Psychological safety is often misunderstood.
It isn’t about avoiding challenge or accountability; it is about making interpersonal risk possible.
By Ify Bamigboye, BACP Integrative Psychotherapist & Certified Executive Coach
Psychological safety sounds comfortable. The reality can look very different.
A psychologically safe meeting may contain disagreement. Someone might question the most senior person in the room.
A colleague may admit that an important piece of work has gone wrong. Someone might say: “I don’t understand.” “I think we’re making a mistake.” “I disagree.” “I need help.”
None of those conversations is necessarily comfortable. But organisations need them.
Organisations operate with incomplete information. Senior leaders cannot see everything. Managers cannot know everything. Data arrives late. Assumptions become outdated. Problems emerge at the edges.
The people closest to a process, customer, system or programme may see something that leadership does not. The organisation therefore needs information to travel. Psychological safety helps us understand one of the conditions influencing whether it does.
Amy Edmondson’s foundational work and subsequent research describes psychological safety in relation to the perceived consequences of taking interpersonal risks. In practical terms: can I ask a question without being made to feel incompetent? Can I challenge an assumption? Can I admit a mistake? Can I raise a concern? Can I ask for help? Can I offer an idea that might fail?
One common misunderstanding is that psychological safety means avoiding difficult feedback, lowering expectations, never upsetting anyone or protecting everyone from discomfort. That is not the objective.
Consider two teams. Both have demanding performance expectations. In the first, mistakes are hidden and questions are interpreted as weakness. People protect themselves. In the second, performance expectations remain high, but people can admit uncertainty, request help and surface problems before they become crises.
Which environment gives leaders better information? Which is more likely to identify a faulty assumption early? Which gives a programme the greatest chance of adapting when circumstances change?
High standards and psychological safety are not opposites. They can reinforce one another.
Pay attention to what happens after somebody speaks
Many leaders say: “My door is always open.” But employees learn culture through what happens after they walk through it.
Someone raises a difficult issue. Does the manager become curious or defensive? Someone challenges an assumption. Are they engaged with or quietly excluded from subsequent conversations? Someone admits a mistake early. Is early disclosure appreciated or punished so strongly that everyone else learns to hide theirs?
The organisation’s real rules are often revealed in these moments.
Listening does not mean agreement. A leader can respond: “I understand your concern. Having considered it, we’re still going to proceed.”
Psychological safety isn’t veto power. It is the ability to contribute relevant information without disproportionate interpersonal risk.
Useful leadership questions include: “What are you seeing that I’m not?” “What might we be missing?” “Who has a different interpretation?” “What would make this decision fail?” “What are people reluctant to say about this?”
Those are not soft questions. They are decision-quality questions.
The goal is not comfort. The goal is an environment capable of holding the conversations performance requires: the early warning, the unpopular observation, the challenge to group thinking, the request for help, the admission that the plan isn’t working.
A team where everyone agrees may feel comfortable. That doesn’t necessarily make it safe.
MindPath Perspective
Psychological safety doesn’t remove challenge. It makes productive challenge possible.
If organisations want people to speak up, leaders need to pay attention not only to what they invite employees to say, but what happens when employees actually say it.
Further Reading & Research
