Don't Shoot the Messenger: A Leader's Guide to Psychological Safety

Scene: A small conference room in a city near you. A videoconferencing screen is on one wall and four employees sit at a round table in the room. A video call with the Director of Transformation is under way.

DoT: So, given everything we just reviewed, are we are on track for the July milestone?

Team: (emphatically) Absolutely!

DoT: Fantastic! That's what I wanted to hear. Ok, well have a great day everyone, good job! (Ends call)

Team: (turning to each other in disbelief) They must be kidding! There's no way we are going to be ready for July!

What just happened?

This is just one example of how it looks when we don't have Psychological Safety in an organization. You get a watermelon program where everything feels good until all of a sudden the sky falls in. That example actually happened.

Companies have been brought to existential crises over this stuff. It is real and, as a leader, the way you lead will absolutely increase or decrease your team's performance though their level of Psychological Safety.

In this note I'll cover what Psychological Safety is, why it matters and share practical leadership actions that can build and reduce this precious commodity.

What is Psychological Safety?

I define this as the ability for people in your organization to be themselves and speak up with viewpoints that might be different to the current perspective of the organization and its leadership.

Essentially, that people can bring up different ideas or bad news without fearing that they will be punished or ridiculed.

Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, pioneered work on Psychological Safety. She defines it as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking’’. She has a TEDx talk on the topic which is well worth 10 minutes of your time.

Why is it important?

We need diverse viewpoints if we are to build the best plans, products, processes, customer experience or whatever the output of your organization is. If you don't have a diverse team of bright people poking on the work then you are not getting the cumulative brain power and unique skill of each person into the work.

Bear in mind that you built your team to select the best individuals, with the widest set of skills, and have spent time nurturing them to be their best... you want them to be able to bring all of themselves.

We need issues to flow upwards. It is human nature to be a little reticent at sharing bad news in public, with senior people present, especially if previous messengers have been shot. The example in the introduction actually happened. In Program and Project Management we have the concept of a watermelon project: green on the outside and then bright red when you look at what is happening inside. You don't want that as it is easier to fix issues the earlier they are found.

There are measurable impacts. Google has done important work on this, which you can read here:

The Googlers discovered that Psychological Safety was one of the most important factors in team performance in the teams they studied.

BCG's 2024 research found that when psychological safety is high, only 3% of employees are at risk of quitting, compared to 12% when psychological safety is low. The numbers are even more more pronounced for diverse team members, as we might expect.

McKinsey's analysis across industries shows psychological safety is "consistently one of the strongest predictors of team performance, productivity, quality, safety, creativity, and innovation" What is psychological safety? | McKinsey.

What are some signs that you might not have Psychological Safety in your teams?

• People are quiet in work sessions. There isn't enough turn-taking, so not everyone is speaking.
• There is gossip, watercooler talk about the work after the work sessions vs in the work sessions themselves.
• The leader shuts down contrary inputs in private or in public.
• The leader or one peer dominates the discussions.

These behaviours indicate that your team may be operating in the red zone while appearing green on the surface, like the watermelon.

When I was leading Organizational Development for a workgroup of ~110 people, I saw several of these warning signs first-hand. I ran an exercise that helped us to assess our actual psychological safety levels and identify opportunities for improvement.

What I did was:

• Recruited a cross-organizational team of diverse individuals. This is harder than it looks, as you can't go up to people and say "I think you might be diverse, would you like to join this initiative?". What I did was open up the opportunity to the organization and see who stepped forward. Then I nudged a bit.
• Trained the team on what Psychological Safety is. This prepared the group for the next step and also helped initiate the group dynamics for openness.
• Asked each team member to host a discussion about Psychological Safety in their work group. Critically, this was done without the line manager being present, so people could speak freely in case there was a problem.
• One really unexpected (to me at least) output of this exercise was that we found that even talking about Psychological Safety improved Psychological Safety. It was as if the raised awareness conferred more permission to speak up to the reticent and perhaps more self-awareness for those undermining the openness.

As a leader, what can you do to build Psychological Safety in your organization?

Professor Edmondson identifies three key approaches:

• Frame the work as learning
• Acknowledge your own fallibility
• Model curiosity

Let's identify some specific actions springing from that framework that can be deployed on a day-to-day basis.

When someone brings up a concern:

• In the moment: Thank them first, before anything else. Acknowledge their courage in speaking up
• Ask clarifying questions rather than immediately offering solutions or dismissing the issue. "Help me understand..." or "What would good look like?"
• Avoid defensive body language - crossed arms, looking at your phone, or interrupting
  
  

Building psychological safety systematically:

• Model vulnerability yourself - admit when you don't know something or made a mistake. Leaders often think they need to project certainty, but this creates distance
• Ask for feedback regularly, not just during formal reviews. "What's one thing I could do differently as we tackle this?"
• Celebrate intelligent failures - when someone takes a reasonable risk that doesn't pan out, highlight what was learned rather than focusing on the outcome
• Create structured opportunities for dissent. For example, give explicit permission to call out reservations or assign devil's-advocate roles
  

Building your support network:

• Identify allies amongst your peers who can help you to stay accountable and provide feedback on your own leadership approach
• Develop trusted advisors who will tell you difficult truths about how your team really perceives the environment you're creating
• Partner with HR or organizational development to get external perspective on team dynamics you might not see

Building Psychological Safety is one of the most effective investments you can make in your leadership journey and the development of your organization. The good news is that almost anything positive you do will start to have an incremental impact on team performance and retention!

If you recognize any of this from your work teams then let's talk! Reach out via LinkedIn, email or the form below.

Be safe,
Gareth.