Your Team Is Polite, Not Psychologically Safe
Psychological safety is a term that now appears everywhere in conversations about leadership and culture. It’s one of the defining topics of our time. Rightly so, given its well-researched impact on team performance, innovation, wellbeing and retention, just to name a few!
It’s no wonder countless articles, research studies, leadership programmes and cultural interventions now centre around the concept.
If you are remotely interested in leadership, teams or organisational culture and someone asks you, “Do you want to build psychological safety in your organisation?” or “Is psychological safety important to you?” the answer is probably an immediate yes.
That’s a positive! But what’s concerning is that despite the enthusiasm for the concept, there are still significant misconceptions about what psychological safety actually means in practice.
So let’s begin with a different question.
If we asked you:
“Does your team have a high level of psychological safety?”
What would your answer be?
Now, we’re not actually interested in whether the answer is yes or no. We’re interested in how you arrived at that conclusion. What criteria are you using to make that judgement?
The Misconceptions Around Psychological Safety
Many people instinctively describe psychologically safe teams in ways that sound something like this:
“We all get on really well.”
“Everyone’s collaborative.”
“There’s very little conflict.”
“People enjoy working together.”
“We have fun whilst getting the work done.”
None of those things are inherently negative. But there is also an amber flag hidden within them.
Too often, psychological safety gets translated into something softer and simpler than it really is - being nice to each other, avoiding conflict, creating harmonious meetings where nobody feels uncomfortable.
But some of the politest organisations and teams can, in reality, have extremely low psychological safety. Let that one sink in!
Everyone appears agreeable. The meetings feel calm. Nobody openly disagrees. Yet underneath, people are heavily editing themselves. Important concerns go unsaid. Challenge disappears.
Organisations often drift towards caution and conformity without fully realising it. Decision making narrows to a handful of dominant voices. Innovation slows. People wait to see what is safe before contributing. Meetings become performative rather than generative.
What Psychological Safety Actually Means
Psychological safety is not the absence of tension.
If anything, psychologically safe teams are often willing to enter difficult conversations more readily, not less. The difference is that people trust the conversation enough to stay in it.
Originally defined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson as a shared belief that people can speak up with ideas, concerns, questions or mistakes without fear of embarrassment, rejection or punishment, psychological safety is fundamentally about whether people feel safe enough to take interpersonal risks.
For us, perhaps the simplest way to think about it is this:
Psychological safety is whether people feel safer telling the truth than staying quiet.
Not truth delivered carelessly or aggressively. But the ability to raise concerns, challenge assumptions, admit mistakes, ask difficult questions and think openly together without fearing that doing so will damage your credibility, relationships or place within the group.
What Becomes Possible When People Feel Safe Enough to Speak Up
Why is this something we should aim for?
People ask questions without apologising first. They offer ideas before they are fully formed. They challenge each other’s thinking without disagreement becoming personal. More than the same one or two voices are heard. Different perspectives are explored rather than unconsciously filtered out. Decisions become more co-created, and feedback is reframed as an act of care rather than criticism. This kind of culture turns meetings into forums for collective intelligence rather than arenas for performance.
The energy that would otherwise go into managing hierarchy, politics and self-protection becomes available for collaboration, learning and better thinking instead.
And importantly, this is not separate from performance.
One of the biggest misconceptions around psychological safety is the belief that it lowers standards or weakens accountability. In reality, the highest-performing teams are rarely the ones without tension or disagreement. They are the teams able to hold challenge and connection at the same time.
They can have hard conversations without the whole relationship fracturing underneath it.
The Real Test
So perhaps the most important question is not:
“Does our team get on well?”
But:
Do people in this team feel safe enough to disagree openly?
To challenge ideas without fear?
To admit mistakes early?
To ask difficult questions?
To say what genuinely needs to be said, particularly when it feels uncomfortable?
Because psychological safety is not the absence of tension or conflict. It is whether people feel safe to take interpersonal risks, share ideas, and learn without fear of negative consequences. It’s a shared responsibility and a continuous process, not a static state or a lack of standards.
In your organisation, what feels safer right now:
Telling the truth, or staying quiet?
Ishreen Bradley, Natalie-Anne Rueeck, Nicky Neal-Smith