Silence Is the Warning Sign: A Conversation with Susanna Romantsova

Most leaders think a calm, quiet team is a healthy one. Susanna Romantsova thinks the silence is exactly what should scare you.

She spent years inside large organizations working on diversity, equity, and inclusion, including a long stretch leading that work at IKEA, before building her own practice around psychological safety and what she calls the Safe Challenger approach. Her core argument is that the softest-sounding topics in business, trust, safety, whether people feel able to speak, are actually the hardest-edged predictors of whether a team performs or quietly falls apart. And most of the signals leaders read as "everything's fine" are the opposite.

Silence is data

The single idea I want people to take from this conversation is that a quiet team is not a safe team by default. When nobody pushes back, nobody flags the risk, nobody says the uncomfortable thing in the meeting, that isn't harmony. It's very often fear, or resignation, or the learned knowledge that speaking up here costs more than it's worth.

Susanna's point is that leaders systematically misread this. Absence of conflict feels like a win when you're busy and stretched. But the disagreement didn't disappear, it just went underground, into side channels and private messages and eventually the exit interview. The teams that look the smoothest on the surface are sometimes the ones with the least genuine safety underneath. So silence should be treated as information, a prompt to ask what isn't being said, not as evidence that all is well.

Psychological safety is not niceness

The biggest misunderstanding, she says, is that psychological safety means being nice, comfortable, and conflict-free. It doesn't. A psychologically safe team can have sharper disagreements than an unsafe one, because people trust that challenging an idea won't get them punished, frozen out, or labeled difficult. Safety is what makes hard conversations possible, not what avoids them.

That reframe matters because leaders who chase comfort end up suppressing exactly the friction a team needs. The goal isn't a room where everyone agrees. It's a room where people can disagree out loud, directly, and still work together the next morning.

The Safe Challenger

Her method centers on becoming what she calls a Safe Challenger: someone who can raise the hard thing in a way that keeps the relationship intact. It's the combination most people treat as a trade-off, high challenge and high safety at the same time. You're not softening the message into mush, and you're not detonating it either. You're naming the real issue while signaling that you're on the same side.

The skill cuts both ways. As a leader, you model it so people learn what challenge looks like when it isn't an attack. And you build the conditions so that when someone challenges you, they walk away having been heard rather than punished, because the first time challenge gets punished, everyone in the room recalibrates and the silence sets back in.

Inclusion is a leadership skill, not a program

Having spent years in formal DEI roles, Susanna is clear-eyed that a lot of that work got reduced to programs, targets, and training modules bolted onto the side of the business. Her framing now is that inclusion is really a leadership capability, the day-to-day skill of making sure the people in the room can actually contribute, not a separate initiative owned by HR.

That's a more durable way to hold it, because it doesn't live or die with a budget line or a political mood. If inclusion is how a manager runs a meeting, distributes airtime, responds to a dissenting voice, and decides who gets stretch work, then it's woven into how the team operates rather than something that can be quietly defunded.

Why this is a performance issue

None of this is framed as being nice for its own sake. Susanna's argument is that safety and inclusion are performance infrastructure. Teams that can surface bad news early catch problems while they're cheap. Teams where people hoard concerns until it's safe, which is often never, discover the same problems late and expensive. The quiet team isn't just a morale risk. It's an operational one, because the information that would have saved you never made it to the surface.

Key takeaways

Silence is a warning sign, not a green light. A team with no visible conflict may be a team where speaking up feels unsafe. Treat quiet as a question to investigate.

Safety is not niceness. Psychologically safe teams argue more openly, not less, because challenge won't be punished.

Be a Safe Challenger. Raise the hard thing directly while keeping the relationship intact. High challenge and high safety together, not one traded for the other.

Inclusion is a leadership skill. It's how you run the room day to day, not a program that lives in HR and dies with the budget.

This is a performance issue. Teams that surface bad news early catch problems cheap. Silent teams pay for them late.

Frameworks worth stealing

Read the silence

When a team goes quiet, don't file it under harmony. Ask what isn't being said. Look for disagreement that's moved into side channels, decisions nobody pushes back on, meetings where the same one or two voices carry every discussion. Silence is a signal to go looking, not a sign you can stop.

The Safe Challenger move

Before a hard conversation, aim for two things at once: name the real issue plainly, and make clear you're on the same side. Don't dilute the message to keep the peace, and don't weaponize it. The test is whether the other person can walk away having genuinely heard the challenge and still trust you.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

A quiet team is not automatically a safe team. Sometimes the silence is the problem.

Psychological safety isn't about being comfortable. It's about being able to say the uncomfortable thing.

Inclusion isn't a program you run. It's a skill you practice as a leader, every day.

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Susanna Romantsova is a leadership and psychological safety consultant who spent years leading diversity, equity, and inclusion work inside large organizations, including IKEA, before building her own practice around the Safe Challenger approach.