How to build psychological safety as a leader

Why teams fall silent, and what a leader can do about it.

Imre Végh · 8 October 2026 · 8 minute read

Straight to the three steps ↓

Silence

When I started out as a coach, I was very impatient. I wanted to help people out of their problems as fast as possible, until an acquaintance told me: ‘don’t let the cup be hotter than the soup’. People need to feel safe enough before they share what is really going on. It is a bit like pulling on a silk thread: pull too hard and it snaps, and everything goes quiet.

In her book The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson points out that silence is invisible: nobody gets fired for staying quiet, and the moment passes without anyone noticing, except the person who held back.

As a leader, you can do something about that silence. Psychological safety, the shared belief in a team that it is safe to speak up and make mistakes, is built in three steps that Amy Edmondson describes: set the stage, invite participation and respond productively. Those steps hold best when there is compassion underneath, because under pressure, technique alone gives way.

The illusion of unanimity

Irving Janis called this the illusion of unanimity, one of the symptoms of groupthink. When nobody objects, the leader assumes that everyone agrees, and silence is read as consent.

Of course, the no does not disappear. It goes underground and works like sand in the gears, through jokes with an edge, excuses, gossip, lobbying and foot-dragging. What you do not hear in the meeting, you hear later at the coffee machine.

Why people don’t speak up

In a study by Milliken, Morrison and Hewlin (2003), 85% of the people interviewed said they had at some point felt unable to raise an issue they considered important with their manager. The reason they mentioned most was the fear of being seen in a negative light, as a troublemaker or a complainer, and of damaging relationships as a result. Other reasons were not wanting to embarrass anyone, the feeling that it won’t make a difference anyway, and the fear of retaliation or of being labelled. And of course, nobody wants to call the boss’s baby ugly.

Many of these calculations happen without us noticing. Detert and Edmondson (2011) call them implicit voice theories: unwritten rules we learned early in life, which keep working even where it is actually safe. Think of rules such as don’t make waves, do as you are told and go along with the majority.

And two situations make it even harder:

• Someone more senior is at the table. Edmondson notes that people higher up are often blind to how much their presence silences others.
• You think you are the only one. In the famous experiments of Solomon Asch, people went along with a clearly wrong majority in about a third of the answers (37%). With a single ally in the group, that fell to around 9%.

‘They should just learn to speak up’

In my training sessions I still hear something like this surprisingly often: ‘How is it my problem if people never learned to speak up?’ That misses something important, and the story of the Space Shuttle Challenger shows what.

It is a tragic story: seventy-three seconds after launch the shuttle broke apart in the air, and all seven crew members died. Yet the evening before, two engineers had already sounded the alarm! Roger Boisjoly and Arnie Thompson warned that the seals would not be reliable in the cold that was forecast. The response from NASA manager Lawrence Mulloy: ‘My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?’ Then a senior manager at Morton Thiokol asked his head of engineering ‘to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat’.

In his testimony to the Rogers Commission, Boisjoly summed up the atmosphere in the words of a colleague: ‘it was up to us to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was not safe to do so. This is in total reverse to what the position usually is.’ And about himself: ‘I also stopped when it was apparent that I couldn’t get anybody to listen.’

So nobody literally said ‘shut up’, it worked more subtly than that, and all the more strongly for it. Psychological safety is about creating a culture of listening, of taking people seriously, and of empathy and compassion. In her 1999 research, Edmondson defined psychological safety as something that belongs to the team, not to the brave individual: ‘a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking’. But it is the leader who creates that climate!

What it is, and what it is not

Google studied 180 teams and found that psychological safety was the most important of five factors. But psychological safety is sharper than you might think, because it does not mean that everyone is comfortable, that everyone is always nice, that feelings come before results, or that nobody is ever held to account. Edmondson sets safety against a high bar: when both are high you are in the learning zone, safety without a high bar is comfort, and a high bar without safety is anxiety. She explains it herself in her TEDx talk.

Psychological safety is about a culture where it is safe enough to voice an unpopular view, and where you are allowed to disagree. What a leader says about openness counts for less than how that leader responds when someone takes the risk with bad news, a mistake or disagreement. In the end it comes down to whether people can count on others to have their back when they make a mistake.

How to build psychological safety as a leader

In The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson gives leaders a tool kit of three steps: set the stage, invite participation and respond productively, and what I like about it is how concrete it is.

1. Set the stage

People only speak up when it is clear that their voice is wanted. Edmondson calls this framing: say up front that the work is uncertain, that things will go wrong and that you need everyone’s eyes. You also make clear what is at stake, so everyone knows why their voice matters.

At the Challenger, the stage was set the wrong way round: whoever had doubts carried the burden of proof, and met little understanding. One sentence at the start of that meeting could have turned the burden of proof around: ‘We launch only when you have convinced me that it is safe.’

A sentence you can use tomorrow: ‘This is new for all of us, and mistakes will happen. I want to hear about them early, not later at the coffee machine.’

2. Invite participation

For the invitation itself, Edmondson names three things: situational humility, proactive inquiry and structures for input.

Situational humility means saying out loud what you do not know: ‘I don’t have all the answers here, and I may be missing something.’ As long as the boss seems sure about everything, every doubt feels like criticism.

Proactive inquiry means asking real questions, because you do not know the answer. One of the most useful comes from Deep Democracy, which we teach in Advanced Communication: ‘What perspective haven’t we heard yet?’ Then listen with full attention, also to what is not being said. And if you are the most senior person in the room, speak last, because otherwise everyone tunes their opinion to yours.

Structures help to make dissent normal, and a simple one is psychologist Gary Klein’s pre-mortem: imagine the project has failed completely a year from now, and ask everyone to write down what happened. Then nobody has to be the spoilsport, because writing down doubts is everyone’s job.

3. Respond productively

This is the moment that counts, because someone has just taken the risk and everyone is watching how you respond.

Start by listening, acknowledging and thanking. Thank the first person who voices a doubt before you respond to the content: Asch’s experiment shows how much a single ally matters, and as a leader you can be that ally.

Then take the stigma out of mistakes by looking ahead, offering help and discussing the next step. ‘Good that you are telling me. What do you need?’ opens more doors than ‘How could this happen?’

And act on clear violations, because psychological safety is no free pass and the bar stays high. Kim Scott calls this Radical Candor: you care personally and you challenge directly. We practise this in our leadership training.

Know where you stand

You can take our psychological safety assessment for your team for free: seven questions, based on Edmondson (1999). It takes two minutes and is anonymous. Have your whole team fill it in and look above all at the differences. If you score higher than your team, that is a good start to the conversation.

Compassion is the foundation

You can learn these three steps as a technique. But when things get difficult, with pressure and emotions running high, we often fall back on what lies underneath. At the Challenger, the normal rule was that you had to show a launch was safe, and under pressure that rule turned around.

In my training sessions I draw a simple axis for this. At one end is self-interest, protecting yourself or keeping to the schedule, and that is where psychological safety disappears. At the other end is attention for the other person, and that is where it grows. Compassion means keeping that attention when the pressure is on.

Compassion is about seeing the human behind the professional: understanding why people in your team do what they do, and creating safety from that shared humanity.

At the Compassionate Leadership Institute, we describe compassionate leadership as ‘seeing with kindness and clarity, and acting with courage and wisdom’. Our three principles fit Edmondson’s three steps remarkably well:

• Seeing Clearly. Whoever stays silent or grumbles at the coffee machine is rarely evil, stupid, crazy or ill. More often it is a tragic expression of unmet needs: to be seen, to feel safe, to matter. Once you see that, you respond productively instead of defensively.
• Vulnerable Strength. Admitting doubt, owning mistakes and asking for help is what Edmondson calls humility, and it gives others room to do the same.
• Fierce Compassion. Having the difficult conversation in time while staying warm towards the person keeps the bar high without losing the safety.

Compassion starts gently, and from that gentleness grows the courage to keep the bar high.

The silk thread

I think about that silk thread a lot, and about how easily it breaks. A speech about openness does little, because safety grows in small moments, like the sigh you swallow when someone hesitates, or the question of who sees it differently. Silence may be invisible, as Edmondson writes, but as a leader you can learn to listen to it.

If you want to practise this with your own team, take a look at our psychological safety training or team coaching.

Sources

• Amy C. Edmondson, ‘Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999.
• Amy C. Edmondson, The Fearless Organization, Wiley.
• Frances J. Milliken, Elizabeth W. Morrison and Patricia F. Hewlin, ‘An Exploratory Study of Employee Silence’, Journal of Management Studies, 2003.
• James R. Detert and Amy C. Edmondson, ‘Implicit Voice Theories’, Academy of Management Journal, 2011.
• Solomon E. Asch, ‘Opinions and Social Pressure’, Scientific American, 1955.
• Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Chapter V, 1986.
• Gary Klein, ‘Performing a Project Premortem’, Harvard Business Review, 2007.