Coach for Candor Before You Coach for Performance
Create enough interpersonal safety for a direct report to surface real risks, mistakes, and doubts.
People reveal coachable truth when speaking up is safer than staying quiet. Psychological safety is not comfort, softness, or freedom from accountability. Edmondson’s work describes a team climate where people believe they can speak up with questions, mistakes, and concerns without being punished or humiliated. For coaching leaders, that belief is the floor under honest development. If people hide uncertainty, the manager ends up coaching a performance theater instead of the real work. The mechanism is risk calculation. Before someone says, “I do not know how to handle this client,” they quickly estimate whether the admission will cost status, trust,…
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