Worksite Wellbeing and System Change in Education

Meetings are data.

I don't mean that in a clinical way. I mean that your meetings, the ones you've been in all year and the ones you've led, have been telling you something about the actual state of psychological safety in your organization. Whether we've been listening is another question.

Think about a meeting you've been in recently. Who spoke? Who stayed quiet? Was there a moment when someone raised a concern and you could feel the room shift? Were questions welcomed, or did they land with a kind of awkward thud? When disagreement came up, did you work through them, or did it get smoothed over quickly to keep things moving?

These aren't small things. In my doctoral research with principals and vice-principals, meetings emerged as one of the most significant sites where psychological safety (or its absence) becomes visible. People spoke up when they were directly asked for their input. They held back when the meeting format signalled that information was being delivered, not discussed. They read the room carefully, picking up on cues about whose voice was welcome and whose wasn't.

None of that happened because anyone intended it to; in fact, the district leaders I spoke to said they valued input from the school leaders. It happened because culture communicates through structures and practices, even when we don't realize it.

The silence question.

There's a useful distinction that came up in the last podcast episode with my co-host, Jade Garratt, that I keep thinking about. Not all silence is the same. Some silence in a meeting is reflective: people are thinking, processing, preparing to contribute. That's healthy and important. But silence can also be an absence. The absence of "I have a concern about this." The absence of "I'm not sure that will work in our context." The absence of "I have a question."

Although some silence is valuable, when people don't ask questions, it isn't usually because they don't have them. In the research I've done and the conversations I've had with education leaders, the fear of being labelled a troublemaker was one of the most significant barriers to speaking up. Research participants said things like, I just wanted to know. I wasn't trying to stir things up. The fact that they felt they needed to say that is telling.

This also fits with the research that Jade's team at the Psych Safety Collective did. They asked practitioners across different workplaces about their biggest barriers to speaking up. The fear of being labelled a troublemaker was the second most common answer. The first? The belief that it wouldn't make any difference anyway.

Those two things together describe an environment where people have learned that speaking up is risky and has no real upside. That is worth taking a look at, because what is the point of meeting if we are not sharing information and learning from it?

What this looks like in education.

One of the things that made this season's podcast conversations feel important to me is how it highlighted the complex and often difficult position that principals and vice-principals occupy. They sit in the middle of their organizational hierarchies, responsible for creating conditions for staff to contribute openly, while often not experiencing that same openness themselves.

When I spoke with school administrators, something struck me that I wasn't initially looking for. When people didn't feel safe to speak up to district leaders, the silence didn't stay contained there. It moved. Leaders who felt they couldn't ask questions or raise concerns at the district level often believed they had to deliver messages to their staff in that same way. They worried about how this type of delivery impacted the relationships they had nurtured within their schools. The absence of psychological safety can have a cascading effect through the system.

Meetings were where that became visible. The district leadership team meeting, where no one pushed back on the initiative; the school staff meeting, where the message delivery feels inauthentic; the need for after-meeting conversations with a carefully curated colleague or two.

If any of that resonates, it's worth naming, not as a failure, but as honest information about where things actually are.

The case for honest reflection before the summer.

I started this work wanting to talk about flourishing. I still do. But the more I learn, the more I understand that we can't skip the honest accounting of current reality. That's not pessimism. It's actually the precondition for meaningful change.

Before the school year fades into summer, it's worth asking: What did your meetings tell you this year? Where were there genuine exchanges, questions, disagreements, and ideas that changed how something was done? And where did you see compliance and smooth surfaces, with the real conversations happening elsewhere?

No big fixes are needed in June, just some reflection. Naming what you noticed is not a small thing. It's where the work begins.

Season 4 of Beyond Self-Care Podcast wrapped up in May.
If you haven't had a chance to listen to the final episode, Psychological Safety, Systems, and the Power of Conversation, it's a good one to take with you into the summer. And I'd love to know what you're noticing.