You’ve got a “speak-up culture” printed on the wall, yet, your meetings sound like a hostage negotiation. Psychological safety, backed by research, ignored by leadership, and often misunderstood, might just be the biggest performance driver you’re not taking seriously.
Phil was a lead developer at a promising new venture, and getting closer to the big launch, he pointed out a security flaw in the product. You know, the kind that could leak user data and send your startup’s valuation plummeting. Leadership listened carefully… then demoted him for “disrupting the team’s momentum.” Three months later, the flaw got exploited. PR nightmare. Customers fled. Leadership blamed… morale.
Ah, corporate logic.
We romanticise “speak-up cultures” in posters and onboarding decks. “Every voice matters,” says the laminated sign in the break room—right above the espresso machine that no one dared report as broken for six months because the last guy who complained doesn’t work here anymore.
So, most organisations don’t want honesty, do they? They want agreement dressed as engagement. Challenge the status quo, and suddenly you're “not a team player.” Which is ironic, because the whole point of a team is to win, not to nod.
And yet, psychological safety—the radical idea that people shouldn’t feel like they’re auditioning for their jobs every day—is still treated as this fluffy, HR-sponsored “nice to have.” Meanwhile, the companies that actually bake it into their culture? They're too busy outperforming everyone else to put up a slide about it.
If you're still thinking “psychological safety” sounds like something your yoga teacher invented during a particularly profound savasana, let’s clear that up.
Enter Robert I. Sutton, Stanford professor and corporate nonsense slayer. In his book, Good Boss, Bad Boss, he reveals the truth:
“Psychological safety is the key to creating a workplace where people can be confident enough to act without undue fear of being ridiculed, punished, or fired—and be humble enough to openly doubt what is believed and done.”
So it’s not about singing kumbaya in meetings or giving gold stars for showing up. It’s about creating an environment where people can speak up without worrying they'll be metaphorically—or literally—thrown under the performance-review bus.
The real kicker in Sutton’s framing is the second half: humble enough to openly doubt what is believed and done. That’s the hard part. It's one thing to let people share their “ideas.” It's another to let them challenge how things actually work without being labeled “difficult” or—my personal favorite—“negative.”
The social environment of psychological safety fosters a positive culture of error, which, for example, frames missteps as learning successes and offers support at all times in order to master personal challenges.
Team members have the confidence to take on challenges because they do not have to fear punishment or exclusion from the group if they do not succeed. Likewise, they receive recognition when they successfully pass challenges.
And while Sutton brings the manager’s-eye view, he’s building on the pioneering research of Amy Edmondson from Harvard. She’s the one who coined the term in the late ‘90s after observing that the best-performing teams made more mistakes—because they reported them. The worst-performing teams? They were too busy pretending everything was fine.
Turns out when people stop pretending, performance improves. Interesting, right?
Psychological safety is about being effective. If your team feels safe to speak up, you get early warnings, better ideas, and fewer expensive faceplants. If they don’t? Well, enjoy the silence before the storm.
In the mid-2010s, they launched Project Aristotle, a study of 180 teams to figure out what made the great ones tick.
Spoiler: it wasn’t IQ. It wasn’t the mix of introverts vs. extroverts. It wasn’t “rockstar talent.” The secret sauce? Psychological safety.
The best teams had norms like:
In short: you could ask dumb questions, challenge decisions, or admit you didn’t understand—and the world wouldn’t end.
The teams with high psychological safety outperformed on innovation, revenue, and retention. And Google being Google, they had the data to prove it.
In Edmondson’s original study, she found that nursing teams who admitted to more mistakes actually had fewer patient complications. Why? Because they caught issues early, addressed them fast, and created space to learn without blame. Meanwhile, in the “low-error” teams, no one reported anything… because no one dared to.
Here’s the plot twist: everyone says psychological safety is important. Ask any executive. They’ll nod sagely, quote Brene Brown, maybe even throw in a line about “open-door policies.” Then they’ll walk into their next leadership meeting and eviscerate someone for “bringing up problems without solutions.”
Because let’s be honest—until the house is actively on fire, no one wants to talk about the faulty wiring.
You’d think decades of research, field-tested case studies, and competitive success stories would be enough to make companies prioritise psychological safety.
The real problem? Performance that’s just good enough.
As long as the quarterly numbers don’t look too embarrassing, there’s no existential pressure to change. Managers don’t see silence as a risk—they see it as “focus.” Conflict avoidance is mistaken for “alignment.” And a lack of feedback? Clearly a sign that “everything’s working great.”
Until it’s not.
When the false shop-window LinkedIn success stories are not enough any more, and when the business finally hits a wall—innovation stalls, talent walks, customer trust nosedives—then suddenly someone in a blazer utters the words “culture change” and emails out that the company should listen better.
Because nothing jumpstarts psychological safety like a corporate rebrand. Well, it does not. Then what does?
Here’s the thing most leaders get wrong about psychological safety: it’s not about being nice. It’s about being real.
According to the Harvard Business Review article, What people get wrong about psychological safety by Edmondson and Kerrissey, most people think it means getting things your way, job security, a trade-off with performance, or that it is a top-down approach. But they get it wrong.
Psychological safety means people feel safe to speak up because they trust the system won’t punish them for it. But it also means they trust that their input matters—and that there are shared standards for excellence.
So how to start building up psychological safety?
The quality of our conversations determines the quality of our results.
That entails asking good questions, listening intently, and pushing for closure along three dimensions: the degree to which people are listening and sharing, the presence of both advocacy and inquiry, and the degree of progress made.
As a leader, try these basic behaviors to promote the right culture:
Psychological safety isn’t a vibe. It’s a system of behaviors. It’s what you repeatedly do, not what you print on mugs. You don’t get it by declaring it. You earn it—moment by moment, mistake by mistake, with the humility to lead out loud and the guts to hear what people actually think. If that sounds like work... good. It is.
And if you’re waiting for performance to tank before you start building it? Well, congratulations on being the last to smell the smoke.
