards and high safety sounds easy, right? So why is it so hard? Here's the turn in today's story.
Every coach says the door is open, but silence in elite sport isn't a character problem, it's the smart move. The building produces it, even when nobody meant it to.
Think about who's being challenged: the person you'd have to disagree with usually controls your minutes, your contract, your next job. The best study I know on that gap comes from a hospital, not a stadium. Ingrid Nembhard, who studies how health care teams learn and improve, worked with Edmondson on a 2006 study of neonatal intensive care units, the wards where the sickest newborns are cared for, and where a doctor outranks a nurse the way a head coach outranks a rookie. Every unit was trying to improve its care, and the researchers wanted to know who would actually join in. So they asked the doctors, nurses and therapists on each unit how safe they felt speaking up, and how far the unit's leaders went out of their way to invite people in and thank them for what they said. The status gap showed up exactly as you'd expect: the doctors felt safest, and the people further down the ladder felt least safe. But that gap shrank on the units where the leader actively invited the lower-status people in, and the invitation did the most for the people with the least power. Those were also the units where people threw themselves into the improvement work. That's a tendency, not a law, but sport has one of the widest status gaps of any workplace, and the lesson travels: the rookie doesn't need a door that's open, the rookie needs to be asked, by name, and thanked for answering.
Now add the people beside you, your rivals for a place: admit you don't understand the defensive scheme, and in a system that's forever hunting for its weakest link, you may have just nominated yourself. Then there's the audience: a full stadium, cameras on every decision, social media stretching the judgment out indefinitely. And nobody's job is secure, coaches and staff included; "hired to get fired" is the saying. When losing face costs enough, silence is the logical choice.
And the price isn't the same for everyone. In a leadership group that's all one race, the same concern can be heard as "difficult" or "an attitude problem" depending on who raises it. Women in men's sport can be penalized more heavily for behaviour that counts as assertive in a man. A gay athlete is already paying a tax to conceal, and an international player on a visa is weighing more than his place. Mental health still reads as weakness here, so disclosure gets a deselection risk added on top, and all of these stack. So when you're assessing this kind of pressure, watch for who actually speaks in your meetings, and then for how the same concern is treated when a ten-year veteran raises it, versus when a first-season player on a visa raises it: who gets cut off, and whose worry turns into action. If the same people keep paying the price for candor, that isn't safety, that's a participation gap.
Now here's how one sentence spreads. Albert Bandura, the Stanford psychologist whose social learning theory came out in the 1970s, showed that people learn consequences by watching them land on someone else: you don't have to be punished, you just have to see it. And James Detert and Ethan Burris, two management researchers who study what makes employees speak up to their bosses, asked in a 2007 study whether the open door is really open, and found that people speak up to a boss they see as open to it, and hold back from one they don't, because that's how they judge whether it's safe. Put those together and you get Marta's building.
Marcus never told the analyst to stop, and he didn't have to, because the analyst was in the room. One defensive reaction from the top can reset the silence calculus for everybody below it.
So how do you read a building like Marta's? Last episode I split silence by where it gets stuck: fear, who's in the room, the back channels. Today I want to stay with the people who are in the room and could speak, because even there, Linn Van Dyne and colleagues, organizational behaviour researchers who argued in 2003 that silence is not one thing, set out three different silences, sorted by motive, and Marta's staff room had all three.
Marta's silence was defensive, the fear kind: she spoke, she got hurt, and now she's protecting herself. The analyst's was different, because he never got burned; he watched Marta get burned and concluded that flagging the numbers was pointless. That's resignation, and the researchers call it acquiescent. And the goalkeeping coach was silent out of loyalty, protecting a working relationship and keeping the peace. That's the prosocial kind, and it's everywhere in sport, because sport raises people to protect the group.
Three silences means three different fixes. Fear needs the consequences changed: what actually happens to the person who speaks. Resignation needs proof, so you show that speaking changes something, visibly and quickly. And loyalty needs the loyalty redefined, because staying quiet about a problem isn't protecting the team, it's leaving the team to find out the hard way. Run a "speak up" campaign on a room whose silence is resignation, and you've reassured people who were never afraid.
Now, here's the trap: unsafe rooms often sound great, loud, funny, everybody finishing each other's sentences. I call that false cohesion, a room that sounds sure of itself, where nobody says what they think. The tell is which register the energy comes in: agreement, enthusiasm and toughness arrive at full volume, while uncertainty, disagreement and "I need help" arrive as silence.
Here's the form I meet it in most often. Ask a team to rate their chemistry and they'll give you a ten out of ten. Then I ask: when did somebody junior last tell somebody senior they'd got something wrong, and it went fine? And the room goes quiet, not because nobody can think of an example, but because everybody knows the honest answer is embarrassing. So I've stopped asking whether a room feels safe, and I ask instead who has tested it lately, and what happened to them.
That question is the heart of a tool I call the Sentence Test. Take the five most powerful people in your building, and for each one, look back thirty days: did anyone with less power disagree with them in public, bring them bad news, or admit they were confused? If you can't find a single instance, or you can and it went badly, safety hasn't been tested, and a team that calls itself close hasn't earned the word yet. I'll say plainly what this is: a practitioner's tool, built out of the research, not a validated test. It won't give you a score, but it tells you where to look.
Then you look, rather than ask. In meetings, watch for whether it's always the same few voices, or whether the bench players and the junior staff speak too, and after an error, watch for whether people move toward the person who made it, or away. In the hallways, watch where the complaints arrive: through official channels, or out in the parking lot. And listen to the language. "That's above my pay grade" means I have thoughts, and sharing them gets me in trouble. "Stay in your lane" means don't carry information across a boundary. "I just work here" means I've checked out. When those become the ordinary vocabulary of a building, the quiet was learned. Proper surveys exist too, Edmondson's own and a sport-specific one built in 2022 by Simon Rice and colleagues, researchers in athlete mental health, and they're worth running anonymously, split by role, but in an unsafe building, people don't believe anonymous means anonymous. So look first, and survey second.
Now, none of this means coaches stop having consequences. Selection, contracts, careers: no coach can promise that mistakes won't count, and no coach should. The resolution is what's sometimes called performance safety, which means you separate the decision from the way it's delivered. You can take a player out of the team, but you don't get to humiliate him on the way out. Think back to Marcus and that midfielder: in two different buildings, the decision is identical, he's dropped, and what differs is whether he learns it from a list, or from a conversation where someone gives him the reason. And the rest of the squad is watching how it was done, and updating their own arithmetic. If that's how a ten-year veteran gets treated, what happens to me if I report a sore groin in a contract year?
The same split runs through everything. After a costly error, is it a public dressing-down, or a debrief about the decision rather than the person's character? An injury gets hidden, because disclosing it risks your place, or reported early, because the medical pathway doesn't run through the selection meeting. The standards are the same, and only the process is different. A lot of sport runs on an unspoken assumption, "you're lucky to be here", which treats people as replaceable and honesty as a lack of gratitude. Performance Safety runs on the reverse, "we're lucky to have you", and not as words on a wall but as the way decisions get delivered. Taylor and colleagues, writing in a sport psychology journal in 2026, formalized the idea for settings where errors carry real consequences, which is exactly what elite sport is.
Now, the objection, and it usually comes in these words: "This is coddling, and elite sport needs thick skin." Here's my answer: comfort means "don't push me", but safety means I can tell you what's true without being humiliated or punished for saying it. A rugby forward doesn't need comfort; he needs to know that a head knock he reports goes to the doctors, and the doctors decide when he plays again, not the coaches. A fear-based culture doesn't get rid of injuries, doubt or mistakes, it gets rid of the reporting.
Edmondson found that out by accident, and it's the story of how this whole field began. As a doctoral student, she went into hospitals to study medication errors on nursing teams, with a simple hypothesis: the better-run teams would make fewer mistakes. She measured how well each team worked together, collected the error reports, and the result came back upside down. The teams that scored highest as teams reported the most errors. For a while she assumed she'd got something wrong, and then she sent a research assistant to spend time on each unit, without saying which units had the high numbers, and the assistant came back describing two different worlds. On the strong units, nurses talked openly about mistakes, and the nurse managers treated an error as something to learn from. On the others, nurses described a place where a slip was held against you, so the smart move was not to write it down.
The better teams weren't making more mistakes; they were admitting them. That reversal is the finding this whole episode rests on.
It's the same in sport. The athletes still get hurt; they just stop saying so, and the coach picks the team on incomplete information. The problem was never hard coaching, it's what happens to the person who carries the bad news.
So what do you do on a Tuesday morning? That's the standard I hold every idea to: if it doesn't change something on an ordinary weekday, it's decoration.
Start small and visible: at your next staff meeting, or in the post-match review, ask for one worry about the game plan. Thank whoever speaks first, and then change one thing, visibly, because of it. Everyone else is watching what that first person gets for it, and that's the whole mechanism.
Then build the plumbing, because "my door is always open" is not a system. Elizabeth Morrison, a management professor at New York University who has spent much of her career on why people speak up or stay quiet at work, found in a 2011 review that three things predict whether people actually do it: will anything change, will I be punished, and is there an obvious route, so build all three. You need a route for concerns that doesn't run through the person who picks the team, and someone to receive them who sits outside the coaching line, a welfare officer, say. You need a reply within a day or two: here's what we did, or here's why we didn't. And you need clear limits from day one about what stays private and what, by law or safeguarding policy, has to go further.
Change the meetings, too, because that's where safety is tested in public. Send the question out beforehand, not the answer. Ask the quiet end of the room first, the bench players and the junior staff, before the veterans speak. Ask, then wait; count to ten and don't fill the gap. Let the leader speak last, and argue on film, not on status. Afterward, thank the people who pushed back, and tell them what came of it. Nothing coming back after someone speaks teaches everyone else to stay quiet.
And when it breaks, because it will, repair in public and repair fast. If you snapped at someone's honest feedback last week, say so this week: I asked for honesty and then I bristled when I got it, and that's mine to fix, so what did you hold back? That correction does more than the original invitation, because it proves the room can survive the coach being wrong. If the team has gone quiet after a loss, name it: we've gone quiet, and this is when we most need to talk; what aren't we saying? The room isn't watching the mistake, it's watching what you do next.
One more piece, because "accountability" is where safety usually dies. When something goes wrong, sort it before you respond. If it was a slip, an honest error, you support the person and fix the conditions that produced it. If someone cut a corner without seeing the risk, or believed the risk was justified, you coach them and address what made that choice seem reasonable. And if someone knowingly ignored a serious risk they couldn't justify, that's reckless behaviour, and discipline may be appropriate. Breaking a rule on purpose doesn't, by itself, tell you which kind of behaviour it was. David Marx, whose 2001 primer on patient safety brought the idea to hospital executives, and Sidney Dekker, a safety scientist who studies how organizations respond when things go wrong, call this a Just Culture. Consequences don't disappear; they become proportional and predictable, instead of shifting with the mood or last weekend's result. One catch: the head coach with the most riding on the error is usually the one who rules on what kind of error it was. If you have a stake in the verdict, you shouldn't be the judge.
And if the big decisions are made above you? Then make a pocket: inside your own sphere, make it known that the truth doesn't get punished here, and prove it, repeatedly. Report back on everything you're told, and write down what you see, with dates, so that when you escalate, you escalate with evidence. A pocket won't fix the floor above you, but it keeps information moving while you make the case upward.
Where does the research stop? Most of the evidence is from outside sport. In 2017 a team of management researchers led by Frazier pooled a hundred and seventeen studies and found a moderate-to-strong link between psychological safety and sharing information, learning, and getting the job done. But that pooled association doesn't tell us how safety works in an elite dressing room, where your body is the work, the judging is public, and deselection is a constant threat. Sport research is catching up. Katrien Fransen and colleagues, sport psychology researchers who study leadership inside teams, surveyed handball players in 2020 and linked safety to team resilience and to how satisfied players were with the team's performance, and in 2025 Hurst and colleagues, sport psychology researchers who compared elite athletes with recreational ones, found that the elite athletes feel less safe, and say they'd be less likely to come forward if someone was violent toward them. But there's a caution, too: Vella and colleagues, who went through the sport studies in a 2024 review, found that the field hasn't agreed what "safety" even means in sport. So the evidence points a direction; it isn't yet a detailed map. And the tools I've given you, the Sentence Test, the sorting of silence, the repair sequence, are practitioner tools built from that research: a lens, not a score.
Madeline Antony and I wrote the full framework up in a book, The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership. The link is in the episode notes.
So, can anyone here tell the truth? Here's the answer: my judgement is that too many elite sport environments still make honesty costly. You find out about your own by looking at what happens when someone speaks, rather than assuming an open door means it's safe.
Safety is the shared belief that admitting a mistake, asking a question or disagreeing won't be punished, and it's made or broken by what everyone watches happen to the person who speaks first. You don't survey your way to it: you test it, you separate the decision from the humiliation, you build a real route for bad news and answer it fast, and when you break it, you repair it in public.
So here's what that adds to our big question: a high-performance culture is one where the truth travels fast, because everyone, not just the people with the most influence, can raise a problem, admit a mistake or disagree, and what they say gets a real response rather than a cost.
Next time, question three: what is actually broken?
That's Dr. MCB’s Curiosities. I hope you learned something. I sure did. Can't wait to ask more questions with you. See you next time! Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. I'm a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views here are my own and aren't endorsed by either university, and this podcast is general education, not medical advice.