How to Engage Skeptics in Culture Interventions

When you need psychological safety on a leadership team but half the executives think it's touchy-feely nonsense, you've got a real problem. The people who most need to shut up and listen are often the ones most convinced that "soft" concepts are a waste of time. And because they have power, their skepticism kills the whole effort. The solution isn't to convince them about psychological safety - it's to introduce perspective taking as a concrete skill that happens to build the same environment.

Perspective taking is the work of actively stepping outside your own viewpoint to understand someone else's position, motivation, and emotions. It's not empathy theater - it's a strategic skill for innovation and negotiation that skeptics can actually get behind. When you frame it this way, you're not asking executives to care about feelings. You're asking them to do the mental work of understanding how different roles, backgrounds, and positions shape how people see problems. Teams with diverse perspectives solve problems better, but only if people actually try to understand those different viewpoints.

The real power is in what happens next. When someone believes you're genuinely trying to understand their perspective - even if you disagree - they share more honest, detailed information. That's how you get to better decisions. A study at a Nordic bank showed this approach working on executives who would have shut down a direct push for psychological safety. By introducing perspective taking as a skill for high-quality dialogue, they built the collaborative environment they needed without triggering the "soft concepts" alarm. The outcome is the same, but the framing makes all the difference when you're dealing with skeptics who control whether the intervention succeeds or fails.