In 2012, Google began its study of 180 teams for over two years aimed to identify the patterns and behaviours within teams that make them effective.
They did this by analysing everything from individual IQ scores to personality types to work experience. They wanted to crack the code on what makes these teams exceptional.
However, the answer wasn't what they expected.
They had the smartest people in the room, but it wasn’t about that. It wasn't even about the perfectly balanced personality types or about their experience levels.
The number one predictor of the team's performance was Psychological Safety.
Teams with high psychological safety outperformed their peers on every metric that mattered. Meanwhile, teams packed with brilliant individuals but lacking psychological safety? They consistently underperformed.
This manifests glaringly in today’s workplace, where most organisations are still optimising for the wrong things.
They're hiring for pedigree, crafting perfect team compositions on paper and investing in the latest productivity tools, all while ignoring the invisible force that determines whether those investments pay off.
What Building Psychological Safety Actually Means (And What It Doesn't)
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who pioneered research on psychological safety, defines it as "a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes."
Building Psychological Safety in teams is about creating an environment where people can be honest, challenge ideas, admit errors and take interpersonal risks without fear of embarrassment or retaliation.
Think about the last time you had a concern at work but didn't voice it.
Maybe you spotted a potential flaw in a project plan. Maybe you had a question that felt too basic to ask. Maybe you disagreed with a decision but stayed quiet.
Why didn't you speak up?
If you're honest, it probably came down to fear. Fear of looking incompetent. Fear of being seen as difficult. Fear of negative consequences.
Now multiply that moment by every person on your team, every day.
That's the invisible tax of low psychological safety.
The same principle applies everywhere. When people can't speak up, organisations bleed value in ways that never show up on a spreadsheet.
Now let's flip the script.
What happens when teams get psychological safety right?
Research conducted by Harvard Business Review reveals that teams with high psychological safety generate 50% more innovative ideas than those without it.
But beyond the numbers, something more fundamental shifts.
When psychological safety is present, teams unlock their collective intelligence. Information flows freely. People build on each other's ideas rather than competing.
Diverse perspectives actually get heard instead of suppressed.
Think about the best team you've ever been part of. The one where work felt energising rather than draining. Where meetings were actually productive. Where you did your best work.
Chances are, that team had high psychological safety, even if you didn't have a name for it at the time.
You could disagree without it becoming personal. You could admit confusion without feeling stupid. You could try new approaches without fear of being crucified if they failed.
That's not a happy accident. It's a deliberate culture that someone built.
The Five Pillars of Psychological Safety
So how do you actually build psychological saftey in team?
safety
Psychological safety doesn't emerge from a single initiative or a company values poster. It's constructed through consistent behaviours across five key areas:
1. Leader Vulnerability
It starts at the top, and it starts with admitting imperfection.
Leaders who model vulnerability give everyone else permission to be human. When a manager says "I don't know" or "I made a mistake" or "I need help understanding this," they signal that these behaviours are acceptable.
This is counterintuitive for many leaders. We're taught to project confidence and competence at all times. But research shows that leaders who acknowledge their own limitations actually increase their team's psychological safety and, paradoxically, their credibility.
Start your next difficult conversation with: "I might be completely wrong about this, and I need your honest input." That simple phrase might change the entire dynamic.
2. Curious Response to Failure
Here's where most organisations get it wrong.
When something goes wrong, the instinctive reaction is to find who's responsible and ensure it never happens again.
Psychologically safe teams do something different. They get curious.
Instead of ‘Who screwed this up?’ they ask ‘What can we learn from this?’
It might bring about solutions for improving communication or identifying parts of a process that don’t work.
Instead of rushing to fix and move on, they pause to understand root causes.
Instead of punishing failure, they distinguish between good-faith errors (which should be learning opportunities) and negligence (which requires different action).
This doesn't mean eliminating accountability. It means recognising that in complex work, failure is information and treating it as such creates better outcomes than fear-based responses.
3. Active Invitation of Dissent
Psychological safety isn't passive. You can't just ‘not punish’ people for speaking up.
You have to actively invite it.
High-performing teams deliberately seek out dissenting opinions. They ask, "What concerns haven't we discussed?" and "What am I missing?".
Leaders explicitly thank people for raising uncomfortable points.
At Bridgewater Associates, Ray Dalio built an entire culture around what he calls ‘radical transparency’ – the active pursuit of honest feedback and dissenting views. While his approach is extreme, the principle matters: psychological safety requires deliberately creating space for disagreement.
The teams that do this best have norms around constructive challenge. They might use techniques like ‘Red Team’ exercises, where someone explicitly argues against a decision. Or they might reserve time in meetings specifically for concerns and objections.
4. Inclusivity of Voice
Whose ideas get heard in your meetings?
If you're honest, it's probably the same few people every time. The extroverts.
The people who've been around longest.
Psychological safety requires actively ensuring all voices matter, not just the loud ones.
This means noticing who isn't speaking and inviting their input. It means creating multiple channels for contribution because not everyone processes verbally in meetings. It means paying attention to whose ideas get attributed and built upon.
Research on diversity shows that diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones only when psychological safety is present. Without it, diverse perspectives become a source of conflict rather than a competitive advantage.
5. Structural Guardrails
Finally, psychological safety needs infrastructure.
That means processes for anonymous feedback when needed. Clear escalation paths for concerns. Transparent decision-making criteria. Post-mortems that focus on systems, not scapegoats.
It means asking "What would someone need to believe to speak up here?" and then building structures that support those beliefs.
The best teams I've seen embed psychological safety into their rituals. Sprint retrospectives that start with "What's one thing I failed at this week?" Team agreements that explicitly address how conflict will be handled. Regular pulse checks on team health, not just project health.
Building psychological safety starts with a single conversation.
A conversation between a leader and their team about how they want to work together.
Here's what that conversation might sound like:
"I want us to do our best work together. That means I need your honest input – especially when you disagree with me or see problems I'm missing. I know that can feel risky, so I'm committing to responding to your concerns with curiosity, not defensiveness. If I mess that up, please call me out. Let's agree that in this team, speaking up is valued, not punished."
Simple. Direct. Honest.
Then comes the hard part: following through.
The first time someone challenges you in a meeting, how you respond will matter more than a hundred conversations about psychological safety. If you get defensive or dismissive, you've just taught everyone to stay quiet.
If you get curious… If you thank them and genuinely engage with their concern, you've created permission for everyone else to do the same.
These moments are tests. Early on, people will test whether you mean what you say. They'll voice a small concern to see what happens. They'll admit a minor mistake to gauge the reaction.
Pass these tests, and psychological safety grows. Fail them, and it evaporates.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
We're living through a period of unprecedented complexity.
Remote work. Global teams. Rapidly changing technology. Ambiguous problems that don't have clear solutions.
In this environment, the old command-and-control approach doesn't work. No single leader has all the answers. Success requires tapping into the collective intelligence of entire teams.
But collective intelligence only emerges when people feel safe to contribute.
Think about your team right now. How many brilliant insights are trapped in people's heads because they're worried about speaking up? How many problems are festering because no one wants to be the bearer of bad news?
That's not a minor issue. That's the difference between thriving and merely surviving.
The organisations that win in the coming years won't be the ones with the best individual talent. They'll be the ones who create environments where that talent can actually collaborate, learn, and innovate together.
And that starts with psychological safety.
Building the Foundation for High Performance
Here's what we know for certain:
Psychological safety is the foundation of high-performing teams and without it, all your other investments in talent, tools and training may deliver diminished returns.
Building it requires deliberate effort. It starts with leadership vulnerability and gets reinforced through thousands of small interactions where curiosity beats judgment, where speaking up is welcomed, and where failure is treated as information.
It's not soft skills. It's the hard work of creating an environment where people can do their best work.
The question isn't whether you can afford to focus on psychological safety. The question is whether you can afford not to.
Ready to build Psychological Safety in your team?
At The EQi Glow,, we partner with organisations to develop the leadership capabilities and team dynamics that drive real performance.
Our evidence-based approach combines psychological insight with practical application to create lasting change. Whether you're looking to transform team culture, develop emotionally intelligent leaders, or unlock your organisations collective intelligence, we can help you build the foundation for exceptional performance.
Get in touch to discover how we can support your team's journey toward greater psychological safety and sustained success.
