In many of the organizations I’ve had the privilege to work in, management practices and control mechanisms are well established. We measure, report, optimize, and follow up. Those tools are necessary – particularly in complex, high-stakes environments. But I’ve also seen how quickly they fall short when the real need is not more control, but more orientation: What matters most right now? What do we protect? What do we change? What do we learn?

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I’ve felt that tension personally. I’ve caught myself trying to manage my way toward a specific outcome – convinced I knew exactly what result was needed. Inevitably, that approach pulls me down into detail: more checkpoints, more questions, more oversight. It’s rarely about mistrust in others; it’s usually about my own discomfort with uncertainty.

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Over time, I’ve learned that this is exactly where courage for openness begins. Leaders who rely only on management tools often respond to ambiguity by tightening control. But true leadership asks for the opposite: the willingness to lead without pretending the future is fully knowable. When I stop trying to eliminate uncertainty, something shifts. I can lift my eyes from the details and focus on what creates stability over time: mission, priorities, and a way of working that builds trust instead of fear.

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Why we must protect the work environment

In my view, it’s with the mission true leadership takes form. It isn’t a plan. It sets the conditions that make good judgment more likely. The mission comes alive when priorities are clear enough to guide decisions and when trust is built into how we work. The point isn’t to remove accountability. The point is to create enough clarity and safety that people can act with autonomy because they understand the direction and the guardrails.

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And this is where the argument moves from leadership philosophy to leadership practice. Mission can only create autonomy if trust is high. Autonomy depends on people being able to tell the truth early – about uncertainty, risks, and when they need support. If honesty is expensive, people don’t become more independent; they become more cautious. They wait. They conceal. They protect themselves. That’s how organisations lose speed and learning capacity in the very moments they need it most.

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In my experience, traditional management environments can unintentionally signal that asking for help is the same as admitting you’re not meeting the expected standard. The messages are rarely explicit, but the culture speaks through phrases like: “Figure it out,” “Come when you have a solution,” or “We tried that before.” These aren’t always said with bad intent, but the effect is consistent: learning gets punished, concealment gets rewarded, and good ideas stay unsaid.

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I’ve realised that this pattern endures not because leaders intend for good ideas to be overlooked, but because the way leadership is practised has just as much impact as the words leaders use. Many leaders genuinely believe they are approachable. But approachability isn’t the same as accessibility. People watch reactions closely. They don’t ask for help because they’ve been told they can; they ask because they’ve seen that it’s safe – because they’ve seen what happens to someone else who did it first.

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When I ask myself how to engineer an environment where trust is real and asking for help feels natural, I come back to one uncomfortable truth: the work environment is not something that emerges on its own. It is something I’m responsible for maintaining.

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Three things I've learned:

First, trust must be actively protected. Left unattended, it rarely collapses due to external pressure alone. It breaks down because of small internal signals that go unaddressed: credit being quietly claimed by the loudest voice, mistakes met with blame instead of learning, meetings where silence feels safer than contribution. I’ve come to see it as my role to be explicit about what I will not accept – and to act when those lines are crossed. Not to control people, but to protect the space they work in. When fairness is defended consistently, people stop watching their backs and start focusing outward, on the mission we share.

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The second thing I’ve learned is that I set the price of honesty, whether I intend to or not. People constantly assess the risk of speaking openly: What happens if I admit uncertainty? What happens if I say I’m stuck? What happens if I ask for help? If I want openness from others, I must be willing to show it myself – without hesitation and without apology. I’ve found that simply stating when I’m unsure changes the tone in the room. Acknowledging a decision, I made that turned out wrong builds more trust than trying to defend it. Each time I do this, the social cost of honesty drops. Over time, honesty becomes a habit rather than a risk.

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The third thing I’ve learned is that culture is shaped less by what we say than by what we reinforce. Behaviours that are recognized get repeated – whether we mean to or not. For me, this has meant becoming more deliberate about separating behaviour from results. Strong results can sometimes be achieved through unhealthy behaviour – but often at a high cost to the work environment. When that behaviour is rewarded, even indirectly, it spreads. On the other hand, when constructive behaviour is recognized – even when outcomes aren’t perfect – it builds something far more durable. Good behaviour compounds. It strengthens learning, reduces friction, and increases trust over time. And in the long run, that is where sustainable performance comes from.

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In the end, true leadership is not something I “communicate” – it’s something I practice, especially when my instinct is to tighten control. It’s choosing clarity over certainty and building an environment strong enough to carry the mission through ambiguity. For me, that means protecting the environment from the internal threats that make people cautious, setting a low price for honesty by modelling it myself, and reinforcing the behaviours that keep trust intact even when results are under pressure. Because when people can speak up early, ask for help, and challenge assumptions without fear, the organization doesn’t slow down, it gets smarter. And in a time where complexity is the norm and the mission demands both reliability and change, that kind of trust isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s the infrastructure that makes leadership possible.

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Kristian Omdahl

Project Manager, Norwegian Offshore Directorate (Sokkeldirektoratet)