Have you ever felt unsafe? Walking down a dark alley after a night out, hearing someone walking behind you, or simply lying in your Airbnb hearing unfamiliar sounds and not being quite sure if someone is breaking in and you are more than ready to hold up your partner as a human shield? But other times, times when it would have been much more logical to freak out, like sleeping in a bunk bed in Southeast Asia with 10 complete strangers and one guy who told everyone at the bar he had been in prison before, you felt completely at ease. The latter might also be because you were drunk, but that is not the point I am trying to make here. It is the phenomenon of psychological safety. The absence of interpersonal fear in an environment, including in the context of a work environment. Fear is an outdated leadership concept that is neurologically proven to be the least effective, as it activates our stress response fight or flight which heightens body activity ready for emotional reactions but diminishes our capacity to think logically with our amygdala. The logical part of our brain is quite needed at work. Therefore, in modern leadership theory, the aim is to create a fearless and safe work environment.
Psychological safety, a concept Amy Edmondson helped popularize at Harvard Business School, emerged from her research on hospital teams. She found that top performing units reported more errors, not because they performed worse, but because they were more willing to speak up about mistakes! Crazy, isn't it? Depriving from that research, there was one common denominator that needed to be fulfilled to create a feeling of safety for every team member. The whole team needed to believe that it is safe to take interpersonal risk, meaning asking naive questions, voicing dissent, raising concerns, or admitting uncertainty. The emphasis is on the whole team, not an individual belief.
So we accomplish the ideal state of a workplace where we all feel so safe that we proactively admit what went wrong and are not afraid to look stupid when asking the simplest questions. Now, the more important part: How do we get there?
As organizational leaders, to build a foundation, it is always best to train your leaders on concrete steps for fostering psychological safety. You can establish that by examining whether there are unnecessary hierarchies, chains of command, or professional boundaries that discourage communication from front line teams to upper management. This way you ensure nothing gets lost through communication telephone game effects and the issue is always communicated by the issue holder themselves. To emphasize this effect, ensure that team members who talk someone’s mistakes down are immediately addressed to shift the culture toward a more mistake positive one.
Departmental leaders can firstly celebrate learning from mistakes and build “lessons learned” debriefing sessions into every meeting, with a smile instead of scaring someone with an emotional outburst. This sounds easy but becomes challenging when mistakes have major financial consequences, which you might even need to carry. Secondly, lead by example to show how to raise tough issues for discussion in a constructive, nonjudgmental manner and encourage all team members to raise tough issues that may be on their minds.
Psychological safety sounds in the first moment like a nice add on, something pedagogical for later .. or the kids. However, it has already arrived our modern leadership world and is part of the basic understanding of leadership. So: Keep it safe, anywhere and anytime! :)
Sources
(Source: What Is Psychological Safety And How To Make It Happen, Alexander Puutio, Mar 02, 2026, Forbes)
(Source: What is psychological safety?, Unknown, July 17, 2023, McKinsey & Company)
(Source: What Is Psychological Safety at Work? Here’s How to Start Creating It, Unknown, March 4, 2024, American Psychological Association)
