Bronson Taylor
Published October 9, 2025
The Myth Everyone Bought
Somewhere along the line, “psychological safety” became a corporate religion.
Every HR leader started preaching it. Every executive nodded along. Every manager started opening meetings with “this is a safe space.”
And somewhere in all that noise, safety replaced performance.
The result? Teams that are calm but slow. Meetings that are kind but empty.
Cultures that talk about trust while quietly eroding it.
Amy Edmondson’s original research on psychological safety was never about making people comfortable. It was about freeing them to tell the truth. The problem isn’t the idea — it’s what we’ve done to it.
We took a concept designed for candor and turned it into a cushion for cowardice.
The Comfort Cult
Walk into a meeting at any modern company and you’ll see it.
Polite nodding. Careful words. Everyone agreeing with whatever the most senior person just said.
That’s not collaboration. That’s choreography.
The team thinks they’re aligned because no one argues. The leader thinks they’ve built trust because everyone smiles.
What’s really happened is psychological safety gone wrong: a comfort cult disguised as culture.
Edmondson’s latest work shows that teams need two ingredients in tension — safety and accountability.
When one disappears, performance collapses.
McKinsey found that 89% of executives say they prioritize psychological safety, yet only 26% believe it improves outcomes.
The rest are discovering the truth the hard way:
A team that’s always safe stops being sharp.
The Slow Death of Candor
You can see the decline in plain sight.
Ideas take longer to surface.
Feedback gets watered down.
People talk around problems instead of into them.
One engineering VP told me, “Our meetings are full of empathy — and nothing gets built.”
Safety without standards breeds stagnation.
It’s why some of your nicest teams are your least productive ones.
Google’s Project Aristotle proved that psychological safety predicts team success — but it also found that safety without direction just creates echo chambers.
Healthy teams don’t avoid tension. They mine it for progress.
The best cultures aren’t safe in the soft sense. They’re safe in the surgical sense — precise, disciplined, and sometimes uncomfortable.
The Real Fear You Should Have
Most leaders are afraid their people won’t speak up.
The smarter fear is that they’ll stop caring enough to bother.
A 2024 Deloitte report found that 77% of employees have experienced burnout and 84% say their company’s response doesn’t help. That’s not burnout from overwork — it’s burnout from undermeaning.
People disengage when their environment rewards politeness more than progress.
They don’t need another offsite on psychological safety.
They need a reason to tell the truth again.
Five Moves That Make Safety Work Again
If you want safety to serve performance — not suffocate it — start here.
Replace “safe” with “honest.” Announce it out loud. “This is an honest space, not a comfortable one.” Make it clear that candor is a sign of respect, not rebellion.
Pair every freedom with a responsibility. For every “speak up,” add “own your words.” Safety means you can challenge an idea — and be challenged back.
Reward dissent that improves outcomes. Publicly recognize people who disagreed early and saved time, money, or reputation. You don’t need another “Employee of the Month.” You need a “Truth Teller of the Month.”
Shorten your feedback loop. Don’t wait for annual surveys. Add one question to every meeting: “What truth aren’t we saying out loud right now?” Then shut up and listen.
Make data your mirror, not your microscope. AI tools like Workplace can surface signals that show when candor dies — a drop in upward comments, a rise in after-hours apologetic tone, or a decline in constructive disagreement. Use that insight to fix systems, not punish people.
These aren’t HR tactics. They’re leadership disciplines.
What Great Cultures Actually Feel Like
They don’t feel soft. They feel alive.
You can hear it in the hum of debate, the pace of decisions, the willingness to call out what’s broken.
When you walk into a great culture, you don’t feel “safe” — you feel awake.
As Jim Collins wrote, “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness is a matter of conscious choice.”
Culture is a choice, too. You can choose comfort, or you can choose progress.
The best leaders build environments where truth travels faster than fear.
Because when psychological safety becomes psychological sedation, your culture doesn’t crash. It just quietly flatlines.
The Hard Reset
The next time you hear someone say, “We need to make people feel safe,” stop them.
Ask, “Safe for what?”
If the answer isn’t to tell the truth, take risks, and build something that matters, you’re building a museum, not a company.
The safest place in the world is a graveyard.
Everything’s peaceful.
Nothing grows.
Choose differently.
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