How Dr. Thomas Krause Thinks About the 40% Leaders Do Not Hear

Episode 11 of Headline Podcast, published on December 3, 2025, featured Dr. Thomas Krause discussing leadership quality, trust, and the limits of incident analysis. His central argument changes the executive question from whether 60% of workers trust a supervisor to what the unheard 40% are already telling the organization.

A high survey percentile can create false reassurance when leaders treat trust as a score rather than as evidence about daily decisions. The useful reading of Krause's position is demanding because it asks executives to inspect the people who remain silent, not celebrate the people who answered positively.

Why 60% trust can still hide a serious leadership problem

A trust score is incomplete when it reports agreement without showing who is missing, silent, or unwilling to challenge a decision. Krause described a situation in which 60% of people could say they trust their supervisor while the organization still sits in the 90th percentile, leaving 40% of the workforce outside the reassuring headline.

That distinction matters because psychological safety is not proven by the average response alone. A team may answer positively because the supervisor is kind during routine work, yet remain quiet when production pressure, fatigue, or a weak control needs to be challenged. The score then measures comfort with normality rather than confidence during disagreement.

Andreza Araujo's work on culture makes the same operating distinction. In Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice, culture is not a poster or a declared value; it is visible in the decisions that people can influence and the consequences attached to speaking up. A survey can locate a signal, but leadership must still verify the conditions behind it.

Executives should therefore ask four questions before celebrating a trust result. Which groups answered least positively? Which decisions were discussed in the comments? What happened after the last warning? Which people were never reached by the measurement?

The unheard group is a control signal, not a survey footnote

The unheard group is a control signal because silence can reveal exposure that the average score conceals. When 40% of a workforce does not trust a supervisor, the risk is not limited to morale; it can affect reporting, escalation, handover quality, and the speed at which weak signals reach a decision owner.

OSHA recommends worker participation because employees often know the most about hazards connected with their work, and its guidance says programs should protect workers from retaliation when they report hazards or use their safety rights. OSHA explains why worker participation must shape the safety program, which means a trust score should be tested against actual opportunities to participate.

The practical test is not whether leaders have a listening channel. It is whether the channel changes a decision within a visible timeframe. A worker who raises a concern on Monday should be able to see who owns the response, what evidence was reviewed, and why the control was accepted, changed, or rejected.

This is where the episode becomes useful beyond survey design. The 40% should be treated as a map of where the management system loses information. Their responses may identify a supervisor problem, a workload problem, a retaliation fear, or a control that fails under real operating conditions.

Leadership quality appears after bad news arrives

Leadership quality is visible in the response to inconvenient information, not in the language used before information arrives. Krause connected safety success with the quality of leadership given to the initiative, which places accountability on the decisions that follow evidence rather than on the existence of a campaign.

A supervisor may invite comments, thank people for speaking, and still weaken trust by delaying action for 30 days without explanation. The opposite can also happen. A manager may disagree with a concern but strengthen trust by explaining the decision, naming the remaining uncertainty, and setting a date for review.

Andreza Araujo calls this the difference between declared commitment and operating commitment. Her experience across more than 250 cultural transformation projects is relevant only to that position, not as a substitute for evidence about a particular team. The leader's credibility is built when the organization can trace a concern from conversation to decision.

For an EHS manager, that trace should include the original warning, the affected work group, the control owner, the decision deadline, and the evidence that closed the loop. Five fields are enough to expose whether participation is real or ceremonial.

Incident investigation should examine the conditions that shaped the choice

An incident review becomes more useful when it asks what made the unsafe choice reasonable at the time. Krause argued that organizations should investigate the root cause of what happened rather than search for a root cause who, a distinction that keeps attention on system conditions without removing personal accountability.

The question is not whether a person made a mistake. The question is whether the work design, supervision, time pressure, equipment state, or previous management decision narrowed the available choices until the mistake became likely. James Reason's work on latent conditions gives leaders a defensible way to make that analysis without turning the investigation into a moral judgment.

A psychologically safe investigation does not promise immunity from consequences. It creates a disciplined order of inquiry in which leaders examine the conditions that shaped behavior before they decide what individual accountability should mean. That order matters because a frightened witness often provides a clean story while withholding the inconvenient facts.

Use three layers in the first review. Establish what the person knew, identify what the work system made difficult, and verify which earlier decision allowed the exposure to remain. The resulting action plan should assign a control owner, a date, and a verification method rather than ending with refresher training alone.

Trust metrics need a denominator and a decision path

A useful trust metric states who answered, who did not, what question was asked, and which decision will follow. Without that denominator and decision path, a number can become a polished form of reassurance that does not reveal where workers still hesitate.

ISO 45003:2021 gives organizations guidance for managing psychosocial risk within an ISO 45001-based occupational health and safety system. ISO describes ISO 45003 as guidance for managing psychosocial risk, which supports a broader reading of trust than a single engagement item because work organization, relationships, and management practices can all shape psychological health and safety.

NIOSH also frames worker well-being across multiple spheres rather than one isolated score. NIOSH presents the Worker Well-Being Questionnaire as an integrated assessment, which is a useful reminder that measurement should connect quality of working life, work conditions, and health rather than reducing the conversation to whether employees like their manager.

Recommendation

Leaders should stop treating the headline score as the outcome and use it as the beginning of a 30-day evidence cycle. The cycle can be run by an EHS manager, a business leader, or a safety committee chair, provided that the person has access to the decision owners who control work conditions.

• Segment the result into at least four groups, including shift, role, tenure, and contractor status.
• Select the lowest-trust group and conduct two structured conversations that ask what people avoid reporting and why.
• Choose one concern that can be resolved within 10 working days, then publish the owner, due date, and verification evidence.
• Review one recent incident or near miss using the what-not-who sequence before assigning corrective action.
• Re-measure the original question after 30 days and compare the result with action closure, not with the previous score alone.

Use this Headline guide to test whether worker voice has a credible operating channel and this evidence comparison for choosing stronger culture signals. If the organization cannot show what changed after a concern was raised, the next investment should improve decision ownership before it expands the survey.

What leaders should carry from Episode 11

Dr. Thomas Krause's argument is not that surveys are useless. It is that a favorable survey can still conceal a leadership failure when the least trusting group remains unheard.

Andreza Araujo's approach to safety culture reaches the same practical conclusion from another direction. In A Ilusão da Conformidade, apparent agreement is not treated as proof that the operating system is safe. Leaders must compare what people say with what the work allows them to do, especially when the decision is unpopular or time is short.

Headline Podcast Episode 11 therefore leaves executives with a sharper standard. Trust is not the percentage that looks good in the board pack; trust is the evidence that people can challenge risk, receive a reasoned response, and see the control change when the evidence requires it. Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Thomas Krause on Headline Podcast.