There is a moment about nineteen minutes into this conversation where Michael Kopper says he spent years working very hard at pretending the old version of himself had no value. Not part of him. All of him.
I could not stop thinking about it. And it turned out to be the same thing we spent the rest of the hour circling: what it actually costs when people cannot be honest about who they are, and why psychological safety at work is not a soft idea but the thing everything else sits on.
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Why this one stayed with me
I have my own version of the thing Michael describes. Mine sounds different than his. But for a long stretch of my life I ran a tape that said I was careless and lazy and bad at being a person.
I collected evidence for it, too. And I spent a lot of energy proving that the me from before was not worth much.
So when Michael started talking about going back years later and finding two pieces of himself worth keeping, I felt that one in my chest. If you are somewhere in that same process, here is a good place to start with the rest of what I make.
Meet Michael Kopper
Michael Kopper is the Executive Adviser and Coach at Basis Technologies. He works with executive teams, and the teams that report to them, on the conversations they have been avoiding.
He is not a therapist and not a clinician, and nothing in this episode is clinical advice. What he is, is someone who rebuilt a life after it came apart in public.
Michael was a finance leader at Enron. The decisions he made there sent him to federal prison. He does not soften that part, and neither did we.
Before he left, two organizations gave him a chance: a healthcare agency in Houston, and the technology company where he still works today. The framework he teaches, Conscious Leadership, is not his own. It comes from The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Warner Klemp, and he is careful to credit it.
Why great employees become struggling managers
I asked Michael why so many capable people freeze the moment leadership stops being a task problem and becomes a people problem. He pushed back on the word freeze, and gave me a better answer.
We punish our great performers by taking them out of their zones of excellence and genius and putting them into management.
His point is that everything earlier in a career comes with people to copy. There were analysts to watch, models to follow, a whole training program for how the technical job gets done.
Then one day the job becomes other people’s feelings, and nobody hands over a manual. Where training does exist, he says, it usually covers performance management rather than the thing people are actually stuck on.
They get stuck because no one is there to show them.
What psychological safety at work actually requires
The term comes from Harvard’s Amy Edmondson. Her 1999 study started from a finding she did not expect: better-performing hospital teams reported more errors, not fewer.
They were not making more mistakes. They were willing to talk about them. You can read the original paper, or her own account of the surprise.
Worth being precise here: Edmondson studied hospital and manufacturing teams, not the coaching work Michael does. Her research supports the general mechanism, not his specific approach.
What Michael adds is what it looks like in a room. He described it as a question of who is allowed to breathe.
I try to allow the oxygen in the room to exist for the story to come out in the open. But if you don’t even create the oxygen, if you suck it all out of the room with your big title and your big salary and your big reputation, then people will be scared.
He borrows Brené Brown’s marble jar to explain how trust accumulates. The idea appears in her talk on the anatomy of trust, and it is small deposits rather than one grand gesture.
Every time a leader lets someone speak their mind without ramification, they’re putting a marble in that jar of trust, especially with junior people. And every time you slap them down, you’re building fear and you’re building distrust.
There is no work you and a home you
This was the part of the conversation closest to what we usually talk about here. Michael’s view is that work-life balance is not bad advice so much as a fiction.
There is no such thing as the work you and the home you. The only way to be your authentic self is if you can see that your life is one.
The missed bus, the parent teacher conference, the doctor’s appointment. They do not stay in their lane, and asking someone to arrive as a different person every morning makes a real team impossible.
If that idea sounds familiar, it is a first cousin of something we have covered from another angle. Calial McCarty and I talked about masking and what it costs to perform a version of yourself all day.
When there is no psychological safety at work, say this instead
This was the most immediately useful thing Michael said. I asked what someone should do when their history makes openness feel like handing over a weapon.
He did not tell anyone to be braver. He said most corporate cultures are not ready for a junior person to walk up and say they are scared, and that this is the culture’s failure rather than the person’s.
Then he gave a sentence you can actually use.
I don’t know what to do here, or I don’t know how to address this issue, can you give me some ideas of how you handled it. Would be not giving away your power while also expressing to someone, hey, I need some help.
Key takeaways
- The manager who is bad with people is usually undertrained rather than unkind. Knowing that changes how you deal with them.
- Owning a bad decision out loud is what makes the consequences survivable. People help you carry what you are willing to hold.
- Trust is built in small deposits, not grand gestures. Letting one person speak without punishment is one marble in the jar.
- You do not have to be the bravest person in the building. You just need one honest sentence that asks for help without handing over your power.
Episode timestamps
- 00:00 Cold open and welcome
- 02:39 The Dr. King quote on his desk for 20 years
- 08:48 Why great employees become struggling managers
- 15:04 Enron, and the tape in his head
- 19:24 Which parts of the old you get to come back
- 26:07 There is no work you and a home you
- 30:53 What to say when you cannot say you are scared
- 37:52 What I am taking out of this
People also ask
What is psychological safety at work?
Psychological safety at work is a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk. It means you can ask a question, admit a mistake, or disagree without expecting to be punished for it. Amy Edmondson defined it as a team-level condition rather than an individual feeling.
What are examples of psychological safety at work?
A junior person saying they do not understand something in a meeting. Someone reporting their own error before anyone finds it. A team member disagreeing with a senior leader and not being frozen out afterward. Each one is small, and the pattern is what matters.
How do you admit a mistake at work?
Say what happened, say it early, and hold the accountability rather than moving it. Michael’s experience is that people are far more willing to help you carry a mistake you own than one you push onto someone else. The consequence is usually smaller than the story you told yourself about it.
How do you build trust with your team?
Repeatedly let people speak without consequence, especially the ones with the least power in the room. Trust accumulates in small deposits rather than arriving all at once. Naming the difficult thing out loud yourself is one of the fastest ways to make it safe for anyone else to.
One more thing
The line I keep coming back to is not about leadership at all. It is Michael saying he worked hard at pretending an old version of himself had no value, and then going back four or five years later to see what was actually in there.
He found two things. The part of him that could see patterns other people missed, and the part that genuinely cared how his team was doing. Those two things are his whole job now.
If you want more like this, there is a lot in the mental health resources hub, and a new episode every week.
If this one helped, a review on Apple Podcasts genuinely moves the needle for a show like mine.
Quick and important: I am not a doctor and I am not a licensed mental health professional. I am someone who lives this stuff and talks about it honestly. Nothing here replaces working with someone qualified, and if you are struggling, please reach out to a professional.
Much love. Good vibes. – Ky
Full transcript
The complete, caption-corrected transcript of this episode is below.
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