People do not stop having ideas.
They stop paying the price of raising them.
That price is set in the room, and it is usually set in the first ninety seconds.
Watch for it. Someone starts with "this might be a stupid question." Someone else gets interrupted at the halfway point of their sentence and does not go back to finish it. The most senior person in the room states a position before anyone else has spoken, and everything that follows is now a response to it rather than a contribution.
Then the real conversation happens in the corridor, and you never hear it.
Psychological safety is not a feeling you generate. It is a structure you design.
Which is where most executive teams get stuck. They try to solve it with warmth. More reassurance, more encouragement, more "there are no bad ideas here." Warmth helps, but it is personality-dependent, so it disappears the moment that leader is not in the room.
Structure does not.
Structure looks like deciding, deliberately, who speaks first, and making it the person with the least positional power. It looks like separating the meeting where ideas are generated from the meeting where they are judged, because the two cannot share a room and both survive. It looks like the leader stating their view last, on purpose, every time.
None of that requires anyone to be braver. That is the point. You should not be running an organisation that needs its junior people to be brave in order for you to hear the truth.
The one change worth making this week is the smallest one. In your next leadership meeting, speak last. Not as a technique. As a standing rule.
What is the last good idea your organisation did not hear, and where in the room did it die?
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