You think you’re holding high standards. Your team feels something else.

---

Hey Spark Family,

I sat with a leadership team recently that was genuinely proud of their culture, and they had every reason to be.

They spoke about it with clarity and conviction. High standards. Clear expectations. No tolerance for mediocrity. People were held accountable, and results were consistently delivered. It was thoughtful, intentional, and, on the surface, exactly what you would want to see.

Then I spent time with their employees.

And the language shifted.

The words I heard were things like stressful, unpredictable, easier to stay quiet than make waves, better to wait and see than to raise a concern early. Same organization. Completely different experience of it.

What stayed with me wasn’t that the leaders were wrong. They weren’t. They cared deeply about excellence. They wanted their people to grow. They believed they were building a strong, high-performing culture.

But somewhere between what they intended and what actually landed, a different message had formed.

Accountability had quietly become something to survive, instead of something to grow through. And no one had said that out loud yet.

The Research Is Clear

Amy Edmondson’s work at Harvard has challenged one of the most persistent assumptions in leadership, which is that high standards and psychological safety are somehow in tension with each other. They’re not. They are deeply interdependent.

Teams that have both consistently outperform teams that have only one.

Here’s what the data continues to show:

➡ High standards without psychological safety create fear. People hit their numbers, but they hold back. They don’t raise risks early, challenge thinking, or bring forward incomplete ideas.

➡ Psychological safety without standards creates comfort, but not growth. The work feels easier, but performance plateaus.

➡ Only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they give is acted on (Gallup). When people don’t believe their input will change anything, they stop offering it.

➡ Fear-based accountability is one of the top drivers of manager attrition (DDI Global Leadership Forecast). Leaders often don’t see it because people rarely name it directly. They adjust quietly, or they leave.

The pattern is consistent. The highest-performing teams are not the ones that choose between standards and safety. They are the ones that build both, intentionally.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

The leaders who create fear-based cultures are almost never trying to. In fact, they are often the most committed leaders in the room. They care about the work. They care about the outcomes. They care about getting it right.

And that’s exactly why this pattern is so easy to miss.

Because the same behaviors that drive excellence can, over time, start to shape how the team experiences the environment.

A leader reacts quickly to a mistake because the standard matters. The team takes that in as a signal about what is safe to bring forward next time.

A leader steps in and takes back a project after a misstep to protect quality, and the team learns to stay closer to what feels safe instead of stretching.

A leader asks sharp, thoughtful questions in a meeting to drive rigor, and the room slowly shifts from contributing to protecting.

Nothing about the intent is wrong. But the impact accumulates.

And over time, you don’t end up with a lower-performing team. You end up with a quieter one. A team that is doing the work, but not bringing their full thinking with them.

↓

What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When I work with a leader on this, the first question I ask is simple. What actually happens on your team when something goes wrong? Not what’s supposed to happen. What actually happens.

Because the answer to that question tells you almost everything about the culture you’ve built.

Leaders who get this right have learned to separate the mistake from the person. “What happened here?” opens a conversation. “Why did you let this happen?” puts someone on trial. One creates movement. The other creates hesitation.

They’ve also learned to reward early signals. If someone brings you a problem before it becomes a crisis and your response is calm and curious, you’ll get more early signals. If your response is sharp or reactive, you won’t stop the problems. You’ll just hear about them later, when the options are fewer and the cost is higher.

And one of the most overlooked pieces is making the expectation clear before holding someone to it. If the standard wasn’t fully understood upfront, the accountability conversation doesn’t feel like alignment. It feels like a surprise.

That’s not accountability. That’s ambush.

🌟 Your Challenge This Week

Before your week gets moving, take a few minutes to reflect honestly.

Think about the last time something went wrong on your team. What was your first instinct, and what do you think your team learned from how you responded?

Is there someone on your team right now who is playing it safe when you wish they would stretch? What might they be protecting themselves from?

And the one that tends to land hardest: where might you be holding a standard that was never made fully explicit?

High standards and high trust are not opposites. They are the conditions that make each other possible. And the leaders who hold both are the ones people actually want to grow with.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – If you’re working to shift your culture from fear to real accountability, that work takes courage. The fact that you’re thinking about it at all says more than you might realize. That awareness is where change begins.✨

Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe to get it delivered directly.