In partnership with
SIGNAL OF THE WEEK
Psychological safety is not about making people comfortable. It is about making honesty possible.
Edmondson and Kerrissey write that when psychological safety exists, people believe sharing hard truths is expected. It allows good debates to happen when they are needed. But it does not mean that participants find debates comfortable.
This distinction matters more than most organisations appreciate. A team that never disagrees, never challenges, and never raises the uncomfortable possibility is not a safe team. It is a silent one. The absence of friction is not evidence of safety. It is often evidence of its absence. Real psychological safety is not the condition in which people feel no fear. It is the condition in which they speak despite it.
THE LEADER’S MOMENT
Something has gone quietly wrong with the idea of psychological safety.
It has become, in many organisations, a synonym for niceness. A reason to soften feedback. A justification for avoiding the difficult conversation. A culture where everyone feels good and very little of substance gets said.
This is not psychological safety. It is its opposite.
The leaders I work with who have genuinely built psychologically safe teams are not the most agreeable leaders in the room. They are often the most demanding. They ask harder questions. They expect more honest answers. They create the conditions in which people can tell them things they do not want to hear.
That is the version of psychological safety that changes organisations.
And it is far rarer than the literature suggests.
In this edition of Leaders Shelf we cover
SIGNAL OF THE WEEK
THE LEADER’S MOMENT
THE WORLD OF LEADERSHIP THIS WEEK
INTERPRETATION
BOOKS FROM THE SHELF THAT CLARIFY THE ISSUE
HOT OFF THE SHELF!
LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LEADERS
LEADERSHIP MICRO PRACTICES
FROM THE AUTHOR’S DESK
SOURCES
CLOSING REFLECTION
THE WORLD OF LEADERSHIP THIS WEEK
A brief scan of what shifted in the leadership landscape this week.
McKinsey research finds that only 26% of leaders exhibit workplace behaviours that actively create a sense of psychological safety, despite its widespread recognition as a driver of performance.
Harvard professors Amy Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey identify six persistent misconceptions about psychological safety, including that it means being nice to avoid arguments, that all ideas must be supported, and that it prevents accountability for performance.
Zenger Folkman research across 18,000 employees finds that leaders who demonstrate specific trust and respect behaviours see employee intention to quit drop from 37% to 20%, and willingness to give extra effort nearly double from 23% to 47%.
Boston Consulting Group research across 28,000 professionals in 16 countries finds that when leaders prioritise psychological safety, the effects on retention are substantial, particularly for employees from underrepresented groups.
McKinsey research finds that a positive team climate, in which members value each other's contributions and have genuine input into how work is done, is the single most important factor in determining a team's level of psychological safety.
INTERPRETATION
One of the most persistent confusions I encounter in leadership teams is the belief that psychological safety is a cultural aspiration rather than a behavioural discipline. Leaders speak about wanting to create safety as though it were a feeling they could install by declaring it. As though saying we value psychological safety here were enough to produce it.
It is not. One of the greatest barriers to creating psychological safety is that leaders often misinterpret the concept, confusing it with a lowering of standards. In reality, the opposite is true. Psychological safety raises the standard for what conversations are expected to happen. It does not make things easier. It makes honesty less costly.
Amy Edmondson identifies three core leadership behaviours that create psychological safety: framing work as a learning opportunity rather than a test of competence, inviting participation by asking questions that signal dissent is welcome, and responding productively to feedback even when the news is difficult. None of these behaviours are soft. All of them require significant self-discipline from the leader, particularly the third. How a leader responds to bad news is the single most powerful signal their team receives about whether honesty is actually safe.
What I observe is this: most leaders respond to bad news with a version of problem-solving urgency that, while well-intentioned, communicates to the team that raising problems is costly. The meeting becomes about fixing, not about listening. The person who raised the concern learns that raising concerns leads to more work, more pressure, and less acknowledgement. They do not raise the next one.
Psychological safety enables productive conflict, where team members can surface problems, disagree constructively, and take calculated risks essential for innovation. But productive conflict requires leaders who can sit with discomfort long enough to hear something fully before responding to it. That is a more demanding standard than most leadership development programmes acknowledge.
BOOKS FROM THE SHELF THAT CLARIFY THE ISSUE
Right Kind of Wrong
By Amy Edmondson
Edmondson's more recent work extends the psychological safety framework into the domain of failure and learning. Her argument that there are productive and unproductive kinds of failure, and that leaders must be explicit about which they are responding to, is directly relevant for any leader trying to build a culture where honest conversation about mistakes is genuinely possible rather than merely tolerated.
Radical Candor
By Kim Scott
Scott's framework sits at the precise intersection of psychological safety and high standards. Her core argument, that leaders must care personally and challenge directly at the same time, offers a practical antidote to the two failure modes that most undermine safety: the leader who avoids difficult conversations out of misplaced kindness, and the leader who challenges without the relational foundation that makes challenge feel safe rather than threatening.
The Culture Code
By Daniel Coyle
Coyle's research across some of the world's highest-performing teams, from Navy SEAL units to Pixar, reveals that psychological safety is not built through policy or declaration but through the accumulation of small, specific signals that tell people they belong and their voice matters. His concept of belonging cues, the micro-behaviours that communicate safety without a word being spoken, gives leaders a practical and behavioural lens for understanding how safety is actually built in practice.
HOT OFF THE SHELF
Happiness Habits
Happiness Habits begins with a 2014 emergency room in Chennai. Sriram S, in his thirties, working in a demanding HR leadership role and running on bad sleep, processed food, and suppressed purpose, was convinced he was dying. He survived. What followed was eight years of rigorous personal inquiry that produced this book: a field-tested framework for the urban professional who has built a career and still feels the absence of something essential.
Organised around Seven Quests ranging from emotional mastery and purposeful living to energy management and healing, the book operates as a leadership infrastructure manual. Sriram's core argument is that the professional who cannot regulate their emotional state, manage their energy, or align their daily actions with their stated values is running on borrowed infrastructure. The career holds. The performance holds. But the debt compounds, and eventually it calls.
LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
Two reports worth reading. Two programmes worth knowing.
McKinsey Global Survey - Psychological Safety and the Critical Role of Leadership Development
McKinsey's research, conducted with Amy Edmondson, identifies four specific leadership behaviours most strongly correlated with psychological safety: being available and approachable, being willing to acknowledge one's own fallibility, creating an environment where the team has genuine input into decisions, and behaving in ways that are predictable and consistent. The report translates research into actionable leadership practice and is one of the most practically useful executive references on this topic. Available at mckinsey.com.
Harvard Business Review - What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety (Edmondson and Kerrissey, 2025)
Published in the May/June 2025 issue of Harvard Business Review, this article by Amy Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey directly addresses the six most common misconceptions that have led organisations astray in their pursuit of psychological safety. It is essential reading for any leader who has tried to build safety and found that what they built produced comfort rather than candour. Available at hbr.org.
Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) - Psychological Safety Workshop
CCL's research-based psychological safety workshop is specifically designed to help leaders distinguish between the appearance of safety and its substance. CCL's research across nearly 300 leaders over two and a half years found that teams with high psychological safety reported higher performance and lower interpersonal conflict, while senior leadership teams showed the greatest variability in perceived safety levels, with 62% of senior teams demonstrating significant differences in how safe team members felt. The workshop is available as a facilitated half-day session in-person or virtually. Details at ccl.org.
Potential Project - Compassionate Leadership Programme
The Potential Project, founded by Rasmus Hougaard, offers a leadership programme grounded in the neuroscience of presence, compassion, and psychological safety. Their research consistently shows that leaders who are genuinely present during difficult conversations, rather than distracted or defensive, create measurably higher levels of team safety. For leaders who want to build safety from the inside out rather than through structural intervention alone, this programme offers a distinctive and rigorous approach. Details at potentialproject.com.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LEADERS
Psychological safety is not a mood. It is a behavioural standard that leaders either model consistently or undermine inconsistently. Teams read leader behaviour far more accurately than leaders realise.
The absence of disagreement is not evidence of alignment. It is often evidence of suppression. Leaders who are not hearing challenge, pushback, or uncomfortable questions should ask why, not assume things are going well.
How a leader responds to the first bad piece of news sets the psychological safety standard for the entire team. That response is remembered long after the news itself is forgotten.
Psychological safety and high performance are not in tension. High safety with low standards produces a comfort zone. High standards with low safety produce an anxiety zone. The combination of both is what produces a learning zone, where teams can take the risks that performance requires.
LEADERSHIP MICRO PRACTICES
The next time a team member brings you a problem, resist the impulse to move immediately to solution. Spend the first two minutes simply acknowledging what they have raised and why it matters. The signal this sends is more powerful than the solution that follows.
In your next team meeting, ask a question you genuinely do not know the answer to and make that uncertainty visible. Say: I am not sure about this. What are you seeing? Notice what opens up in the conversation.
At the end of this week, identify the last time someone on your team disagreed with you openly. If you cannot remember, that is the data point worth examining.
FROM THE AUTHOR’S DESK
Marut Bhardwaj - Founder & Curator, Leaders Shelf
The word that I keep returning to when I think about psychological safety is courage.
Not the courage of the leader who declares the team a safe space and moves on. But the courage of the leader who asks a hard question and waits for the honest answer. Who hears something uncomfortable and does not immediately defend, explain, or minimise. Who creates the conditions for honesty by being honest themselves, including about what they do not know and where they have got it wrong.
Psychological safety is not a gift leaders give to their teams. It is a standard leaders set through the quality of their own behaviour. And that standard, once set, becomes the culture.
The question worth sitting with this week is not: do my people feel safe? It is: have I given them genuine evidence that honesty is welcome here?
SOURCES
McKinsey and Company. Psychological Safety and the Critical Role of Leadership Development. McKinsey Global Survey, 2021. mckinsey.com
Edmondson, Amy and Kerrissey, Michaela. What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety. Harvard Business Review, May/June 2025. hbr.org
Zenger Folkman. Research: What Leaders Do to Create Psychological Safety. zengerfolkman.com, 2025.
Boston Consulting Group. Psychological Safety and Retention Research. BCG, 2025.
Center for Creative Leadership. Psychological Safety Workshop Research. CCL, 2025. ccl.org
Potential Project. Compassionate Leadership Programme. potentialproject.com
Edmondson, Amy. Right Kind of Wrong. Atria Books, 2023.
Scott, Kim. Radical Candor. St. Martin's Press, 2017.
Coyle, Daniel. The Culture Code. Bantam Books, 2018.
CLOSING REFLECTION
Psychological safety does not feel like comfort.
It feels like the moment someone says the thing
that needed to be said,
in the room where it needed to be said,
to the person who needed to hear it.
And the person who needed to hear it
did not flinch.
That is the environment leaders build.
One response at a time
If this brief helped you see the leadership landscape more clearly, subscribe to Leaders Shelf for weekly leadership intelligence drawn from books, research, and real leadership signals.
Leaders Shelf
Published weekly. Curated by Marut Bhardwaj.