If you're looking to build high-performance teams, Deloitte's approach provides valuable insights. In collaboration with CfL (Centre for Leadership), Deloitte has launched a 25-hour leadership course aimed at developing teams that excel through open debate, learning from mistakes, and embracing diverse perspectives.
By Kirsten Weiss, November 2024
Kristoffer Kaspersen has adopted a new leadership approach: intentionally pausing to allow others to contribute before sharing his own thoughts.
For Kaspersen, IT Delivery Director at Deloitte, engaging in direct, sometimes challenging discussions has never been an issue. However, a Leading High-Performance Teams course brought a fresh realisation: not everyone feels at ease with his forthright communication style.
“For me, disagreement is perfectly fine. I’m naturally comfortable with conflict and believe it can bring new perspectives.”
“But the course highlighted that some colleagues, even within my own team, find my approach intimidating. If I want to encourage open dialogue where everyone feels safe to contribute—and I do—then I need to create an environment where all team members are confident enough to engage,” says Kaspersen.
Deloitte developed its Leading High-Performance Teams course with CfL to foster psychological safety as a foundation for collaborative, high-performing teams.
Ninna Friis Gleberg, Head of Deloitte’s Leadership Academy, explains:
“At Deloitte, we are highly performance-driven, but success is a team effort. We’re committed to building a culture of coaching, feedback, and mutual support.”
“This requires psychological safety in our relationships. Without it, it’s challenging for teams to learn from one another and for leaders to harness everyone’s ideas and insights.”
“We want a workplace culture where disagreement isn’t feared. Without room for error or differing opinions, it’s impossible to build sustainable teams capable of evolving together,” says Gleberg.
The effort to create high-performing teams is nothing new for Deloitte, a partner-driven company in the consulting industry accustomed to tracking billable hours.
However, the focus on fostering psychological safety and well-functioning teams intensified when Deloitte’s CEO, Christian Jensby, prior to assuming the role in 2023, openly discussed his own insecurities in interviews and expressed his ambition to lead an organization where psychological safety forms the foundation for performance.
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In an interview with Lederstof.dk, Deloitte’s CEO Christian Jensby shared his personal doubts and his need to work in trust-based communities where making mistakes is acceptable—not constantly, but with room to learn from them and without fear of judgment.
The CEO spoke candidly about his own fallibility and his tendency to be weighed down by both the mistakes he has made and those he fears making. He also expressed his ambitions to lead a company that embraces uncertainty and places psychological safety at the heart of fostering strong collaboration and developing ideas together.
In an interview with Lederstof.dk, Christian Jensby highlighted that the consulting industry—including companies like Deloitte—carries a heavy cultural legacy, with a reputation for generating stress and recruiting what he described as "employees who push themselves relentlessly because they are constantly unsure if they meet expectations."
The then-incoming CEO shared his vision to transform the company’s culture into one that is safer and less hierarchical, where leaders manage less and listen more.
Deloitte has made psychological safety a practical priority. Over the past two years, more than 100 partners and leaders have attended an intensive course exploring their own behaviours and learning strategies to foster safety within their teams.
The programme, delivered by CfL, incorporates insights from two leading management theorists: Patrick Lencioni’s framework on team dysfunctions and Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety.
Patrick Lencioni identifies trust as the cornerstone of high-performing teams, underpinned by the courage to admit mistakes and engage in constructive conflict. His framework emphasises shared accountability, prioritising collective success over individual interests.
Lencioni’s pyramid model outlines how dysfunction at any level—whether lack of trust, fear of conflict, or failure to commit—can derail team performance. Leaders are critical to creating an environment that supports openness, accountability, and shared goals.
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as the confidence to take interpersonal risks—like sharing new ideas or admitting mistakes—without fear of humiliation or exclusion. In teams lacking this safety, members often default to self-protective behaviours that stifle innovation and collaboration.
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Deloitte has developed a 25-hour psychological safety course in collaboration with CfL.
The programme integrates Lencioni’s and Edmondson’s theories to support sustainable teamwork.
This effort aligns with Generation Z’s need for openness and feedback. It requires a cultural shift, which Deloitte is actively working to achieve.
Det er vigtigt, at ledelsen går forrest i at skabe og vedligeholde et trygt arbejdsmiljø. Deloitte ser øget efterspørgsel på værktøjer og metoder til psykologisk tryghed.
CfL’s Leadership Consultant, Marie Louise Halvgaard Møller, explains the theories as follows:
“Organizations naturally aim to maintain high performance standards, but research shows that fostering a culture of psychological safety is essential for ensuring people continue to thrive and perform. Without this, pseudo-cultures can emerge where employees experience dissatisfaction, struggle with well-being, or leave the organization.”
“The goal of the High Performance Leadership courses is to equip leaders to create a sustainable culture where ideas can be shared and discussed in a safe space while also allowing for open conversations about mistakes.”
“Everyone makes mistakes, including leaders, so how do you handle the situation when you or a team member has made an error? It’s important to emphasize that mistakes are not equivalent to a lack of performance. Instead, how we approach these situations can significantly impact the success of a project and the well-being of the team,” says Marie Louise Halvgaard Møller.
The High Performance courses span 25 hours, and prior to the course sessions, leaders receive feedback from their teams at home. Colleagues and employees respond to eight questions about their leader.
As Marie Louise Halvgaard Møller puts it, “Receiving this kind of feedback can be challenging or even tough,” but during the course, participants work with consultants to process the feedback and discuss how the leader can act differently going forward.
“The culture in many high-performing companies is intense, particularly in partner-driven organizations, which are traditionally very top-down. However, the leaders we work with today understand that their role is to engage people, ensure everyone has a voice, and ultimately contribute to generating new ideas.”
“It’s demanding for participants to practice this, but if leaders don’t know how to create psychological safety, we lose openness, innovation, and ultimately results,” says Marie Louise Halvgaard Møller.
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Everyone makes mistakes, including leaders, so how do you handle the situation when you or a team member has made an error? It’s important to emphasize that mistakes are not equivalent to a lack of performance. Instead, how we approach these situations can significantly impact the success of a project and the well-being of the team.
During the course, participants also work with cases and role-playing exercises designed to train them to handle pressure as leaders. In one exercise, a team must address a customer complaint and a mistake made by one of the group members.
The team’s task is to find a constructive way to handle the situation while practicing awareness of error management and recognizing typical reactions and patterns in both themselves and others. Each participant is assigned a role, but the person in the leader role has complete freedom to act as they see fit.
Despite good intentions, people often revert to previously learned and habitual reaction patterns when under pressure. For example, this might involve harshly reprimanding or shaming the person who made the mistake, or entirely brushing off the error, thereby creating a pseudo-culture where everyone knows a mistake has been made, but no one addresses it openly.
“No one wants to be singled out or made to look foolish, so we pay close attention to how leaders act.”
“But it’s also important to acknowledge that even in a team with a skilled leader working to create psychological safety, there can be one or more employees who, consciously or unconsciously, undermines that safety.”
“This is a form of schoolyard psychology, where people sometimes act inappropriately to protect themselves or maintain their place in the hierarchy. Ultimately, however, it’s the leader’s responsibility to address this,” says Marie Louise Halvgaard Møller.
Both CfL consultant Marie Louise Halvgaard Møller and Ninna Friis Gleberg emphasize that a company like Deloitte, which operates in advisory services, consulting, auditing, and accounting, naturally relies on its clients' trust and always strives to avoid errors.
However, even the most skilled and meticulous individuals make mistakes occasionally, and in large projects, even small errors left unnoticed can have significant consequences.
“We must, of course, minimize mistakes, but we also need to be able to talk about them and create a culture where we not only address and correct errors but also learn from them.”
“Obviously, there should be no mistakes in an annual report, but we must accept that people make mistakes and that identifying these mistakes can lead to valuable insights and long-term savings.”
“My experience is that we haven’t always been open to talking about mistakes, but if we maintain a culture of silence around errors, we won’t learn from them—and we may also struggle to attract a generation of young talent that insists on being seen as whole individuals more than previous generations did,” says Ninna Friis Gleberg.
Generation Z, now stepping into the workforce with their strong educational backgrounds, has a clear expectation that their leaders will see and treat them as whole individuals.
Born between 1995 and 2012, this generation has a pronounced need for feedback and mentoring. They want to be heard and seen, have the opportunity to discuss and adjust direction, and expect openness in relationships—including the ability to talk about and learn from mistakes—without fear of being pushed aside by a leader with more stripes on their shoulder when they make a misstep.
Asto Ninna Gleberg Friis puts it, “To attract and retain top talent, a leader must accept and effectively manage these demands and expectations.”
This is why Deloitte’s efforts to create psychological safety align closely with its strategic ambition to be the best company for talent development, committed to lifelong learning and ongoing professional and personal growth.
“Cultural change is a long and steady process, and it’s not yet possible for us to measure the full impact of the courses. However, we’re making a concerted effort to help our leaders gain deeper insights into their own and others’ reactions and patterns, and to ensure that all team members have the opportunity to contribute.”
“There is a noticeable shift in awareness today regarding psychological safety and the importance of the team compared to the past. Previously, many of our leaders found psychological safety intriguing but did not view it as something directly relevant to their work.”
We are seeing an increasing number of inquiries from leaders interested in enhancing psychological safety within their teams, particularly through developmental feedback,” says Ninna Friis Gleberg.
Returning to Kristoffer Kaspersen, who shared the following praise for the course:
“The course gave us a shared understanding of the leader's role in fostering psychological safety within a team. Some of us, like me, need to take a deep breath, while others set goals to be less reserved. But we developed a common language for creating safe teams and gained important insights about ourselves.”
“For me, it means that it’s okay to disagree, but we need to do so respectfully, as the best decisions are made collaboratively. It’s also crucial to have support from your leadership. Specifically, it has been pivotal for me that my leader, CIO Aino Arildsen, leads by example and keeps us focused on continuous development in a safe space.”
