Leadership mistakes: fear, people-pleasing, and psychological safety

Executive overview

Avoiding hard decisions doesn't eliminate the cost — it redistributes it onto the team. In 2024, Dr Amantha Imber led Inventium through a difficult year marked by staff turnover, financial pressure, and her own fear-driven paralysis. What she thought was prudence was a freeze response masquerading as strategy.

The core failure: hope as a substitute for action. Avoiding redundancies, avoiding conflict, and avoiding hard feedback loops all had compounding costs that landed on people who didn't sign up for them.

Indecision is a decision — and it costs more than the thing you're afraid to do.

Hope is not a strategy

• Economic downturn hit consultancies hard in late 2023 and into 2024; clients cut budgets.
• Rather than acting, Imber kept hoping conditions would turn or a new CEO hire would fix things.
• Redundancies weren't considered — partly because Inventium's average tenure is ~5 years, making cuts feel unthinkable.
• The freeze response made imagining those conversations impossible, so the option was erased entirely.
• By not acting, pressure accumulated on team members who bore the cost of the delay.
• In hindsight: the cost of indecision was higher than the cost of the decision itself.

People-pleasing as a leadership liability

• A therapist told Imber that her high need to be liked made her a poor manager — she accepted this without challenge.
• That statement became a "nail in the coffin" reinforcing her desire to exit the CEO role.
• She later recognised she'd taken a two-sentence clinical observation as absolute truth without questioning it.
• Therapist statements, like any input, are perspectives — not verdicts.
• The need to be liked drove conflict avoidance, not just approval-seeking.
• By 2025, awareness of the pattern was the starting point for changing it.

Likeability vs. genuine listening

• Wanting to be liked is near-universal among leaders, even those who claim they only need respect.
• The problem isn't the desire for connection — it's when likeability sits in the driver's seat of decisions.
• A team decision where a colleague challenged Imber's view led her to genuinely change her position — not to please, but because the data shifted her thinking.
• The teammate later said what mattered wasn't the outcome, but that she felt truly heard.
• Changing your view in response to new information is a mark of good leadership, not weakness.
• Honouring a voice doesn't require agreeing with it — you hear it, and then you decide.

Psychological safety must be universal

• Imber helped clients build psychological safety while a gap existed inside her own team.
• When most of the team felt safe but one or two didn't, sensitive concerns moved to private conversations rather than open forums.
• Even one person not feeling psychologically safe can unravel trust across the whole team.
• Partial safety is not safety — it's a two-tier system with the same damage profile as no safety.

The Inventium team health monitor

• Every 6–8 weeks, the team meets in person for a 90-minute culture review.
• They assess ~10 dimensions of team health, including psychological safety, adapted from Atlassian's squad health model.
• Ratings use a four-point system: silver (two thumbs up), green (one thumb up), orange (thumb sideways), red (thumb down).
• All members reveal their rating simultaneously — rocks-paper-scissors style — to prevent anchoring.
• Divergent ratings trigger a conversation; aligned high ratings prompt a "what's working?" discussion.
• In-person delivery matters: body language and energy provide signals that video calls can't replicate.

Why cadence matters

• Annual engagement surveys are too infrequent — four seasons pass, context changes completely.
• Weekly check-ins risk becoming background noise; people become desensitised.
• Six to eight weeks hits the window where meaningful change can accumulate but isn't yet irreversible.
• The gap between when an issue arises and when it's discussed reflects the health of the relationship.
• Asking for feedback and doing nothing with it causes more damage than not asking at all.