The Elephant in the Boardroom

On today's episode, we discuss the rise of national and international psychological health and safety standards (including enforced approaches in Denmark, the UK, and Australia and ISO 45003) and the EU’s 2026 vote to explore EU-wide legal requirements, driven by increasing workplace stress, bullying and harassment, absenteeism, and major societal costs. We argue that standards and legislation should set a baseline and provide inspiration, but cannot fix culture without changing day-to-day behaviors and habits. We also contrast traditional “how do you feel” engagement surveys with measuring what actually happens in organizations, emphasizing the gap between written policies and lived experience. Key themes include boards and leaders needing curiosity, psychological safety as constructive conflict (not harmony), and shared responsibility that increases with seniority, including modeling openness, admitting ignorance and mistakes, and enabling employees to speak up in meetings and report errors.

PeopleFirst Standard on Linkedin

Joshua Ellins on Linkedin

Jesper Holst on Linkedin

Karen is a leadership communication advisor specialising in rhetoric. She works with leaders and leadership teams to communicate in ways that bring strategies and change to life, while fostering motivation and well-being across the organisation. With more than 20 years of experience as an advisor, Karen works with organisations across a range of sectors, including finance, energy and education. She holds a Master’s degree in Rhetoric.

In this episode, we sit down with Karen to discuss how rhetoric, “the art of communicating convincingly” (Aristotle), applies to modern leadership across speeches, writing, one-on-ones, listening, and behavior. Karen explains how leaders often treat communication as a “soft” topic, but effective leadership requires influencing behavior through ethos, logos, and pathos while adapting to the audience and situation. They explore AI-generated communication through a seminar example where an AI-written speech sounded polished but inauthentic, while a less perfect personal speech built trust. Karen shares a Danish company case where a harsh tone and public scolding undermined psychological safety and collaboration; she describes diagnosing issues via group work and one-on-ones, aligning leaders on a common story, and improving outcomes through visibility, meeting employees where they are, repetition, and celebrating progress.

You can connect with, and follow Karen's work via the following:

https://karenbendix.dk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-bendix/

PeopleFirst Standard on Linkedin

Joshua Ellins on Linkedin

Jesper Holst on Linkedin

We welcome agile coach Bo Malling to The Elephant in the Boardroom and explore how "psychological safety" can become an unhelpful buzzword when it’s talked about without follow-through, or reduced to superficial rules like asking permission before feedback. We discuss whether self-reporting surveys are “broken,” with Bo arguing they’re often used because they’re easy, can be gamed, and frequently fail to drive action; especially when mandated at enterprise scale, though self-reporting can be useful one-on-one to surface perception gaps. Bo shares examples where leaders’ reactions to norm-breaking moments (e.g., shutting down questions in large meetings) quickly reshape safety, and emphasizes improving psychological safety through team-level behaviors and facilitation structures like Liberating Structures “1-2-4-All,” plus making commitments explicit rather than treating silence as consent.

The 1-2-4-all method

Follow Bo Malling on Linkedin

PeopleFirst Standard on Linkedin

Joshua Ellins on Linkedin

Jesper Holst on Linkedin

In the first episode of The Elephant in the Boardroom podcast, we (Jesper and Joshua), co-founders of the People First Standard, introduce our mission to help companies improve psychological health and safety while also meeting emerging legal requirements such as Denmark’s BEK 605 and similar standards in the UK, Australia, and Canada. We discuss data from Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report (90,000 working hours in a lifetime; only 20% engaged) and connect psychological safety to engagement, error reporting, reduced bullying and harassment, lower absenteeism, and better business outcomes. 

We explain that psychological safety isn’t the absence of learning or accountability, and we outline how our third-party certification tool uses anonymous, scenario-based questions mapped to standards to provide objective measurement, evidence for audits, and improvement recommendations, complementing, not replacing, existing engagement and mental health surveys.

PeopleFirst Standard on Linkedin

Joshua Ellins on Linkedin

Jesper Holst on Linkedin