Psychological safety isn’t warmth…It’s protection for telling the truth
I worked in a team once where everyone was super polite, all our meetings were good and while we spoke to ourselves after, in the actual meetings not many raised their voice. With that said, we were for sure missing deadlines.. but no one wanted to bring it up the executive leadership...
Having nice meetings, where there is no disagreement isn't what psychological safety is about, it isn't warmth... what it should be is protection for telling the truth when it matters.. something our team was not doing
When does being nice becomes a liability?
I had seen the problem months earlier, and knew we would not make the timelines that were promised, but raising it meant challenging the approach in front of senior stakeholders.. and basically in front of their bosses...I knew in that company culture that speaking up would make me as someone who creates friction, who isn't aligned.... and this wasn't the first time I had been labeled as such. .... so I stayed quiet.
When we missed the deadline, the pressure got spicy...but now the stakes for speaking up were even higher.. so no one did!
Three forces that govern safety (my view)
After seeing this happen over and over in that org, and then later as I see it in my consulting work, I started using three regulators to diagnose where safety can break.
1) The leader sets the consequence function: how they respond to voice and errors determines the immediate risk calculation people make.
2) Peers control the social cost: they normalize candor or kill it through everyday reactions, backing people up, showing curiosity, not treating dissent like disloyalty.
3) The system either makes voice work or doesn't: does raising a concern lead to action, or does it disappear? Do people have bandwidth to surface problems, or are they so overloaded that silence becomes efficient?
Leaders can set the tone, but peers and systems decide whether it holds under pressure... yes there can be teams that are safe, even when the system or peers don't support it... but that safety is fragile and can break at any time.
If someone on your team flagged a critical risk right now, what would happen?
-Would a peer back them up, or would they stand alone? -Would the system stay as is and keep moving?
That's where safety lives....in the moments after someone takes a risk...
Would love your thoughts....