Leading Through Trust: Building Stronger Teams Through Engagement and Open Communication
Physical security is one of the most people-facing professions there is. We are the people at the front gate or entrance; we respond to incidents and walk the floor daily. Every one of those interactions is a moment to practice essential skills and embrace them to build trust.
If practiced routinely, four foundational skills distinguish good security leaders from great ones: psychological safety, emotional intelligence, purposeful presence, and open communication. Master these, and everything else in security management gets easier, including compliance, employee retention, incident reporting, and trust.
Psychological Safety: Make It Safe to Speak Up
Reflect on these three situations, thinking about how you might respond versus how you have seen others respond during your career. An officer notices someone piggybacking through a secure door but isn’t entirely sure it’s worth flagging, since other officers have let it go. A supervisor suspects a colleague mishandled an incident or employee interaction. A new hire made a mistake during his patrol and is terrified to admit it. In every case, what happens next depends entirely on whether that person believes he or she can safely speak up. This does not diminish the severity of each situation, but how we respond does matter. Severity and compassionate understanding can coexist.
Psychological safety is the confidence that raising a concern, admitting an error, or asking a question won’t get you punished or ridiculed. It sounds soft, but it isn’t. Sometimes it’s the difference between finding out about a problem in five minutes or five weeks. How you act as a leader and the behaviors you demonstrate build this trust and build this efficiency.
Leaders build psychological safety in small, repeated moments, not in policies, SOPs, post orders, or training sessions. When an employee comes to you about a mistake, your first words set the tone for all future disclosures. “Walk me through what happened” builds trust. “How could you let that happen?” kills it.
A trust-destroying response affects not just that person, but everyone who hears about it afterward. People are watching your behavior as a leader at all times. Word travels fast about which leaders you can be honest with.
Emotional Intelligence: Read the Room
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to understand your own emotions, process next steps, and respond well to other people’s emotions. For security professionals, it shows up constantly, often in the highest-pressure moments of the job: de-escalating an agitated visitor or employee, coaching an officer through a rough event or shift, or staying calm while a crisis unfolds in real time.
Composure is contagious, and so is panic or crisis behavior. When a leader stays level-headed during an incident, the whole team calibrates around that steadiness. When a leader visibly loses it, that spreads too. It impacts your brand and others’ perceptions of you.
EQ must also show up in the quieter moments. An officer who is repeatedly late might be struggling with something at home. A team member who pushes back on a new procedure might have a legitimate concern buried under suppressed frustration. Leaders with strong EQ get curious rather than defensive or upset, and they usually achieve better outcomes as a result.
“Walk me through what happened” builds trust. “How could you let that happen?” kills it.
Purposeful Presence: Show Up Like You Mean It
Purposeful presence is more than showing up on the schedule. Leaders who practice purposeful presence are highly engaged, and they use empathy and active listening to build trust. They stay present in the current moment and conversation, not halfway listening, thinking about the next meeting, or waiting for their turn to speak.
Security work runs on relationships built during routine moments. A supervisor stops to talk with an overnight guard instead of just checking the patrol log. An executive walks the floor, asking officers what’s been happening and being genuinely curious, instead of only reading incident summaries. A director sits in briefings—phone down, eyes up, genuinely listening.
These moments matter more than they seem. Employees can tell instantly when a leader is distracted or just going through the motions, and they respond in kind. Purposeful presence is one of the best intelligence-gathering tools a leader has. The people closest to the doors, cameras, employees, and the public usually know about issues long before they show up in a report or an event. An engaged and connected workforce is one of the best leading indicators in a security program. This will not only build trust but also lead to the prevention culture we all strive for.
Open Communication: Explain the Why, Even When It Is Difficult
Every security policy has the potential to create resistance for somebody. Employees who understand why a security rule exists are far more likely to follow it and explain it more clearly to others. Employees who are just told “because that is the policy” are far more likely to find a workaround or demonstrate a lack of support, not just for the policy but also for their leadership team.
Open communication means that the reasoning or the logic behind the policy or decision flows freely in both directions. Leaders must take the time to explain the logic behind decisions rather than simply issuing orders and expecting them to be executed. This also ties back to psychological safety—communication is dynamic and should go both ways, enabling employees to provide honest feedback about policies and ask questions. And when something goes wrong, people will speak up so leaders have the information they need to adjust during incidents and continuously improve afterward
This is especially true during incidents or unintended events. A calm, clear, honest update builds more trust in the workforce. This same skill set applies to large incidents or crisis communications. The skills can help you authentically and naturally communicate to the public or executive leadership during a crisis.
Bringing It All Together
None of these four skills replaces the strong foundation of a security program and fundamentals of physical security. Access control still needs to work. Patrols still need to happen. Cameras still need to provide coverage. But infrastructure and practice are only as good as the people running the program and the people whom leaders have the honor to serve. Those people perform better, stay longer, and report problems faster when they trust their leaders.
The best physical security leaders understand a simple truth: Their job isn’t just to protect an organization from the people or events that cause harm. It’s about building the kind of team and culture that identifies early indicators, retains the best people, and earns employees’ trust. That’s built one honest conversation, one calm response, and one genuinely present moment at a time.
Dan Rhatigan, CPP, DCJ, CSP, is the vice president, security, EHS, and site services at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. He has worked in EHS and security in the pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing industries for more than 25 years. Rhatigan has extensive emergency response experience, having spent almost 20 years in the fire service, including serving as a first assistant chief of training and operations. He holds a bachelor of science in emergency management, a master’s degree in safety and health, and a doctorate in criminal justice, with a concentration in homeland security.
