Psychological safety is the cornerstone of high-performing teams and thriving workplaces, enabling open communication, creativity, and innovation. However, even well-intentioned leaders can unknowingly erode this environment through specific actions or habits. Whether dismissing feedback, micromanaging, or prioritising results over relationships, these behaviours can stifle collaboration and suppress team morale. The resulting impact isn’t just limited to strained relationships—companies face diminished learning, reduced creativity, and a decline in overall productivity. This article dives into the subtle ways leaders may undermine psychological safety and provides actionable insights to help leaders foster an atmosphere of trust and openness where employees feel empowered to contribute and take risks without fear of judgment.
The concept of psychological safety is pivotal in today’s corporate environment, as highlighted by Amy Edmondson’s influential work The Fearless Organization. While its benefits are clear—fostering innovation, engagement and a no-blame culture—leaders often hinder the implementation.
Understanding Psychological Safety
Psychological safety creates a corporate culture that values transparency and sees mistakes as learning opportunities. It encourages individuals to voice concerns and share ideas freely, which is crucial for driving forward-thinking and innovation.
Consider the alternative: a culture of fear and shame that drives problems underground, misses learning opportunities and increases the risk of systemic issues. It is human nature to avoid looking foolish and being shunned. So mistakes are hidden and we let things slide.
Learning From History
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the global aviation industry faced substantial safety issues, declining consumer confidence and air travel numbers. They had little choice but to tackle their safety issues head-on. This required airlines to come together with a common goal to make everyone who flies as safe as possible.
Introducing a nonpunitive reporting policy required pilots to share incidents and near misses within an agreed timeframe. This policy was pivotal to improving standards, making air travel one of the safest forms of travel.
Why Do Businesses Choose To Focus On It?
Businesses now see psychological safety as a beacon for high engagement and empowerment, unlocking hidden potential while making an environment less risky. This pursuit is admirable and noble, but it needs the courage and conviction of leaders to see it through. It is also a journey, not a destination.
What Causes Psychological Safety To Fail?
Teams constantly change, and therefore, dynamics shift. Our primal responses see new people as threats, unknown entities that cause uncertainty and anxiety. Much of this is subconscious, so we might not even realise it’s happening. When you add in internal competition, ego and misaligned goals, the cracks soon appear, and performance levels drop.
Egotistical leaders who place their needs above the group destroy psychological safety. Their obsession with winning causes people to feel unsafe. A more selfless leadership focused on performance—that faces the facts, sharing thoughts, good and bad—can lead to a better future.
How leaders react is crucial, too. When things happen, is their response disproportionate? Or are they balanced, calm and methodical? The personal pressure level will determine a leader’s response, and their feelings can influence whether it’s in proportion.
The leader’s intent may be to tackle the challenge a-on, embrace the learning opportunity and come together to work through it. However, add in the complexity and demands from boardrooms, stock markets, media and the workforce, and that intent may waver. The scale and nature of these pressures can easily bias any leader’s decision-making.
How leaders intellectually spar with their people can be dangerous. It can be healthy to stretch, test and explore with their people, but if they have to “win” the argument, they will likely intimidate their people, who will probably then stay in their lane and play it safe.
I sympathise with those in public roles who are particularly susceptible to this; the risk of failure is so high personally and professionally that adopting a psychological safety culture, while intellectually sensible, can be risky as mistakes and failure are spun in the public eye by the press with a witch hunt as they demand someone to be held accountable—that’s not conducive to psychological safety and definitely a need for strong leadership.
What Happens When Psychological Safety Is Failing?
The absence of psychological safety causes decline, whether it be an existential problem that causes the leader’s downfall or a slow decline.
Without learning and growth, people don’t innovate, take risks or be creative. People who previously felt safe can now feel exposed and seek new opportunities elsewhere, which means losing talent and recruiting becoming harder.
Employees can become less engaged and feel undervalued, marginalized and underappreciated, so delivering organizational goals becomes much more challenging.
Increased stress and anxiety directly impact decision-making. People play it safe, looking for ways not to lose instead of playing to win. Playing to win means being prepared to lose, but knowing failure means learning and growth. In other words, you either win or learn.
The irony is that a psychologically safe culture surfaces issues and allows for debate, discussion, shared learning and more collaborative problem-solving. All of which raise standards across an organization, decreasing risk and driving up performance.
Why You Need To Hold Your Nerve
The alternative to psychological safety doesn’t bear thinking about; a false harmony pervades, and blind spots grow. It makes no sense only to hear what you want to hear; the reality is that bear traps are lying in wait!
Psychological safety doesn’t guarantee a worry-free journey, but the issues can be in plain sight, and your people will be more likely to want to be a part of the solution.
It takes real effort to remain rational and calm when things around you are failing. However, we can train ourselves to look for the learning in the chaos over time. But you must fight your body’s natural fight or flight response, develop strong self-talk and create a narrative that finds the learning once you let the emotions dissipate.
As Kipling said, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting.”
Being human means making mistakes. Being superhuman might just mean having the courage to embrace and learn from them.
This article first appeared on Forbes.com on 27th February 2024
Ricky has been a regular contributor to the Forbes Councils since 2023, where he shares his perspectives on all things leadership, change, culture and productivity, all with Thinking Focus’ unique perspective on metacognition, or as we prefer to say, thinking about thinking.
