Six Ways HR Leaders Can Transform Hidden Tension into Team Trust

Every organization experiences conflict.

It lives in hallway conversations, in what gets said after the meeting ends, in the silence that falls when someone almost says something true. Worst of all, it can go unacknowledged, simmering just below the surface and always ready to derail your organizational capacity and company culture.

For HR leaders, recognizing these unseen tensions and reading the silence is the actual work of culture leadership. Being a good leader means understanding this and stepping up to create an opening for what needs to be spoken, heard, and worked on.

The process begins with understanding that what you can see is rarely the whole picture. The harder question is whether leaders are willing to be honest about what’s really undermining company culture.

The Three Levels of Culture

Company culture is the shared set of values, beliefs, and hidden assumptions that dictate how people actually behave when no one is watching.

Company culture isn’t a nice-to-have bonus for highly productive teams. It is the core operating system of any profitable, agile organization.

As Edgar Schein, a former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, explains, culture operates on three distinct levels:

• Artifacts: The surface-level elements of an organization that are clearly visible and audible to observers. What you can see and hear, encompassing things like dress codes, office layout, how meetings run, who speaks, and who doesn't.

• Espoused Values and Beliefs: The organization’s persona, representing the specific ideals and principles the company publicly claims to follow, including its mission statements, stated priorities, and publicly claimed principles.

• Underlying Assumptions: The culture’s underworld, comprising deep, invisible, subconscious beliefs that drive behavior. These are rarely named, but they shape everything.

Most teams spend the majority of their time reacting to what is visible on the surface, when the deepest company dynamics often lie just below the surface.

That’s why high-capacity leadership and HR teams are defined by their ability to work below the surface. When leaders dare to bring the underworld of their culture out into the light without blame, shame, or defensiveness, something important happens.

How to Work Across All Three Levels

To effectively shift an organization's internal climate, leaders must move beyond managing outward behaviors and begin engaging with the invisible currents that shape their team’s daily reality.

By applying the following six practices, HR professionals can pull these hidden tensions into the light and build a foundation of genuine trust.

1. Look beyond what you see and hear.

Surface behavior does not tell the whole story. Pay attention to patterns, recurring tension, silence, and what keeps happening again and again, then ask what deeper dynamics may be shaping what you’re observing.

2. Notice the gap between stated values and lived reality.

Most organizations can clearly articulate what they value. The real question is whether people experience those values in practice. When there is a gap, tension often builds below the surface.

For example, if a company says it values work-life balance but promotes the individual who stays until 9:00 PM every night, the culture isn’t balanced. It’s performative at best.

Closing the gap requires acknowledging where the unwritten rules are winning.

3. Name what people already know.

It is incredibly powerful when leaders state what others have only said in private conversations. It reduces isolation and creates confidence. Name what’s true in a safe space where people feel like they can speak the truth.

For instance, in a recent leadership session with a large non-profit organization, a leader finally named the tension everyone had been carrying. The simple act of acknowledgment shifted the energy in the room and opened a door that months of silence had kept closed.

This released a pressure valve, validated the employees’ reality, and proved the leader was paying attention.

4. Ensure senior leaders go first.

When two senior leaders in one of our client engagements openly named the cultural underworld, something cascaded through the room.

First-line managers spoke up. Young leaders were invited in and actually heard. Senior leaders listened with curiosity rather than defensiveness.

The act of naming created permission for others to do the same.

5. Respond with curiosity, not defensiveness.

When hidden assumptions surface, leaders must resist the urge to explain them away.

In the client engagement mentioned above, no one defended their position, no one reacted emotionally, and no one pointed fingers. That posture of non-defensiveness was not incidental to the outcome. It was the outcome.

6. Treat the underworld as a doorway.

Hidden tension often points directly to what most needs attention, repair, and your leadership. What is avoided can become the path forward.

Opening this doorway also gives people agency.

Once the unwritten rules are made visible, employees are clear about what they are signing up for. They can consciously choose to stay, engage, and align with the real culture.

Building Trust Conversation by Conversation

This kind of cultural shift rarely happens overnight. The breakthrough moments where teams finally open up and engage deeply are often years in the making, and they are only possible because of the sustained, courageous work that precedes them.

HR leaders can’t fix everything in a single afternoon.

Creating the conditions for honest dialogue is a deliberate practice, built over time, conversation by conversation.

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Penny Koch-Patterson, Ed.D., MBA, PCC, CMC serves as an Executive Leadership Coach & Consultant for Henley Leadership Group, a premier strategic consultancy dedicated to transforming mid-market and enterprise organizations from the inside out.