Hi Reader!

When I started as a manager, I loved it when people agreed with me.

Oh no, I wasn't arrogant. At least, I didn't think so at the time. For me, it felt like confirmation. Like I was reading the room correctly, making good calls, earning trust.

Then, a leadership program for a bank I'd invested real time and energy in failed. And in the aftermath, I found out that several people on my team had seen it coming. They'd had concerns. Real ones. And they hadn't said a word — because they didn't want to upset me.

That was the moment I stopped trying to make everyone happy and started trying to make everyone heard. They are not the same thing.

The term "psychological safety" is everywhere right now. And in a lot of organizations, it has quietly become a reason not to have hard conversations.

Which is the exact opposite of what it was designed to do.

Andrew Bolton, CEO and co-founder of Tech Rescue, said something in our conversation on Built by People Leaders — the most downloaded episode of the podcast so far — that I haven't stopped thinking about. He's skeptical of safety culture. Very skeptical. He thinks it's making companies fragile, slowing down innovation, and giving people permission to opt out of real debate.

His argument: safe doesn't get results.

And here's the thing — he's not entirely wrong.

Go back to the original. Amy Edmondson, who actually coined the term, defined psychological safety as the belief that you will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up, taking risks, or admitting mistakes. Her famous 2x2 matrix plots safety against accountability. High safety + high accountability = learning and high performance. High safety + low accountability = comfort zone. Low safety + high accountability = anxiety zone.

The problem isn't psychological safety. The problem is that we've been building the wrong quadrant and calling it safety.

When a team avoids difficult feedback because someone might feel uncomfortable — that's not safety. That's avoidance with a nicer name.

When leaders stop naming what isn't working because they don't want to cause tension — that's not care. That's a slow leak.

When people walk out of a meeting with unspoken concerns — like my team did — that's not a harmonious culture. That's a warning sign.

Real psychological safety is what makes disagreement possible. It's what allows someone to say "I think this is heading in the wrong direction" without calculating whether their job is at stake. It's what makes a team capable of learning from failure instead of hiding it.

Andrew's frustration is with the watered-down version—and it's legitimate. But the answer isn't less safety. It's more precision about what safety actually means.

Here's where I'd invite you to look honestly at your own team.

Not "do people seem comfortable?" Comfort is easy to fake and easy to misread. Ask something harder: Do people tell me things I don't want to hear? Do we talk about what went wrong, or do we move on quickly? When there's disagreement, does it surface in the room — or in the corridor afterward?

If you want to go deeper on this, I write about it in Part 2 of CLICKING — specifically in the Strong Teams Are Built Peer-to-Peer, Not Top-Down chapter, which is about the kind of relational trust that makes real candor possible.

And I also wrote about one of the most underused tools for building that culture: Why Your Team Needs a Failure Party (Yes, Really).

Worth a read if you've ever wondered how to make learning from mistakes something your team actually does, not just talks about.

The full conversation with Andrew is here. He'll challenge you. That's the point.

See you next week.

Daria

P.S. If this made you think about your own team — let's talk. Book a call with me, and we can look at what's actually getting in the way of real psychological safety where you work.

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