Psychological safety is how great relationships are born (and grown)
You can nurture individual relationships by leveraging group culture
Welcome to Connection Hub!
I’m going to be authentic: This week, I’m quite tired and can’t be bothered to write an introduction… 😅 The good news is, I have a great post for you. Enjoy!
Years ago, my friend posted a Twitter poll that I remember to this day. He asked people if they’d rather be happy or safe.
At the time, 62% of people answered “happy” — including me. But as I voted, I couldn’t help but think:
Is it even possible to be happy without feeling safe?
From where I stand today, this is a no-brainer. Obviously a baseline sense of safety is a foundation of happiness. Whenever my body and nervous system are in survival mode, there’s no capacity for joy. I’m simply too consumed by putting out fires — either real or imaginary ones.
This applies to relationships more than to anything else. It’s hard to create a bond with someone without feeling safe with them first.
It’s not just the amount of time we spend together that matters. It’s also the level of psychological safety we experience.
Psychological Safety Is an Element of Group Culture
I think of psychological safety as an element of group culture. It can be experienced one-on-one, too. But in the classic sense, it describes how people relate to each other in a group.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson coined the term in the context of workplace teams. She defines it as:
“The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”
Edmondson also refers to it as “an emergent property of the group.” While psychological safety is evident to an individual — for example, through how freely one makes choices, communicates, and reports mistakes — ultimately, it’s something we create collectively.
Edmondson discovered this when she conducted research among hospital teams. She studied the correlation between their levels of teamwork and how often they made mistakes. Unexpectedly, she discovered that the better the teamwork, the more errors were reported. That felt somewhat surprising.
With time and further research, Edmondson understood it wasn’t necessarily that more collaborative teams made more mistakes. Rather, it appeared that they reported them more freely. The teams which were accepting of mistakes were the same ones that enabled effective collaboration.
In her HBR article, Amy Gallo explains how this works, using the concept of psychological safety:
“First, psychological safety leads to team members feeling more engaged and motivated, because they feel that their contributions matter and that they’re able to speak up without fear of retribution. Second, it can lead to better decision-making, as people feel more comfortable voicing their opinions and concerns, which often leads to a more diverse range of perspectives being heard and considered. Third, it can foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement, as team members feel comfortable sharing their mistakes and learning from them.”
Simply put, psychological safety in a group encourages you to take more risks. You say and do things without fear of bad consequences. While that’s valuable at work, it’s not the only context where it matters.
When people experience safety in a group, they also form deep, honest, and supportive personal relationships more easily. I learned this two years ago, when I moved into the community centre where I still live today. It helped me understand what psychological safety is by grasping what it isn’t.
Here’s the first thing.
Psychological Safety Doesn’t Equal Comfort
Living at The Salisbury Centre taught me many things. Arguably, the most important one was communication.
In February 2022, when I brought my bags and furniture up to my attic bedroom, I was a different person than I am today. I barely knew what personal boundaries meant. I was perpetually censoring myself, afraid to step on other people’s toes. I didn’t know how to make requests or voice uncomfortable truths. I had little to no awareness of power dynamics.
While I obviously still have a lot to learn, one shift was quite dramatic. For the first time, I found myself in a setting with such high degree of psychological safety. More than that — I actively created that safety inside our small Residents group culture.
The root was in my relationship with Susannah — the other person who already lived there. We met through the Authentic Connection Group that I had started a few months earlier. Because of that, we had a shared understanding of what kind of communication we were aspiring to.
In the very first days of living together we expressed that we wanted to become better at voicing disappointment, sharing impact we had on each other, and giving appreciation. All that in faith that this would make our relationship stronger and safer — and living together, easier.
Never before had I experienced my relationship with somebody deepen so fast. During the first two months, Susannah and I developed a friendship where pretty much nothing felt off limits. As long as we were coming from a place of transparency and respect, it seemed we could say anything.
This didn’t mean it was always comfortable. For example, I’d cut our conversations when she went into deep sharing while I was rushing to get out of the house. It felt uncomfortable to say “I don’t have space for this right now.” I was used to always giving people space, even at the expense of my own.
But Susannah responded positively to this. Repeatedly, she’d say “thank you” and explained she felt safer whenever I voiced a boundary like that. She understood honesty was much more helpful than quietly building resentment. Plus, it made her confident that whenever I said I was willing to listen, it was genuine.
Psychological safety doesn’t prioritize comfort, as some people mistakenly believe. Instead, it puts honesty and transparency first. These two, even if uncomfortable in the moment, make it easier to trust the other person in the long run.
Psychological Safety Isn’t the Same as Trust
“Think in terms of Trust being about “how much I believe others”, whereas Psychological Safety is about “how much slack I believe others will cut me.” — Lean Agility
Susannah and I created a norm where we knew we would cut each other as much slack as we could. If one “screwed up,” the other would trust that she did her best. At the same time, she would be able to share impact.
This meant we could risk saying difficult things, even if we weren’t sure how they’d land. We assumed the other person would understand it as an expression of care for the relationship — rather than a personal attack.
In the beginning, it was just the two of us. However, the norms we created extended to other residents who moved in with us afterwards. The trust built between two people translated into a small group culture that could grow from there.
Trust and psychological safety are two related concepts — but there are differences. By “trust,” people usually mean something felt between individuals in a dyadic relationship. Trust is concerned with what I believe about the other person — and what they believe about me.
Psychological safety can be seen as an equivalent of trust, extrapolated to group culture. When it’s present on a collective level, it upholds the norm of sharing uncomfortable truths even if two people temporarily abandon that norm.
If this sounds a bit cryptic, here’s an example.
After my partner moved in with me and Susannah, a new layer of discomfort arose. Just like any couple, we sometimes activated each other’s deepest wounds through seemingly trivial behaviours. A lot of the time, the instinct would be to sweep those feelings under the rug. But thanks to being embedded in a culture of psychological safety, we were able to voice uncomfortable truths more often.
In those moments, having a third person felt like big support. Even if we got triggered to the point of becoming dismissive or blaming, our small household group culture contained that. There was another, neutral person there. She reminded us about what we valued as a group, so that difficult conversations would be held by a bigger context.
This created a culture of helping each other feel safe — even if things got messy. We knew it was okay to say difficult things and risk making a mistake. Psychological safety flourished because we reminded each other about the values we shared: honesty and transparency.
Psychological Safety Doesn’t Make You Dull
My mind keeps coming back to my friend’s Twitter poll, and how he presented happiness and safety in contrast with each other. The reason it struck me is because it was an example of how prevalent this idea is in our culture.
Too often, we associate safety with dullness and stagnation — while associating happiness with excitement and growth. In recent decades, Western culture has been pushing for growth, living on the edge of comfort zone, and challenging ourselves as the hallmark of a happy, fulfilled life. I believe this is misguided.
One of the most vivid examples is the self-improvement movement that exploded in the 2010s. In many ways, it was a decade that glorified constantly pushing ourselves and “expanding our limits.” And even if the Covid pandemic slowed things down a little, we often still don’t see that to take full advantage of life’s challenges, we need a secure base to go back to.
As Ruth Whippman writes in her essay Where were we while the Pyramid was Collapsing? At a Yoga Class, in recent years we started pursuing self-actualization not as a result of security and prosperity. Rather, many see it as an alternative to the fundamental needs of safety.
On top of that, we think it’s normal to divorce individual wellbeing from the state of the systems we live in:
“We have collectively adopted a kind of neoliberalism of the emotions. Rather than seeing psychological health and flourishing as the result of a basic social contract that aims to provide for all, we are increasingly seeing it as the result of individual effort, divorced from our circumstances or the societies in which we live.”
In this quote, Whippman speaks to societal-level psychological safety: a need for social contract that would ensure food, housing, healthcare, and education for all. Despite having collective resources to provide that, we still maintain a society in which “half of Americans do not have $400 on hand to tackle an emergency.”
We don’t value psychological safety enough as a society. Just as much, we don’t value it in many smaller groups and teams. A lot of people associate safety with dullness, stagnation, and too much comfort. Meanwhile, quite the opposite seems true.
Feelings safe in a group stimulates growth and allows for more complexity and nuance to be emerge. This is clearly reflected in how much diversity a group can contain. Pursuing diversity in teams is now a holy grail of good organizations. Many companies wave the flag of wanting to be inclusive of people representing different backgrounds, abilities, race, and other characteristics.
However, Amy Edmondson’s research shows that if psychological safety isn’t in place, the diversity of cultures and worldviews limits, rather than supports, a team. A range of opinions and perspectives is only helpful when people feel safe to express them:
“People with similar backgrounds share norms and assumptions about how to behave, how to set priorities, and at what pace to do the work. When team members come from different backgrounds, these taken-for-granted habits frequently clash; even what counts as “evidence” to support an opinion varies across fields. The result is misunderstanding and frustration. (…)
Here is what we found. As predicted, on average, team diversity had a slight negative effect on performance. However, in those teams with high psychological safety, diversity was positively associated with performance. By contrast, diversity was even more negatively associated with performance for teams with lower psychological safety than the average.”
Safety is a prerequisite for growth and development — rather than an impediment. Understanding this can shift your perspective on psychological safety and encourage you to value it more.
Just like John Bowlby, British psychologist and the first attachment theorist once noticed: “life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.”
This is just as true for grand adventurers and explorers as it is for those who want to create genuine connection with a wide range of people.
Wonderful article, very personal and with a broad impact around how cultural norms may often miss the mark. Eye-opening.