The rooms you walk into will tell you everything.
In meetings where people feel safe to speak, you’ll feel it before you know it. The energy feels light. People are spread out comfortably in the room, no empty pockets. Conversations are flowing easily among some, while others sit quietly, at ease, doing their own thing.
Walk into a room where they don’t feel safe, and you’ll feel that too. Nobody looks up when you enter. Answers are short and carefully worded. Agreement comes quickly and unanimously on topics where reasonable disagreement would make more sense.
Lisa Rotstein is an executive coach who has been walking into rooms like this for nearly three decades. She coaches executives and leadership teams through organizational change, and she says she can read a room before anyone speaks.
“I can feel it when I walk into a room. I can almost feel that thickness in the air.”
That thickness has a name. It’s called unsafe quiet.
Two kinds of silence
Safe quiet is the room that’s thinking. It has weight and possibility. The leader is holding space and everyone knows it.
Unsafe quiet is the room that’s afraid. Everyone is waiting to see which way the leader leans before they say a word. People are walking on eggshells. They’re saying what the CEO needs to hear, not what’s actually true.
Most leaders aren’t listening for it, and if they are, they often struggle to tell them apart. The gap between what they think is happening and what’s actually happening is where strong leaders get stuck.
Stop rushing to fill the discomfort.
When a room doesn’t feel safe, people don’t stay silent. They fill the silence with something qualified answers, conformity, quick gestures of agreement. Anything to keep the peace. They withhold information and feelings, afraid to be judged or shut down. They express vague enthusiasm for ideas they have real concerns about.
Lisa calls it the sediment problem.
“When you’re churning out the sediment at the bottom of the ocean, you can’t see clearly until that sediment settles again.”
Real organizational work stirs things up. Safety isn’t clean and neat; it’s uncomfortable and can look, from the outside, like things are going wrong. Leaders who rush to fill that discomfort with answers, direction, or reassurance short-circuit the process. Instead, leaders who learn to linger, invite challenge, wonder and want to learn more are those who build safety into the spaces they enter.
The coach’s approach is to stay curious! And most importantly, approach with generous assumptions.
“Lingering in the unknown. Lingering in the silence, allowing the silence to do the lifting.”
When that works, when the room holds the discomfort long enough, something shifts.
“Someone says something. It’s like there’s a witnessing of a birth to some new idea. Like this little tiny bud is coming up from the ground, and everyone is watching it.”
That moment doesn’t happen if the leader rushes to fill discomfort with distraction.
Three signs your team’s quiet is the wrong kind
Before your next meeting, pay attention.
People consistently
1) wait for the most senior person to speak before offering their own opinion.
2) A direct question produces nothing or vague and heavily qualified answers.
3) Agreement is quick and short.
Any one of these is worth noticing. All three together point to a team that has learned staying quiet is safer than being honest.
What creates safe quiet?
Safe quiet doesn’t come from a culture initiative or a values document. It gets built through small, repeated actions over time.
Ask questions before sharing your opinion. Let silence sit longer than feels natural after someone says something unpopular or even controversial. When someone disagrees, thank them and mean it. When something goes wrong, get curious before getting directive.
Set the stage before anything else happens.
- Create group agreements before the difficult conversation starts.
- Be transparent, name the lane before you enter it to change what people feel they’re allowed to say.
“Everyone might have seen the data. But now we’re actually going to talk about it. So it’s going to become real.”
Any one of these is worth noticing. All three together point to a team that has learned staying quiet is safer than being honest.
The research backs it up
Nathalie Blais, founder of Canada Coach Academy, cites a meta-study on feedback that most leaders find clarifying rather than discouraging. Feedback works less than 30% of the time. Even when it comes from a credentialed professional handing you a prescription.
Feedback still has a place. The problem is treating advice-giving as the primary leadership tool. It produces far less change than the effort it takes. The leaders who build rooms where people speak honestly, where the silence is the safe kind, do it by asking better questions and getting out of the way.
The energy in the room will tell you whether it’s working.
You’ll feel it before anyone says a word.
This article was inspired by a conversation with Lisa Rotstein on The Connection Experiment.
Listen to the full episode on YouTube and Spotify.
Coach Academy trains coaches and leaders in the skills of connection, curiosity, and evidence-based communication. Our ICF-accredited programs are designed for people who want to build the skills that actually create change.
Visit coachacademy.com to learn more.