You can’t mandate psychological safety.
EXPERT OPINION BY BILL MURPHY JR., FOUNDER OF UNDERSTANDABLY AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, INC. @BILLMURPHYJR
Aug 31, 2025
Have any of these things ever happened to you?
- You call in your team for a brainstorming meeting, looking for smart ideas. But everyone seems afraid to speak up.
- You think you have the core of a smart idea, and you ask for feedback to improve it. But everyone tells you it’s perfect, no room for improvement — even though you know that can’t be right.
- An employee makes a suggestion that you consider, but ultimately reject. Afterward, they become sullen — or even tell you that shooting down their ideas made them feel like they’re not free to offer ideas in the future.
As a leader, I’m betting you’ve probably been in some of these situations, and you might even have paid attention to the idea of promoting “psychological safety” in the workforce in order to get your team to offer their best.
So, what if I told you that the notion of “psychological safety” has turned into one of the most misunderstood concepts of our business generation, and that there are things that smart leaders can do to motivate employees better as a result?
Writing in Harvard Business Review, Amy C. Edmondson of Harvard Business School and Michaela Kerrissey of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health say they’ve identified key misconceptions about psychological safety — along with how leaders can build a “strong, learning-oriented work environment.”
Here are the things they say people don’t understand, along with their blueprint for success:
Psychological safety doesn’t mean simply being “nice.”All other things being equal, why not be nice? But that doesn’t mean that safety and niceness are the same thing.
Change requires conflict, and sometimes that means setting aside niceness for higher values. So, Edmonson and Kerrissey say, if “psychological safety” becomes code for never saying what you really think if it isn’t nice, that’s a recipe for disaster:
Safety and comfort are not synonymous. Safety is the condition of being protected from danger, harm, or injury. Comfort is a state of ease and freedom from pain.
Wanting to be nice, people avoid being honest and, whether they realize it or not, collude in producing ignorance and mediocrity.
Even if you knew nothing else about this concept, I’ll bet you can see why that would not be a good recipe for leadership and success.
Psychological safety doesn’t mean that you always get your way.Honestly, I don’t even understand how this would be possible. One assumes that if there is any conflict of opinion at all in business, that means that not everyone involved in the conversation can leave feeling that they’ve convinced everyone else.
Psychological safety doesn’t mean nobody can ever lose their job.I suppose perhaps there’s an element of job security intertwined with psychological safety, in the idea that maybe no one should be judged by a single, solitary off-the-wall idea or comment in most cases.
But if psychological safety becomes a license to stay quiet, do nothing, and keep working in your business — well, let’s just say I’d love to be your competitor.
Psychological safety is not an excuse for bad performances.If it were, I mean, what would even be the point? Instead, the entire idea of psychological safety is to create an environment in which team members feel empowered to express ideas that might improve performance.
“[E]xtensive research shows that not learning in groups is common. People hide information to save face or to be agreeable or both,” Edmonson and Kerrissey write. “And teams fall easily into groupthink, where members don’t want to disrupt what they erroneously assume is a consensus.”
You can’t mandate psychological safety.Like a famous Supreme Court case, psychological safety is hard to define, but we know it when we see it. That also means that it’s the kind of thing that people have to buy into across an organization.
Related: Regardless of whether top leadership is convinced of the value of psychological safety, “psychological safety is built by everyone—at all levels of the company.”
Blueprint for success
So, if you’ve bought into the idea of psychological safety, what are the things that you can do as a leader to promote it within your organization?
Edmonson and Kerrissey say smart leaders do 3 key things to create an environment in which employees are motivated to speak up—especially the best team members, whose candor and input you value most:
- Talk less about psychological safety itself, and more about your organization’s goals. I’ve written before that a key test is whether, on Halloween, an employee would (a) feel comfortable dressing up and imitating you (in good fun), and (b) imitate you by repeating your company’s mission statement as a mantra — because you say it so much that it becomes a bit of a cliche.
- Work on consciously improving the quality of team conversations. Key: “[L]ead conversations in a way that encourages information to be shared candidly and processed thoughtfully. That entails asking good questions, listening intently, and pushing for closure. High-quality conversations are both an outcome and a driver of psychological safety.”
- Finally, figure out structures that encourage “sharing reflections and tracking progress.” Examples Edmonson and Kerrissey cite include committing to through “work results, insights, and learnings” at the end of every week, scheduling weekly “office hours virtual meeting[s]” so team members can drop in and discuss what’s on their minds, or even just encouraging leaders on teams that work together to have their team members talk directly to each other.
Bottom line? Creating a culture of psychological safety is difficult to quantify, but likely to pay off regardless.
And nobody should have trouble feeling comfortable saying that.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/bddszdwf