Latest news with #AmyEdmondson
Forbes
2 days ago
- General
- Forbes
Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsolete—By Solving The Wrong Problem
Psychological safety, problems at work, mistake, fatigue, dismissal, stress and overwork. Two months ago, Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson and associate professor Michaela J. Kerrissey wrote an eloquent article in the May-June issue of Harvard Business Review., 'What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety.' A Massive Effort To Enhance Psychological Safety With Little Effect 'Psychological safety' was once an obscure term in psychology and management research. Professor Edmondson changed all that with her best-selling book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (2017) HBRP. According to her recent article, 'Today the concept is downright popular. Countless managers, consultants, and training companies have worked hard to create psychologically safe workplaces, and thousands of articles have been devoted to the topic.' In 2017, the need for the effort was obvious: 'A 2017 Gallup poll found that only 3 in 10 employees strongly agree with the statement that their opinions count at work.' Yet today, 8 years later, those Gallup numbers have hardly budged. What went wrong? According to the 2025 article, 'As the popularity of psychological safety has grown, so too have misconceptions about it.' The authors identify six common misperceptions: 'Psychological safety means being nice; it means getting your way; it means job security; it requires a trade-off with performance; it's a policy; and it requires a top-down approach.' They explain why each misperception gets in the way and give advice on how to counter it. The Key Problem: What Is The Problem? What is the problem that this massive effort is trying to solve? One useful insight sometimes (unreliably) attributed to Albert Einstein is to rethink fundamentals. 'If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend the first 55 minutes defining the problem and the last five minutes solving it." The effort on psychological safety may be doing the opposite. Thus, a closer look at the lack of progress on enhancing psychological safety points to another possible cause: a focus of the effort on the team level of the firm. As Professor Edmondson's 2017 book stated, 'My field-based research has primarily focused on groups and teams, because that's how most work gets done.' So too, the 2025 article focuses almost exclusively on leaders trying to enhance psychological safety at the team level. The team level may be where most of the work gets done, but not necessarily where most of the problems are caused. The Real Problem Behind Lack Of Psychological Safety Guess what? In many other aspects of management, the principal problem today is not at the team level, and rather in the way the whole organization is run. For the last half-century, the central problem addressed by management was how to cut costs so as to maximize shareholder value and enhance bonuses for the executives. That was the official position of the U.S. Business Roundtable for several decades. Business schools still teach it. Most of the processes, systems, and mindsets that support it are still in place in many big firms. So that is the problem that managers are required to address, whether they agree with it or not. Is it any wonder that there is a lack of psychological safety in such settings? The Shift From Cutting Costs To Creating Value For Customers The good news is that in a smaller group of public firms—perhaps 20% of public companies-- the primary dynamic of a business has shifted from cutting costs and extracting value to creating more value for customers. Value-creating enterprises emerged from the combination of two elements: first, entrepreneurs began using digital technology and AI to deliver exponentially more value than traditionally-managed firms; and second, digital technology gave customers the power to demand more value from businesses. The killer insight: value-creating enterprises not only satisfy customers: they make much more money than firms focused on making money. Workplaces devoted to creating value for customers are also likely to be more congenial as workplaces than those focused on extracting value from customers and boosting executive bonuses. Meanwhile, profit-seeking firms that still focus primarily on improving efficiency and cost-cutting are generating below-average value and are having difficulty in surviving. Two-thirds of the famous blue-chip firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Average are now performing below average (See the table below). The performance problems that these firms are facing of course aggravates even further the problem of workplace psychological safety, as workers in those firms are likely to be blamed for shortfalls in performance. Thus, many of the managers in struggling efforts to enhance psychological safety may be trying to solve the wrong problem. If they shifted the focus of their efforts to updating the goal of their firms and creating more value for their customers, their workplaces could transition from the dispiriting goal of extracting value from customers to the potentially inspiring purpose of creating value for them. And read also Why Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsolete—It's Not Rocket Science—Or AI Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsolete: Master Value Creation Now 5-Year Total Returns of firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Average as of July 2025
Forbes
6 days ago
- General
- Forbes
Getting To The Heart Of Psychological Safety Through Character
Psychological safety emanates from interactions which reflect character I have been a fan of Amy Edmondson's pioneering work on psychological safety since we met as young scholars at an organizational learning conference decades ago. While my interests lay in the relationship between organizational learning and strategic renewal, she was tapping into a core underpinning of organizational learning: whether individuals and teams could engage in open and candid dialogue, feel safe speaking up, taking risks, and making mistakes. The benefits of psychological safety have been well-documented, as revealed by Project Aristotle, which found a correlation with a 43% increase in team performance, including a 19% increase in productivity, 31% more innovation, 27% lower employee turnover, and 3.6 times more engagement. Although the benefits of psychological safety are well-documented, the factors that contribute to it have been more elusive. Forbes Council Member Jeff Williams provides six practical steps to creating a psychologically safe environment, which echo many common prescriptions, including diagnosing where you stand, reviewing your policies and protocols, modeling psychologically safe behaviors, creating an organization-wide safety culture, discussing it, and holding check-ins. Although these are practical insights, there is a need to get to the heart of psychological safety, to explore why it has been so challenging for many organizations. Research at the Ivey Business School has revealed that the difference between weak and strong leader character is correlated with a 16% increase in psychological safety and an 18% increase in employee voice. Leader character may well be the bedrock for psychological safety. There are three key steps to unlock the potential character brings to enable psychological safety. Step 1 – Understand How Character Impacts Psychological Safety What has been overlooked in psychological safety is how character influences it. Because people have not understood what character is and how it can manifest in deficient and excess states, we have neglected a key aspect of both the diagnosis and the remedy. The 11 dimensions of character can manifest in deficient and excess states as shown in Table 1. Since people tend to judge their behaviors based on intention, while others judge them on their observable behaviors, they often fail to recognize that their character strengths are manifesting as excess vices, as shown in the right-hand column. Tasha Eurich's findings highlight the challenges associated with self-awareness, revealing that 95% of people believe they are self-aware, yet only 10-15% are. Table 1 - Virtues and Vices In our character workshops, we ask participants to describe leaders who exhibit strong integrity and drive but low humility and humanity. Words like bully, arrogant, tyrant, and jerk often top the list. By examining the excess vice states of drive and integrity in Table 1, you can see why. When someone has high drive and integrity that are not balanced by other character dimensions, these strengths can become dictatorial, forceful, uncompromising, belligerent, rigid, and dogmatic, among others. Because people often lack self-awareness and don't intend to behave in this way, such behavior becomes a significant blind spot for them. Let's connect the dots to psychological safety. When we ask people to describe what it feels like to work for or with someone who has these character imbalances, the responses are consistent, and, unfortunately, many have experienced it. Weaknesses such as humility and humanity, as shown in the left column of Table 1, offer clues. These deficient traits of humanity and humility are reflected in words like uncaring, vindictive, aloof, disinterested, and disrespectful. Combined with the excess vices of high drive and integrity, the person becomes challenging to work with and for. Returning to the core aspects of psychological safety, there is little chance of having open and honest dialogue, feeling safe to speak up, take risks, and make mistakes. In fact, research at the Ivey Business School shows an 18% gap between individuals with weak and strong character in terms of employee voice, indicating that people are less likely to engage when character is weak. Although Table 1 presents the character dimensions in list form, the behaviors in the middle column should be visualized as a wheel with the judgment dimension at the center. This is because judgment, what Aristotle called 'practical wisdom,' has its own set of behaviors and also plays a special role in regulating all character behaviors. We call this character-based judgment. There is no doubt that the words in the left and right-hand columns are strong. They are meant to leave no doubt that the deficient and excess states are problematic and undesirable. Because people often struggle to see themselves as anything other than their good intentions portrayed in the middle column, we ask them to imagine whether their typical lean is to the left or the right. For example, I am a very purposeful person (behavior associated with transcendence). It would be rare for me to be directionless, so my miss is not on the left side. It suggests my miss is to the right - being fixated. Although I would never describe myself as being fixated, my character development has helped me see that if others do not observe strengths in other dimensions, such as collaboration (being open-minded and flexible) and temperance (being patient and calm), they will view my purposive behavior in a more fixated way. Importantly, for me to have confidence in my character-based judgment, I need to ensure that I am strengthening my weaker character behaviors. This leads to the need for character development. Character imbalances not only influence individual and collective judgment but also impact individual well-being, often in distinct ways. For example, someone with high drive and low temperance may experience burnout arising from a relentless pursuit of perfection. In contrast, someone with high collaboration and low integrity may find that they continue to prioritize the needs of others over their own. Overall, there is reason to develop character beyond enhancing psychological safety. Research at the Ivey Business School reveals that the difference between weak and strong character is associated with an 8% difference in well-being, a 10% difference in resilience and job satisfaction, and a 14% difference in leader effectiveness. Step 2 – Develop Character To Increase Psychological Safety Unlike personality, which is considered semi-stable with no associated development paradigm, character behaviors are habits that can be developed but can also erode. Without a clear understanding of what character is and how it manifests in deficient and excessive states, it is understandable that most people will have weaknesses and imbalances. When it comes to psychological safety, it is not simply a matter of assessing whether an environment is psychologically safe, but diagnosing imbalances in individual character that contribute to it. In 'Towards a Model of Leader Character Development: Insights From Anatomy and Music Therapy,' co-authored with Corey Crossan and Cassie Ellis, we describe five levels of leader character development, with Level 1 being the ability to discover and assess one's character and that of others. Assessments such as the self and 360-degree Leader Character Insight Assessment and the VIA Character Strengths Survey are helpful tools. In Level 2, we describe how character can be activated through priming, reminding, and reinforcement, using music as an example. We have created a Spotify playlist featuring songs for each of the 11 dimensions, as suggested by workshop participants. There are other practical reminders, such as images and poems, and many creative ways people have found, including how Corey Crossan paints her nails in the corresponding colour of the character dimension in Table 1 that she is exercising. The value of understanding how to activate a dimension of character is to consider what it may take at any moment to speak up when it doesn't feel psychologically safe. For example, a leader may need to activate their humanity, humility, and collaboration to encourage others that it is safe to speak up. I learned this lesson when a colleague told me I was intimidating, after a meeting in which I had not even spoken. Because I saw myself as collegial and cooperative, it turns out that I lacked the self-awareness to realize that someone might view me as intimidating. Having witnessed the nodding heads of many executives when I share this story, it revealed to me how, with some awareness and capacity to activate character, we can shift these moments. I realized I not only need to activate collaboration, humanity, and humility, but I also need to strengthen them. The most challenging work arises in Level 3, where daily practice is required to strengthen a behavior. With 11 character dimensions and 62 associated behaviors, a daily practice is incredibly challenging. I realized my daily yoga practice was an essential way for me to exercise becoming more patient and calm (behaviors associated with the temperance dimension). Strengthening my temperance has been another dimension that helps to ensure my other strengths in transcendence, drive, courage, and judgment do not manifest as excess vices and undermine psychological safety. For example, my passionate behavior (transcendence) and decisiveness (judgment), when not supported by strong temperance, can silence others. Where I see my decisiveness as the beginning of the conversation, others can experience it as the end of the conversation. One of the reasons Corey Crossan and I created the Virtuosity character development mobile app was to curate a set of daily exercises for the 62 behaviors that comprise the Virtuosity character development system. Level 4 is a natural extension of Level 3 because it considers how the development of a behavior depends on and influences the character behaviors of others. In my own experience, once I discovered how my patience and calm depended on strengthening other dimensions of character, such as humanity, humility, collaboration, and transcendence, I began to put less pressure on my temperance. Essentially, I became less agitated and frustrated with others and began to see different possibilities. One of the reasons that people question character is that most of us don't imagine that character development needs to hold up under every context, which is Level 5. Our strength of character needs to be reliable in both crisis and calm, personally and professionally. There is plenty of research in sociology pointing to how context shapes action, such as the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, where students who had been randomly assigned to roles as guards began to abuse those in the role of prisoners within only five days. However, context need not be that dramatic to influence character. Consider how many people blame compensation and reward systems in organizations for their behavior. In character workshops, the proverbial light bulb goes on when they consider what that reveals about character. Connecting the development of character to psychological safety, it is not simply that individuals can strengthen their character to reap the benefits associated with the quality of conversation that enables candid dialogue and risk-taking, but character development also demands that individuals begin to transform the context within which they operate, which may undermine psychological safety. Step 3 - Rely on Character to Cultivate a Psychologically Safe Context In 'Making Leader Character Your Competitive Edge,' published in MIT Sloan, Bill Furlong, Rob Austin, and I describe that character is embedded in the architecture of the organization. This means that creating the conditions for psychological safety isn't just about interactions between people, but also the context that either enables or hinders it. Reflecting on Level 5 of character development, context can often undermine character. However, too often, the blame for the lack of psychological safety is placed on the context, such as what gets rewarded or punished in organizations. For example, reward systems often overweight drive and underweight temperance, with a focus on results at any cost. And because people are often selected and promoted based on this likeness, a vicious cycle emerges where the context undermines character and character undermines context – people cut corners. Few will speak up to question decisions. It is not simply about whether there is psychological safety to do so, but whether they possess the strength in integrity, justice, and accountability to speak up. The anatomy of failure in every organization, whether it be Enron, Wells Fargo, Volkswagen, or Boeing, is a system that embodies imbalances of character as I described in my Forbes article 'Lessons From Boeing on Elevating Character Alongside Competence.' When individuals and systems exhibit character imbalances, the organizational culture often reflects those imbalances. In my Forbes article, 'Seeing How Character Eats Culture For Breakfast,' I make the point that culture will reflect the character of its members. Furthermore, leaders with strong character will ensure that the organization's systems and processes reflect strong character. Psychological safety is vital, but it can be challenging to achieve. Many troublesome issues that weaken psychological safety stem from character imbalances. The good news is that the solution is straightforward. Character is the key missing element. Since character can be assessed, developed, and embedded in organizations, it can be measured and managed. Addressing psychological safety truly depends on character development, particularly in leaders who set the tone and shape the organizational culture.
New York Times
15-07-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Why Amanda Anisimova's emotional post-match interview was a masterclass in handling failure
Editor's note: This story is a part of Peak, The Athletic's desk covering leadership, personal development and success through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here. On Saturday at Wimbledon, it took 57 minutes for Amanda Anisimova to lose the women's final, a painful 6-0, 6-0 drubbing at the hands of Iga Świątek. It took her just more than five minutes — and a few tears — to reframe her failure into something totally different. Advertisement The video of Anisimova's post-match remarks was soon one of the indelible moments from Wimbledon, a moment of humanity after a brutal loss. Needing just one question, Anisimova, a 23-year-old American, fought back tears, graciously complimented her opponent, thanked the fans — and apologized, too — and then broke down as she praised her mother, who had nurtured and supported her after the sudden death of her father in 2019 and during an eight-month sabbatical from tennis that began in 2023. 'I know I didn't have enough today, but I'm going to keep putting in the work,' Anisimova said, wiping tears from her cheek. 'I always believe in myself so I hope to be back here again one day.' It was easy to see why the moment went viral. To tennis fans, it was a heart-wrenching display, the cruelties of the sport laid bare. To Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, it was something more: a masterclass in failure. That might sound harsh. It's not supposed to be. Edmondson is an academic with a particular interest in human failures. Namely, she has a strong belief that we all could benefit from failing a lot more. So when she watched Anisimova's speech, she saw an example of an argument she presented in her 2023 book, 'Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.' 'It was courageous,' Edmondson said. 'It was honest, and then you realize how compelling it is and how few people truly take that opportunity to be honest and vulnerable and generous after a devastating failure.' Edmondson's argument stems from a simple belief: The best companies fail more, not less. 'The most successful or high-performance organizations are not the ones that never fail,' she says. 'They're the ones that catch and correct. And they're willing to take risks in new territory in ways that often lead to success — but often don't.' Advertisement Edmondson believes most human failure can be separated into three archetypes. There is basic failure, which often amounts to simple error. You send an email to the wrong person at work, or type the wrong number in an expense report. There is also complex failure, when more complicated systems, like supply chains during a pandemic, fail due to multiple causes. Both types — basic and complex — can be corrected. It's the third type of failure, which Edmondson labels 'intelligent failure,' that is most beneficial, leading to knowledge, discovery and growth. To qualify, Edmondson offers four criteria: You are operating in new territory, pursuing a goal, testing a hypothesis, and you have thoughtfully considered the risks. 'When a scientist has a good hypothesis and she tests it and it's wrong, that's not bad,' Edmondson says. 'It's one step closer to a game-changing discovery.' The most innovative companies, Edmondson says, take a similar approach. Athletes tend to understand this dynamic better than most. Jannik Sinner lost to Carlos Alcaraz in a five-set epic at the French Open this year, then pointed to the value of that defeat after beating Alcaraz at Wimbledon on Sunday. 'You just have to understand what you did wrong and you have to work on that,' Sinner said. Pete Sampras once called his loss to Stefan Edberg in the 1992 U.S. Open one of the most important moments of his career. After winning the first set 6-3, Sampras dropped the second set 6-4 and lost a tiebreaker in the third, at which point his head dropped and his whole demeanor changed. Edberg knew then he had him beat. 'I knew deep down in my heart that I didn't fight that hard,' Sampras later said. 'I didn't really want it enough at that time. And that's when things changed. When I lost the match, it bothered me, it irked me. I feel like I packed it in. I promised myself I would never let that happen again. And so I look at that match as the pivotal match of my career – and it was a loss.' Advertisement Sampras went on to win 13 more majors over the next decade. For those of us who are not elite athletes, Edmondson believes the stomach for embracing failure can be weaker. Most people are better at evaluating the failures of others than our own. And whether a failure is basic, complex or intelligent, we need to respond to them with the same emotions. 'We have to learn to be OK with failures in new territory,' Edmondson says. It's not easy, but there are ways to improve. Edmondson believes people should always consider the 'true rational stakes' of a situation, and then code it as such. Anisimova, for instance, lost out on money and career advancement by losing on Saturday, but it was still just a tennis match. Anisimova was never able to solve Świątek on the court. She became just the second woman ever to lose a grand slam final 6-0, 6-0, and after the match, Anisimova outlined what had gone wrong. She felt a little fatigued after besting Aryna Sabalenka in the heat two days earlier. She struggled to stay composed. 'I felt frozen there with my nerves,' she said. Then she did something important and powerful: She reframed the loss as an opportunity for growth, taking solace in a quote from the author Marianne Williamson: 'Pain can burn you up and destroy you, or burn you up and redeem you.' 'I told myself, 'I'll definitely come out stronger after this,'' she said. 'I mean, that's not an easy thing to go through, losing 0-0 in a Grand Slam final. If anything, I can look at it as a positive.'
Fast Company
02-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
High-performing teams all have this one thing in common
As a manager, it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind of fixing processes, eliminating bottlenecks, and streamlining workflows. We focus on reducing friction—the things that get in the way of people doing their best work. And sure, that's important. But here's the thing: Reducing fear is just as, if not more, important. A comprehensive two-year study by Google identified psychological safety as the most important factor in high-performing teams. This environment allows team members to take risks and be vulnerable without fear of negative consequences. Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson emphasizes that psychological safety enables employees to speak up, make mistakes, and learn from them, which is essential for innovation and growth. Let's face it. The best processes in the world won't help much if your team is afraid to speak up, take risks, or challenge the status quo. Fear can stunt creativity, shut down communication, and make people avoid the very risks that lead to growth. So, as leaders, we need to think beyond just fixing processes. We need to also focus on creating an environment where people feel safe and confident enough to act—even if it means making a mistake along the way. Why Fear Matters More Than You Think Fear is a powerful force. It can make people double-check their work, avoid taking risks, and be extra cautious. But when fear becomes the driving force behind decisions, it also leads to silence. When people are afraid to speak up, they hold back good ideas, overlook problems, and avoid making necessary changes. Neuroscience backs this up. When we experience fear, our brains go into 'fight or flight' mode, which limits our ability to think clearly and make rational decisions. When we're scared, we become reactive instead of proactive. This is why a culture of fear isn't just uncomfortable—it's downright unproductive. As a leader, it's your job to create a culture where people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and challenge the status quo. That's why reducing fear should go hand in hand with reducing friction. Fixing Processes Doesn't Fix Everything Let's look at a real-world example: the United States Postal Service. In the early 2000s, the USPS faced a significant drop in productivity, rising operational costs, and declining employee morale. To address these issues, management introduced new technology, upgraded processes, and streamlined workflows to improve efficiency and reduce errors. They invested in automated sorting systems and revamped scheduling to make operations run more smoothly. However, despite these process improvements, the results weren't as dramatic as expected. Productivity wasn't increasing, and employees still seemed disengaged. The reason? Fear was still very much present in the workplace. Employees were afraid to speak up or share concerns about the new processes. If workers noticed something wrong with the new systems or had ideas to improve efficiency, they didn't feel comfortable offering suggestions or challenging the way things were done. This is a perfect example of how reducing friction—by fixing processes—didn't have the full impact it could have had because fear was still holding back the team. How could USPS have tackled both issues at once? They could have started by actively working to reduce fear within the organization. Management needed to create an environment where employees felt safe to make mistakes, raise issues, and offer constructive feedback. Employees who feel safe and supported are more likely to speak up when something's not working and more likely to suggest creative solutions. They become partners in progress rather than passive participants. Balancing Both: Reducing Friction and Fear SEB, a Nordic financial services group, implemented a five-month training program focusing on psychological safety and perspective-taking for its investment banking leadership team. This initiative aimed to overcome transformation challenges and foster open communication. As a result, the team achieved revenues 25% above their annual targets in a strategically important market segment. A multi-industry case study followed businesses whose team members were hesitant to voice concerns. All participants implemented psychological safety workshops emphasizing active listening and constructive feedback. This initiative led to improved conflict resolution, enhanced communication, and increased productivity, positively impacting the company's bottom line. To be an effective leader, you can't just focus on fixing processes. That's a quick fix, but it doesn't address the deeper issues that impact team dynamics. Reducing friction is important, yes. But reducing fear is essential if you want to create a truly high-performing, innovative, and engaged team. Simon Brown, global learning and development leader at EY, has spent years building critical skills and behaviors in high-performing teams. He shares: 'You can't automate courage. While systems help things run smoothly, it's the culture that inspires people to run toward challenges instead of away from them.' Real-world application So, what does this balance look like in practice? • Reduce friction: Simplify workflows, cut out unnecessary steps, and ensure your team has the tools and resources they need to do their jobs efficiently. • Reduce fear: Foster a culture of psychological safety, where mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, where feedback is welcomed (not feared), and where team members feel confident enough to take risks and innovate. • You/me/we: Adopt a decision-making framework that defines what decisions employees can make on their own without fear or reprisal. This cuts down on back-and-forth decision-making bottlenecks and helps people feel more empowered in their roles. • Model a hands-off approach: Is your leadership decreasing the number of mandatory meetings but still attending themselves? Making outdated rules 'optional' instead of obsolete? Without buy-in from the top, team members will be too afraid to take action on simplification initiatives that can free up time and decrease unnecessary mental distress. Leadership isn't just about improving processes—it's about improving people's ability to act within those processes. If you want your team to truly thrive, you've got to focus on both reducing friction and reducing fear. When you do, you'll create an environment where people feel empowered to make decisions, try new things, and speak up when something's not working. That's when the real magic happens.
Forbes
20-05-2025
- Health
- Forbes
Why Psychological Safety Drives Performance In High-Stakes Industries
LONDON - NOVEMBER 03: Production staff. (Photo by) To call psychological safety a strategic imperative across industries is no exaggeration. It is a proven driver of high-functioning teams, yet it remains one of the most misunderstood concepts. In complex, high-reliability sectors like healthcare and technology, where outcomes hinge on rapid decision-making, cross-disciplinary coordination and adaptive learning, creating an environment where ideas and people feel safe to speak, challenge and contribute is vital to cultivating a resilient and high-performing culture. Peer-reviewed studies consistently link psychological safety to greater innovation, more effective leadership, enhanced collaboration and measurable improvements in team performance. But widespread misconceptions often dilute its impact, framing it as comfort over honesty or consensus over constructive tension. This article examines the influence, common misconceptions and high-stakes applications of psychological safety, particularly within the evolving landscapes of healthcare, technology and modern organizational leadership. Psychological safety refers to an individual's perception of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks in a particular context, such as the workplace. It is the belief that one can speak up, offer ideas, ask questions or admit mistakes without fear of punishment or shame. This concept, introduced by Amy Edmondson in 1999, has since been recognized as a cornerstone of effective team dynamics across multiple industry sectors. A prevalent misinterpretation is equating psychological safety with comfort or the absence of conflict. However, proper psychological safety fosters an environment where challenging the status quo and engaging in constructive dissent are not only accepted but encouraged. It's not about creating a conflict-free zone, but about ensuring that team members and employees feel secure enough to express diverse viewpoints and take calculated risks. As a health journalist, I've spent years tracing the ripple effects of emotional environments on the workplace. What I've learned is this: Psychological safety is a significant multiplier of well-being. When people feel unsafe expressing themselves, asking for help or communicating discomfort, the stress follows them into the other areas of their lives; it settles in the nervous system and accumulates gradually over time. The body and mind respond to social threats in the same way they respond to physical threats. It spikes cortisol, disrupts sleep, suppresses immune function and erodes the capacity for recovery, emotional resilience and self-regulation. Research from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2022) suggests that low levels of psychological safety in the workplace are significantly associated with increased rates of burnout, anxiety and emotional exhaustion, particularly among healthcare workers and employees in high-demand industries. Conversely, when psychological safety is present, teams perform and function more effectively. Individuals report increased levels of self-efficacy, greater emotional resilience and improved job satisfaction. Over time, this translates into better health and well-being outcomes, including lower inflammation, a more stable mood, enhanced relationships and a greater ability to self-regulate under pressure. If we want to future-proof our workforces and protect collective mental health, psychological safety is key in a world that increasingly runs on speed, precision, and pressure. The most humane and high-performing environments will be the ones that make it safe to be human. A study published in Frontiers in Psychology emphasized that healthcare professionals who feel psychologically safe are more likely to voice concerns, ask questions and deliver feedback, leading to improved patient safety and overall care quality. Further, fostering psychological safety can mitigate burnout and enhance job satisfaction among healthcare workers. In the fast-paced tech industry, psychological safety is equally vital. Research indicates that teams with high psychological safety are more innovative, as members feel empowered to share ideas and admit mistakes without fear of retribution. An analysis in PLOS ONE found that psychological safety has a positive influence on employee innovative performance through enhanced communication behaviors. While psychological safety flourishes within teams, its foundation is built by leadership. Business leaders are more than strategic architects; they are cultural stewards. Their behaviors set the tone for what is spoken, what is silenced and how people relate to risk. In psychologically safe environments, for instance, leaders model intellectual humility and leadership competency by inviting dissent, acknowledging uncertainty and rewarding sincerity, even when their ideas can be challenged. A 2023 study in the European Management Journal suggested that leaders who display transformational and servant leadership qualities, such as empathy, empowerment and active listening, inspired their followers to lead themselves. Conversely, fear-based leadership and micro-management can be correlated with team withdrawal, silence and reduced innovation. For executives navigating high-pressure sectors such as healthcare and technology, the implications are profound. When team members feel secure enough to challenge inadequate systems, report ethical concerns or propose unconventional ideas, organizations become more agile, transparent and resilient. And the benefits aren't abstract. Companies that prioritize psychological safety report lower turnover, faster problem-solving and stronger employee engagement. For example, Google's landmark Project Aristotle study on effective teams implied that psychological safety was the most critical factor driving team performance, surpassing expertise, intelligence or even tenure. In brief, psychological safety encompasses not only how people feel and behave, but also how they interact with others. It's about how leaders lead and inspire others to do the same within their organization while welcoming their teams' voices, input and feedback. Psychological safety is a biological, emotional and cultural imperative. In industries like healthcare and technology, where lives are saved and systems are built in real-time, the ability to speak up without fear is a key difference between innovation and inertia, between resilience and risk. And the data is clear: teams that feel safe to share unpolished ideas, ask questions and admit mistakes outperform those that don't. They adapt faster. They solve more complex problems. They build stronger cultures of trust where performance doesn't come at the expense of human fulfillment. Ultimately, leaders who cultivate psychological safety are raising the bar for relational excellence. They understand that creativity is fragile, feedback is transformational and psychological safety is the fertile soil in which both flourish. Whether you're a hospital executive, a tech founder, or a team lead navigating daily pressures, the boldest act of leadership today may be about listening more deeply, inviting more voices and making it safe to fail forward. Because the future of work and well-being depends not only on what we build, but also on how bravely we allow others to co-create it with us.
