What Businesses Get Wrong About Psychological Safety
In today’s corporate landscape, few ideas have travelled faster — or been more misunderstood — than psychological safety. Once an obscure academic term coined by MIT’s Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis in the 1960s, it has since exploded into boardrooms, workshops, and keynote speeches. But in the rush to embrace it, many leaders have twisted psychological safety into something it was never meant to be: a promise of comfort, consensus, or protection from failure. The result? A well-intentioned but deeply misguided approach that often inhibits the very learning and performance it was meant to support.
Psychological safety is not about being nice. Nor is it about protecting egos, shielding people from accountability, or making workplaces uniformly agreeable. At its core, as writes Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, psychological safety is about “a shared sense of permission for candour” [1]. It is the belief that one can speak up, ask questions, raise concerns, or admit mistakes without fear of humiliation or reprisal.
Psychological Safety as “nice”
So where have businesses gone wrong? Let’s begin with the most persistent misunderstanding: that psychological safety means being nice. Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Edmondson and Michaela J. Kerrissey, an associate professor of management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, recall a consultant who boasted of having a “psychologically safe team” because “we never argue” [2]. But conflict avoidance is not a hallmark of safety — it’s a symptom of suppression. “Nice,” in this context, becomes a euphemism for silence. Teams that substitute politeness for candour become echo chambers. Without challenge, they stagnate. Without dissent, they fail.
The infamous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 offers a cautionary tale. As Edmondson notes, senior advisors to President Kennedy withheld their concerns about the ill-fated plan for fear of appearing unsupportive [3]. The catastrophic result led Kennedy to re-engineer his team’s decision-making process to encourage dissent — an approach that later paid off during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In business, as in politics, silence kills.
This conflation of psychological safety with comfort has been exacerbated by “concept creep.” Shane Snow, CEO of the film tech company Showrunner and founder of the innovation skills center Snow Academy, warns that leaders too often treat discomfort as danger, mistaking emotional unease for a lack of safety. “Safety is not the same as comfort,” Snow writes. “A good fitness trainer will help you to safely exercise and grow your muscles. And you will be uncomfortable. But you will be safe” [4]. Discomfort is the crucible of learning. If your team never feels stretched, it’s probably not growing.
Another damaging myth is that psychological safety means getting your way. One healthcare executive described a staff member accusing leadership of creating an unsafe environment because their idea wasn’t adopted [5]. This misinterpretation weaponises the concept. Psychological safety ensures your voice is heard, not that your opinion carries the day. As Timothy R. Clark writes in Forbes, “To be heard is not to be heeded” [6].
The reality is that disagreement — respectful, rigorous disagreement — is fundamental to safety. It’s not dangerous to challenge ideas; it’s dangerous when people fear doing so. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue in The Coddling of the American Mind, conflating disagreement with violence or ideas with harm erodes resilience and undermines the very conditions necessary for democratic discourse and innovation [7].
Psychological Safety as Security
Psychological safety is also often mistaken for job security. Google’s 2023 layoff of 12,000 employees prompted outrage from staff who saw the move as a betrayal of the company’s psychological safety ethos. Yet, as Edmondson and Kerrissey clarify, the very fact that an employee felt empowered to stand up at a town hall meeting and critique leadership proved that psychological safety was still alive and well [8]. Being able to speak candidly — especially in moments of tension or disappointment — is the truest measure of a psychologically safe culture.
Psychological Safety as Performance
The most enduring and corrosive misconception, however, may be the idea that psychological safety undermines performance. This false binary — safety or excellence — misleads many leaders into thinking that fostering candour requires sacrificing standards. In reality, high-performing teams thrive on both. “When both psychological safety and accountability are high, teams do their best work,” Edmondson argues [9].
This dynamic interplay is captured well by Sarah Liu, founder and managing director of The Dream Collective, an Asia Pacific (APAC) top 10 diversity and inclusion consultancy. Writing in Forbes Australia, Liu points out that when people feel psychologically safe, they not only take more creative risks but also hold themselves and each other accountable for outcomes [10]. Safety creates the space for constructive failure. But without clear goals and high expectations, that space becomes slack rather than supportive.
Indeed, if psychological safety is used as a shield for low performance, it ceases to be safety at all; it becomes avoidance. As Clark writes, “Non-performing employees tend to invoke it as an excuse for poor performance. They claim that we should give them a pass. But autonomy is earned, not owed”. [11]
Psychological Safety as Policy
Another misconception is that psychological safety can be mandated through policy. Rhode Island’s 2024 Workplace Psychological Safety Act, which allows employees to sue employers for failing to provide a psychologically safe environment, may be well-intentioned but fundamentally misunderstands how safety is created [12]. You can’t legislate trust. You can’t demand vulnerability. You can’t write a law that tells people to be honest. Psychological safety is cultivated, not installed.
That cultivation happens, crucially, through leadership behaviour. But contrary to the top-down dogma many consultants peddle, it’s not solely a leader’s job. As Edmondson reminds us, psychological safety is “local” [13]. Some teams in the same company flourish while others flounder. Not because of executive proclamations but because of micro-behaviours: how people respond to dissent, how feedback is delivered, how mistakes are handled.
Edmondson and Kerrissey put it plainly: “It’s possible to create a motivated, psychologically safe, high-performing team anywhere. Start by focusing on your own team” [14]. Safety is not something senior leaders hand down like holiday leave, it’s something we build interaction by interaction, meeting by meeting, moment by moment.
Psychological Safety as Practice
So what does building psychological safety look like in practice?
First, leaders must put purpose front and centre. As Edmondson observed, teams that focus obsessively on safety tend to become “really nice to one another” — and nothing else. Edmondson and Kerrissey give the example of Anouk, a consultant who realised that the leadership team’s focus on creating psychological safety — the very reason she’d been hired — was actually backfiring. She helped them reframe their focus to concentrate on shared goals and performance rather than the abstract concept of safety. Psychological safety improved as a by-product [15]. The takeaway? Talk less about safety, and more about why your work matters. A shared mission justifies the risks of candour.
Second, teams must learn to have better conversations. Poor-quality dialogue — where updates crowd out inquiry, advocacy trumps curiosity, and silence is mistaken for agreement — breeds mediocrity. High-quality conversations, by contrast, are marked by engaged listening, intellectual friction, and progress. “The best way to strengthen psychological safety is to lead conversations in a way that encourages information to be shared candidly and processed thoughtfully,” write Edmondson and Kerrissey [16].
They give the example of a global retailer for whom one operations leader set up intentionally “slow” meetings — designed to be out of sync with the usual pace of business — where his team practised curiosity, admitted challenges, and collaborated more openly. The result was a microclimate of candour and improved performance [17].
Third, structure matters. Psychological safety is reinforced through rituals and routines — “failure walls,” end-of-week reflections, or drop-in office hours. These small, repeatable practices send a powerful signal: mistakes are learning opportunities, not liabilities. At PepsiCo UK, end-of-week reports on incomplete or imperfect work helped eliminate wasted effort and improve coordination [18]. At Microsoft Western Europe, Cindy Rose instituted regular “failure parties” and after-action reviews, cultivating not just accountability but shared ownership of outcomes [19].
What Businesses Get Wrong About Psychological Safety
Ultimately, the essence of psychological safety is trust — not just between individuals, but across teams. As Snow argues, trust is earned through ability, integrity, and benevolence. Only the last is non-negotiable. “No amount of skill or ability can make you trust someone who you don’t think has your best interests at heart” [20]. In a group where benevolence flows freely, people forgive mistakes, welcome dissent, and interpret each other’s actions charitably.
The challenge, then, is not to impose psychological safety from above, but to model it from within. To hold both high standards and deep empathy. To treat discomfort not as a threat but as a sign of growth. To encourage, not enforce, vulnerability.
Businesses that get this right will not only outperform their peers but outlast them. Because in an era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, it’s not slick strategy or airtight execution that gives you the edge. It’s the ability to speak up, challenge assumptions, and learn fast. And that only happens in environments where people feel truly safe enough to do so.
Sources
[1] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[2] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[3] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/shanesnow/2020/05/04/how-psychological-safety-actually-works/
[5] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothyclark/2021/06/21/what-psychological-safety-is-not/
[7] Haidt, J., & Lukianoff, G. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind. Penguin Press.
[8] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[9] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[10] https://www.forbes.com.au/news/leadership/psychological-safety-debunking-the-myths/
[11] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothyclark/2021/06/21/what-psychological-safety-is-not/
[12] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[13] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[14] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[15] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[16] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[17] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[18] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[19] https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
[20] https://www.forbes.com/sites/shanesnow/2020/05/04/how-psychological-safety-actually-works/
About the author
