An interview with Dr. Laurie Cure, CEO of Innovative Connections and the author of Leading Without Fear.
What if the traits a leader points to with the most pride — the push for quality, the insistence on standards, the sense of urgency — are exactly the ones quietly training their team to stop talking?
That’s the uncomfortable question at the center of Dr. Laurie Cure’s work. Cure is CEO of Innovative Connections, a management consulting firm focused on strategy, culture, and leadership, and the author of Leading Without Fear. Across three decades of coaching executives, she’s landed on an argument that runs against a comfortable assumption — that a leader who resists feedback simply has thick skin. In her telling, it’s usually ego, dressed up as accountability, and it carries a real cost.
Ego doesn’t announce itself
Most leaders don’t recognize the moment their own defensiveness closes a door. “Defensiveness and ego rarely feel like that from the inside,” Cure says. The behavior surfaces when a leader is already afraid or under threat, and fear is precisely the state in which self-awareness gets harder to reach. So the leader reframes. According to Cure, ego-driven behavior gets justified “as them driving accountability, providing clarity, creating urgency, or ensuring performance standards” — and while they’re busy defending the choice, they stop noticing the tells. The team goes quiet. People start agreeing with everything. Someone over-explains a decision that never needed defending.
She points to a leader she’s coaching now who’s seen as a micromanager and flatly disagrees with the label. The behavior, in Cure’s read, is rooted in a fear of looking incompetent and a perfectionism that whispers she’s never quite good enough. The team still respects her — but they’ve grown more silent, and on certain projects they’ve quietly stopped giving their full effort. It’s the “why bother” response that’s easy to miss until output slips.
Cure’s fix isn’t a personality overhaul. It’s a single distinction she returns to constantly: intent versus impact. “Self awareness and behavior change come from evaluating the impact of our actions,” she says. Good intentions are common. They’re also beside the point if the effect on the room is fear.
When fear starts at the top
“When fear starts at the top, it rarely stays there,” Cure says. Senior leaders set the terms of what gets tolerated, encouraged, and rewarded, and those terms travel. The most common failure she sees is a leader reading silence as consensus. “I’ll take silence as a sign we all agree,” she hears — or some version of it — and the assumption is usually wrong. Silence tends to mean compliance, not alignment. As she puts it, “People stay silent most often because honesty is not welcome.”
The bill comes due later, and it’s larger than most leaders expect. Good ideas go underground. People soften the truth or withhold information — not out of malice, but because sharing it hasn’t been worth much. Then come the costs that show up on a spreadsheet: turnover, disengagement, decisions made on incomplete data. A culture of quiet isn’t free. It’s just deferred.
Psychological safety, past the slogan
Cure is wary of her own vocabulary here. “There is a risk that we take these terms and they become slogans and over time, meaningless,” she says, noting that “employee engagement” went through the same hollowing-out. Psychological safety, in her definition, asks something concrete of a leader every day, and it starts with curiosity.
That means slowing down. Leaders in a hurry — the ones who feel they need every answer, or who lean on an open-door policy as if the door does the work — tend to respond fast and cold, or jump straight to the fix. Cure teaches a smaller, harder move: pause, and change the grammar of the question. Swap “why” for “what” and “how.” Instead of “why did you do it that way,” try “what were some of the factors that led to that decision?” The shift sounds minor. It changes what people are willing to say.
And a leader’s first reaction, she notes, speaks volumes. A sigh, a flash of irritation, a defensive counter — the team reads all of it and adjusts accordingly.
Feedback is information. Criticism is identity.
Taking hard feedback can feel like a hit to your authority, and Cure says that’s the ego doing its job. Her most practical reframe separates two things people tend to collapse. “Feedback is information that we can use to make change. Criticism we interpret as judgement and it hits at our identity.” The nervous system, trying to protect us, translates the first into the second — it hears I’m failing when the message was actually useful.
Her advice in the moment is almost disarmingly simple: don’t argue, don’t justify, and buy yourself time. “That was hard to hear, but thanks. I want to take some time to process,” is a perfectly good response. You decide later which parts are true for you — and that sorting doesn’t happen while your defenses are up.
She’s watched the process play out slowly. One senior leader she coached was told he was too pessimistic and combative with colleagues’ ideas, and his first reactions moved through denial, anger, and a sarcastic, passive-aggressive compliance — a progression that tracks the emotional stages of the Kübler-Ross Change Curve. Only once he could grant that some of it was valid did the behavior actually shift. The payoff was concrete: stronger partnerships, and work that got easier to move.
The confidence to not have the answer
Cure ties all of this to a version of humility that most people misread. “Confidence without humility comes across as arrogance,” she says — but the reverse fails too: “humility without confidence, it can feel to others like insecurity.” The leaders who listen well have enough inner stability to admit what they don’t know without feeling diminished by it.
She offers a recent example. An executive team, working on a strategic plan, had started to define its own people as the problem — entitled, unaccountable, quietly resistant. The traditional response would have been to tighten performance management and push harder for buy-in. Instead, they got curious and ran focus groups. What surfaced was more complicated: a recent board turnover had produced a new CEO, and the resulting uncertainty among senior leaders was trickling down through every layer beneath them. The executives were too close to see their own contribution. “Instead of treating the issue as a problem with employees’ attitudes, they were able to see the contributing part they played,” Cure says — and folded that into the plan.
For any leader who runs a team — including the marketing and brand leaders shaping culture inside their own functions — the through-line is hard to unhear. The feedback a leader most needs is often the feedback they’ve made it unsafe to give. Fixing that starts with the one variable they fully control: their own reaction.
Dr. Laurie Cure is CEO of Innovative Connections and the author of Leading Without Fear. This piece is part of The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.
Related reading: Employee Experience (EX) and Change Management.
