The Field Guide › Paper
Note: sourced from the published abstract and a secondary research summary rather than the full primary text, so this description is necessarily thinner on methodological specifics than most entries in this corpus. Examines a specific, underexplored lever for building durable psychological safety: whether leaders build it more effectively by seeking feedback (asking their team for input) or by sharing feedback (openly disclosing criticism they've already received about their own performance from others). Three studies build the case. In naturalistic data on CEOs, both feedback-seeking and feedback-sharing independently predicted board members' ratings of top-management-team psychological safety. The more consequential test is a longitudinal field experiment: leaders were randomly assigned to practice one behaviour or the other, and only feedback-sharing had a positive effect on psychological safety measured a full year later; feedback-seeking, despite being the behaviour most leadership advice emphasises, did not produce a lasting effect. A follow-up round of qualitative interviews with leaders and employees two years on explains why the two behaviours diverged so sharply over time. Feedback-seeking opened a moment of vulnerability, but it tended to dissolve: leaders sometimes responded defensively to what they heard, or simply didn't visibly act on it, and the practice lost credibility once employees noticed nothing was changing as a result of speaking up. Feedback-sharing worked differently: because a leader disclosing criticism they'd personally received was a public, on-the-record act of vulnerability, it created a kind of social commitment to keep doing it, and employees reciprocated by offering more of their own honest feedback in turn, which gave the leader more concrete, actionable material to work with and built a habit of mutual accountability that proved durable. A further finding worth flagging directly: leaders who shared criticism they'd received did not damage their own reputation for competence by doing so, addressing a natural worry that public vulnerability costs a leader authority. The practical implication complicates a lot of standard leadership advice, which tends to treat 'ask more questions' as the primary behavioural lever for building psychological safety: this research suggests that disclosure, not just solicitation, may be the more durable route, and that the two aren't interchangeable substitutes for each other.