Psychological safety is about permission for candor. Not the absence of tension. – Amy C. Edmondson and Michaela J. Kerrissey
I’ve shared this idea in rooms of two and rooms of two hundred. And every time I do, I see something shift in people’s faces. Because somewhere along the way, psychological safety became a synonym for making sure nobody’s uncomfortable.
That’s not what it is. And that confusion is doing real damage to real teams.
Here’s what I see happen. And I’ve lived it myself.
A leader on the team is struggling. And not just a little bit. The kind of struggling that leaves marks on the people around them. You know something has to change. But the team has been through a lot lately. Morale is fragile. And honestly? You tell yourself they just need more time, or worse, you tell yourself you can fix it…I can fix her…I can fix him…
I’ve been that leader. The one who waited.
What I didn’t fully see in that moment was that what I was calling patience, what I was dressing up as concern for psychological safety, was actually fear with a nicer name on it. The senior leader I should have addressed directly eventually left on their own. But the collateral damage to that team was deep and long lasting. Some of those people never came back around. They left. This is one of my most vivid and painful mistakes as a leader.
That is not psychological safety. That is avoidance. And avoidance dressed up as “being nice” is still avoidance.
And then there’s the other way we can get this wrong as leaders.
You’ve been in the meeting where everyone’s nodding along. No debate, no tension, no pushback. And then you walk out and immediately the real conversation starts in the hallway, the parking lot, the group chat. The things people were actually thinking? They just weren’t willing to say them in the room.
That’s not psychological safety either. That’s a team that has learned it’s safer to be silent. The conflict didn’t go away. It just found a different address.
So what does psychological safety actually look like?
It looks like a team where the trust runs deep enough that hard things can be said in the room. Where someone can push back on a bad idea, including yours, and it doesn’t cost them anything. Where a leader can look someone in the eye and say, “I’m telling you this because I’m for you, not because I’m done with you,” and the person actually believes it.
That kind of trust doesn’t make things easier. It makes things clearer. Clarity is kind…but it can also be uncomfortable. That’s okay. Uncomfortable and unsafe are not the same thing.
High standards and genuine belief in the person. You need both. One without the other doesn’t work.
I wasn’t at my best when I delayed. I know that. But I learned something from it that I’ve carried into every leadership situation since. Protecting someone from a hard truth is not the same as caring for them. Sometimes the most caring thing you can do is say the thing that needs to be said, with honesty, with respect, and with the relationship strong enough to hold it.
Truth spoken with love.
That’s what psychological safety was always supposed to make room for.
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