Impression Management
The primary enemy of Psychological Safety
Identified in People Before Tech (Bloomsbury, 2021, ISBN 978-1-4729-8545-3) as the primary enemy of Psychological Safety.
Impression Management is the performative behaviour people engage in to protect their image at work. It means saying what sounds good instead of what is true. It means hiding problems instead of escalating them. It means performing competence instead of admitting uncertainty.
When Impression Management dominates, Speak-Up Culture collapses — and Human Debt™ compounds silently.
"When you first mentioned impression management to me, it immediately caught my attention. It was one of the more startling things I've heard in the past couple of years. I had never heard of it."
Gene Kim called it potentially "the missing tool."
— Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, in the appendix of People Before Tech (Bloomsbury, 2021, ISBN 978-1-4729-8545-3)
How Impression Management creates Human Debt™
- Problems stay hidden until they become crises
- Disagreement goes underground, slowing real decisions
- Teams report green when reality is red
- Execution Integrity breaks because verification depends on honest signals
Book Provenance
This concept was identified by Duena Blomstrom in People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury Business, 2021, ISBN 978-1-4729-8545-3). It connects to the broader Human Debt™ framework.