There's a moment in Ted Lasso I keep coming back to, and on the face of it it's completely ridiculous.
When something is weighing on one of the coaches, someone calls a "Diamond Dogs" — an impromptu little huddle where anyone can put a problem on the table and, for a few minutes, no one is judged for having said it out loud. Grown men, barking. It's played entirely for laughs. And yet it's a great depiction of what we call “Unity” in action.
Psychological safety — Amy Edmondson's term for the shared sense that it's safe here to speak up, to admit a mistake, to ask the daft question — a robust finding in teams research, and it’s a big part of the TeamHive dimension of Unity. It's also, I've come to believe, the most quietly faked. Not always intentionally faked but often I see teams ‘doing the motions’, its expected you ‘should speak up’ and everyone wants it to be true but the energy in the room tells me a different story, it tells me ‘We need to be seen to be speaking up and also be careful not to disagree with the wrong person or view’. In most teams, I will find many people who will tell me it's safe. But fewer actually are. And the awkward part is that the people best placed to know are usually the quietest ones in the room — which is, of course, precisely why we don't hear from them.
What Richmond gets right, when it's at its best, is that Ted goes first. He makes it safe to be human by being human before anyone else has to be — most memorably about his own panic attacks, which he doesn't dress up or apologise for — and the room slowly follows him into that. It's a small, unshowy thing, and I suspect it's most of the job.
In the PLUS model, the Unity dimension is made up of three parts:
Constructive Communication — can this team actually handle difference, and have the hard conversations, without it going sideways?
Safe Environment — is it genuinely safe here to speak up and to be wrong, or only safe-sounding?
Team Connection — is there real belonging and trust underneath, or mostly just proximity and a shared calendar?
And yet, for all its warmth, there is one person the Richmond room never quite reaches. Nate — talented, genuinely contributing, and slowly, painfully convincing himself that he doesn't belong there. If you were ever to score that team, he'd be the single soft spot in an otherwise lovely picture: one voice tilting quietly toward the door while everyone around him feels held. I find him almost unbearable to watch, because I feel like I've met him so many times.
That's the thing about safety I most want people to sit with. It is not an average. A team can feel deeply, sincerely connected and still be losing someone at its edge — and the confident, cheerful voices, the ones who'll happily tell you the culture is great, are never the ones who could see it let alone tell you about it..
Which is really why a team's own good feeling about its culture isn't, on its own, evidence. It's the whole reason we built the TeamHive 360 the way we did — gathering everyone, and the stakeholders around them, anonymously, so that the quiet signal doesn't get drowned out by the loud one. A Unity score that looks perfectly strong on average can still be hiding the one person who is about to leave, and, more often than not, the reason they will. If you asked your quietest team member whether it's really safe to disagree here — would their answer match yours?
