An assistant coach says the press isn't working. The head coach says it's fine and moves on, and for the rest of the season nobody mentions the press. Put yourself in that meeting with a sore hamstring you haven't told anyone about, or a worry of your own about the game plan, and think about what you just learned about raising it.
Every coach says the door is open, and there may be a good policy too. But when you're deciding whether to speak, you probably aren't checking the policy. You're remembering what happened when someone else tried.
Amy Edmondson described something called psychological safety, a belief shared across a team that it's okay here to take a risk with the people around you. That risk might be admitting a mistake, asking a question that shows you didn't understand, or telling the coach the press isn't working. Because it's a belief, it comes from what people have seen, and a good policy may not change it.
This is also why a team's view of itself can mislead us. Ask a team to rate their chemistry and they'll often say ten out of ten. Then I ask when somebody junior last told somebody senior they'd got something wrong, and it went fine. The room often goes quiet, and I think that's because people know the honest answer wouldn't look good. So I've stopped asking whether a room feels safe. I ask who has tested it lately, and what happened to them.
People weigh what speaking up might cost them against how likely it is that anything will change, which is what I call the silence calculus. In elite sport that cost can be high. The person you'd have to disagree with usually controls your minutes, your contract and perhaps your next job, the people beside you are competing for your place, and coaches and support staff often don't have secure jobs either. One disagreement in a meeting can feel like a risk to your livelihood, and when you're facing all of that, staying quiet can be the logical choice. That doesn't make it a character problem. Someone can have good reasons to stay quiet and still end up carrying a risk, and the team may never hear something it needed to know.
You also don't have to be the person who got shut down. In the 1970s, Albert Bandura set out social learning theory, the idea that people learn consequences by watching them land on someone else. If a coach responds defensively to one person in a staff meeting, everyone else in that meeting has seen what happened, and it's worth asking whether you would raise your concern the next week if you had been sitting there. Speaking up also doesn't cost everyone the same. Race, gender, sexuality, a visa and a mental health problem can each add to the cost, and they can stack, so two people can raise the same concern and be taking very different risks.
When I'm trying to understand a team, I ask who has tested it lately and what happened to them, who saw it, whether a ten-year veteran and a first-season player on a visa are treated the same way when they raise the same concern, and whose worry turns into action while someone else's gets cut off. Those questions can be answered from what people have seen, which is where the belief comes from.
Now consider what all of this quiet can hide. During her doctoral research, Edmondson went into hospitals to study medication errors on nursing teams. She expected the better-run teams to make fewer mistakes, but the teams that scored highest for working well together reported the most errors. By her own account, she then sent a research assistant to spend time on each unit without saying which units had the high numbers. On the strong units, nurses talked openly about mistakes and the nurse managers treated an error as something to learn from, while on the others a slip was held against you, so it made sense not to write it down. She concluded that the better teams weren't making more mistakes. They were admitting the ones they made.
These were nursing teams in hospitals, so this can't tell us directly what happens in a dressing room. But I think it shows why a low number of reported problems may not mean there are few problems, since it may mean people have stopped reporting them. In sport, that can mean athletes who are still hurt and have stopped saying so, and a coach who then picks the team on incomplete information without any way of knowing it. So if nobody in your organization has raised a concern for months, it's worth asking whether there are few problems or whether people have stopped raising them.
We also need to be honest about what the research can tell us. Most of the evidence on psychological safety comes from outside sport, and it 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. One study published in 2025 compared elite athletes with recreational athletes, and the elite athletes felt less safe and said they'd be less likely to come forward if someone was violent toward them. This was a survey at one point in time, and it asked what athletes said they would do rather than what they did, but it gives us a reason to ask whether the athletes in our own organizations would feel able to come forward. A 2024 review of the sport studies also found that the field hasn't agreed what safety even means in sport, so the evidence points in a direction while still being thin.
Some people will say all of this is coddling, and that elite sport needs thick skin. I understand the worry, and the standards matter, because safety isn't permission to lower the bar for selection. Comfort means "don't push me," while safety means you can say what's true without being humiliated or punished for saying it. Players still get dropped on a team where it's safe to speak up, and contracts still run out. Disclosing an injury may still change a decision about who plays on Saturday, and no coach can promise that it won't. What shouldn't happen is that you're humiliated or punished for having been honest.
So how do we make honesty less costly when the consequences are real? I'd start with how decisions are delivered. Imagine a veteran being dropped, and finding out either from a list or from a conversation where someone gives him the reason. The decision is the same, and it may well be the right one, but other players are watching how it was done. If you had a sore groin in a contract year and you'd just watched him find out from a list, I think you'd be less likely to report it. Some people call this performance safety, which means separating the decision from the way it's delivered.
Leaders can also change what people see. In 2006, Ingrid Nembhard and Amy Edmondson looked at neonatal intensive care units, where a doctor outranks a nurse much as a head coach outranks a rookie. They asked staff how safe they felt speaking up, and how far leaders went out of their way to invite people in and thank them. People with lower status felt less safe, and that difference shrank on the units where the leader actively invited them in. That's a tendency from health care, and we don't know whether it holds on a particular team. But think about being in your first season and whether you would tell the head coach the press isn't working because you'd been told the door was open. I think a rookie may need more than an open door. The rookie may need to be asked, by name, and thanked for answering.
You could start small. At your next staff meeting, you might ask for one worry about the game plan and ask the quieter people first, thank whoever speaks first, and then change one thing because of what they said in a way people can see. Everyone else will be watching what that first person gets for speaking up. I haven't tested this as a protocol. It's practical advice.
We also need a route for bad news, because "my door is always open" isn't a system. If the only person you can tell is the person who picks the team, you may decide not to tell anyone. People need a way to raise a concern that doesn't run through that person, with someone outside the coaching line to receive it, such as a welfare officer, and they need a reply within a day or two saying what was done or why it wasn't. If nothing comes back, people learn to stay quiet. We should also be clear from day one about what stays private and what, by law or safeguarding policy, has to go further, because we can't promise that everything stays private. An urgent medical, welfare or safeguarding concern never waits for any of this, and if someone is in immediate danger, they need urgent help.
We'll also get this wrong sometimes. A decent coach under pressure can still shut someone down, and the people in the room will remember it. When that happens, I'd go back to the same people, quickly, and say so: "Someone told me something true last week, and I shut them down. That's mine to fix. What else have you been holding back?" I think that can do more than any invitation, because people see the coach admit getting it wrong in front of the same people who saw it happen.
Think about your own organization and the last time someone with less power disagreed with someone senior or brought them bad news, what happened to them afterward, who saw it, and what you think those people would do the next time they had a concern. Looking back over the past month, finding one time it happened, and asking how it went for the person who spoke would be a useful place to begin this week.
Prefer to listen? Listen to Episode 2 — 25 minutes ↗. You can also find it on Spotify ↗, Apple Podcasts ↗, Amazon Music ↗, Overcast ↗ and Pocket Casts ↗.
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If you're catching up, Episode 1 ↗ explores the pressures people work under.
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Dr. MCB
P.S. This series draws on the book Madeline Antony and I wrote, The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership (Routledge). You can find the book here ↗.