I want to understand this better
Why does one workplace feel safe to speak up in, while another makes people keep their heads down? Why can behaviour that would seem completely unacceptable from the outside become normal inside a team? Why do good people sometimes stay silent when they see something happening? And why can perfectly decent people sometimes behave badly when they are under pressure or given power?
If you have found yourself asking questions like these, you are in the right place.
This part of Deeper Learning is not about deciding who is a good apple and who is a bad one. It is about understanding behaviour, power, environment and culture and what happens to us when they collide. The more we understand what is happening, the better equipped we are to change it.
Start with the environment
Professor Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School has spent decades studying what she calls psychological safety. At its simplest, psychological safety is about whether people believe they can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes or disagree without being humiliated or punished for doing so.
Think about your own workplace. What happens when somebody challenges the boss? What happens when somebody makes a mistake? Who gets listened to? Who gets interrupted? Which behaviours get rewarded? Which behaviours does everybody notice but nobody mentions? And what happens when somebody raises something uncomfortable?
Those questions can tell us an enormous amount about a culture. A workplace can have values written beautifully on the wall and still have an environment in which people are frightened to speak.
Culture is not simply what an organisation says it believes; it is about what happens around here.
Look for patterns, not just incidents
Hospitality moves quickly and pressure can come from every direction. A major world event can cause input costs to fluctuate, customers can become impatient, staffing levels can become stretched, a busy service can go wrong, shareholders can become demanding. Pressure can appear everywhere in hospitality. Tempers can fray and somebody may say or do something they later regret. One bad incident does not necessarily describe an entire culture, but repeated behaviour deserves attention.
Sometimes culture becomes more visible when we stop looking at individual incidents and start looking for patterns.
Your brain has something to say about this too
This is where the work of Good Apple Effect founding supporter Dulcie Swanston becomes particularly useful.
Dulcie combines extensive leadership experience with behavioural science and neuroscience. Her films for the Good Apple Effect explore models including SCARF (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness) and PREFACE (Psychological Safety, Relatedness, Ethics and Equity, Fairness, Autonomy, Certainty and Ego), helping us understand what happens when the brain perceives threat. These exclusive films will be published here on the Good Apple Effect website later in 2026.
That threat does not have to be physical. Our brains are continually taking in information about things such as status, certainty, autonomy, relationships and fairness.
You might notice:
A change in tone.
Being excluded from a conversation.
Public criticism.
Not knowing where you stand.
Feeling that a decision is unfair.
Losing control over something important to you.
Well, our responses can be surprisingly powerful. We might become defensive, withdraw, stop contributing, react more strongly than we intended or decide that saying nothing is the safest option.
Understanding that does not excuse poor behaviour, but it can help us understand why people behave as they do – including ourselves.
You can also read Dulcie’s book or contact Dulcie to understand her paid-for services.
Why do people stay silent?
It is easy to look at an unhealthy situation from outside and ask, “Why didn’t somebody say something?” But inside the situation, things can look very different. People calculate risk. Will I be believed? Will anything actually change? What will this do to my career? Will my shifts disappear? Will I become known as difficult? What if everybody else thinks the behaviour is normal? What if the person involved is the owner, chef, general manager, director or chief executive?
Silence does not necessarily mean approval. Sometimes silence is self-protection. That is why creating a culture where people can speak is so important.
When management happens by accident
There is another part of this conversation that is particularly relevant in hospitality. People are often promoted because they are brilliant at their job.
The brilliant bartender becomes a supervisor. The outstanding chef becomes a head chef. The great salesperson becomes a sales manager. The excellent operator becomes responsible for dozens or hundreds of people. But being good at the job and being good at leading people are different skills.
Yvette Whitwam, founding supporter of the Good Apple Effect and founder of Beanstalk HR, describes this as the move from “accidental manager” to “purposeful leader.” Her work focuses on giving managers the confidence, emotional intelligence and practical skills to deal with people well, including recognising and challenging inappropriate behaviour before it develops into something more serious.
That distinction is important. Misuse of power does not always begin with someone setting out to cause harm. Sometimes people have simply never been taught how to use the power they have just been given.
That does not remove responsibility for behaviour but does give us another place from which to start changing it.
Inclusion is important too
Who feels that they belong in a workplace can also influence who feels able to speak.
Garry Clarke-Strange, founder of Think Inclusion Consulting, works with organisations to embed what he calls Everyday Inclusion into leadership, strategy and culture. That phrase is a useful one. Inclusion is not simply a policy, an annual training session or a statement on a website. It is experienced in hundreds of ordinary actions. For example, who gets invited in, who gets heard, who gets opportunities, whose difference is respected, who feels safe enough to disagree and who feels they need to change something about themselves simply to fit in.
Understanding culture means paying attention to those everyday experiences as well as the big picture ones.
Toughness and kindness are not opposites
Hospitality can be demanding. High standards, strong performance and accountability are all important. Better culture does not mean lowering any of them.
The interesting question is whether we have sometimes confused high standards with harsh behaviour.
Brené Brown’s work on courage, vulnerability and shame repeatedly explores the relationship between how people feel and how they perform. Her more recent conversations with organisational psychologist Adam Grant also examine the relationship between toughness, kindness, trust, psychological safety and performance.
You can expect excellence from somebody and still treat them with dignity. You can give difficult feedback without humiliating them. You can hold someone accountable without making them frightened of you.
Those things are not contradictions. In fact, they may be part of the same thing.
Understanding is not the same as excusing
This is important.
Learning about neuroscience, psychological safety, accidental management, inclusion or workplace pressure is not about finding sophisticated excuses for poor behaviour.
Understanding why somebody behaves in a certain way does not mean accepting that behaviour. Understanding why people stay silent does not mean accepting silence as inevitable. Understanding how cultures develop does not mean believing they cannot change. Quite the opposite.
Understanding gives us more choices. We can notice patterns earlier, become more conscious of our own behaviour, create environments where people feel safer to speak, equip managers to lead people rather than simply manage tasks and intervene before poor behaviour becomes normal behaviour.
Look around
Perhaps the most useful thing you can do after reading this article is simply become curious. Look at your own workplace. Not to find fault or identify the bad apples – just take a look.
What happens when someone gets something wrong? Who speaks most? Who rarely speaks? What happens when someone disagrees? What behaviour gets rewarded? What behaviour gets ignored?
And perhaps the most interesting question of all: What have we become so used to that we no longer notice it?
That is where deeper understanding can begin.
And when understanding leads you to ask, “So what do I actually do?”, the third part of Deeper Learning is waiting for you:
I want to handle this well.
Explore further
Dulcie Swanston — Top Right Thinking
Behavioural science, neuroscience, leadership and team performance.
dulcie@toprightthinking.com
Top Right Thinking
Yvette Whitwam — Beanstalk HR
Anti-harassment programmes, bystander intervention, management development and purposeful leadership.
yvette.whitwam@beanstalkhr.com
Beanstalk HR
Garry Clarke-Strange — Think Inclusion Consulting
Everyday inclusion, organisational culture, leadership and sustainable cultural change.
garry@thinkinclusionconsulting.com
Think Inclusion Consulting
Ceri Gott
Executive and team coaching, conscious leadership, culture and supporting leaders to understand their own beliefs, assumptions and behaviours.
Ceri@cerigott.com
And finally, if you would like to explore some of these ideas in a different way, our Five Minute Learning pieces look at how workplace cultures develop and what we can learn from them. The Glass Sofa explores the behaviours and problems that can become so familiar we stop noticing them, while The Broken Windows Theory looks at how small behaviours left unchallenged can gradually influence what becomes accepted as normal. Take a look at both and see what they make you notice about your own workplace.
