Six Misconceptions About Psychological Safety

            In this Harvard Business Review article, Amy Edmondson (Harvard Business School) and Michaela Kerrissey (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) say psychological safety has been widely recognized as a key factor in teams’ creativity, morale, and performance. But a number of distortions and misconceptions have led critics to say it needs to be tossed out as another flawed management fad. Edmondson and Kerrissey address these one at a time: 

• Misconception #1: Psychological safety means being nice. The idea is that you shouldn’t say what you really think unless it’s positive. But safety and comfort are not the same thing. “Wanting to be nice, people avoid being honest and, whether they realize it or not, collude in producing ignorance and mediocrity,” say Edmondson and Kerrissey. “Teams that don’t surface hard truths perform worse than those that do.” Effective teams give permission to be candid, take interpersonal risks, ask questions, disagree, admit mistakes, and distinguish between being nice and being kind. “Nice is the easy way out of a difficult conversation,” say the authors. “Kind is being respectful, caring, and honest.” 
• Misconception #2: Psychological safety means getting your way. A healthcare executive said a colleague didn’t support his idea in a meeting and that made him feel psychologically unsafe. What nonsense, say Edmondson and Kerrissey. Leaders need to hear what people think and not be emotionally fragile. “It’s helpful to think of psychological safety not as a gift for one participant but rather as an environment for the whole team.” Of course leaders shouldn’t tolerate bullying, harassment, disrespect, or unethical conduct. 
• Misconception #3: Psychological safety means job security. When Google laid off 12,000 people in 2023, one employee stood up at a town hall meeting and said this went against the company’s commitment to psychological safety. But that policy didn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be layoffs, say Edmondson and Kerrissey. In fact, by feeling safe to stand up and speak out, the employee was validating the policy.
• Misconception #4: Psychological safety will undermine performance. Some leaders believe embracing psychological safety will make it difficult to address weaknesses and hold people accountable. But this is a false dichotomy, say the authors; top performance requires both high standards and psychological safety. Leaders need to cultivate a climate in which candor is the norm; otherwise, “people hide information to save face or to be agreeable or both. And teams fall easily into groupthink – where members don’t want to disrupt what they erroneously assume is a consensus.” 
• Misconception #5: Psychological safety should be a mandated policy. “We can’t mandate psychological safety any more than we can mandate things like trust and motivation,” say Edmondson and Kerrissey. “You can’t pull a lever and make it happen.” In fact, trying to mandate psychological safety is likely to result in people keeping leaders in the dark about things they don’t want to hear. Psychological safety is built in a group’s interactions, and is fostered when leaders consciously use three tools: messaging honestly about challenges the team faces; modeling being a good listener, asking good questions, and showing that it’s okay not to know all the answers; and mentoring colleagues with feedback on group norms.
• Misconception #6: Psychological safety requires a top-down approach. “It’s true that what leaders do matters,” say Edmondson and Kerrissey. “But ultimately, psychological safety is built by everyone – at all levels… In small but important ways, everyone influences the environment. Anyone can call attention to the need for input or ask questions to draw others out, and anyone can respond to others in productive rather than punitive ways… By showing interest in other people’s ideas and concerns, team members can reinforce their peers’ voices and help establish a productive learning climate.” 

            Edmondson and Kerrissey conclude with suggestions on how to build on these insights to foster and reinforce a team’s psychological safety: 

• Frequently say what your team is trying to accomplish, why it matters, and how everyone plays a key role. 
• Improve the quality of team conversations. “That entails asking good questions, listening intently, and pushing for closure,” they say. 
• Institute structures for sharing reflections and tracking progress. “What matters,” say Edmondson and Kerrissey, “is the discipline of offering honest appraisals of what’s going on with the work (performance against goals) and of the team climate and quality of interactions.” 

 “What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety” by Amy Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey in Harvard Business Review, May/June 2025

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1083 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.