The most dangerous people in your company right now are not the screamers or the obvious bullies.

They are the ones who use the word “safety” every time you try to talk about standards.

Try to run a real postmortem and someone says “this feels like blame.”

Ask a senior leader why a commitment slipped and you hear “we do not want to create an unsafe environment.”

Challenge a chronic underperformer and you get “that feedback does not feel psychologically safe.”

On the surface it sounds enlightened. Underneath, accountability just left the building.

The Day Safety Got Rewritten As Immunity

Psychological safety was never supposed to mean “no one ever feels uncomfortable.” Amy Edmondson’s original work defined it as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Teams that had it did not hide mistakes. They surfaced them, learned, then raised their performance. Her research in Administrative Science Quarterly showed that the safest teams actually reported more errors, then got better results because they learned faster.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of companies rewrote that definition without saying it out loud.

Safety stopped being about the freedom to raise hard truths. It turned into protection from hard truths.

You can see the rewrite in the way leaders talk when pressure hits.

They say things like “let us not make anyone feel bad about this miss” instead of “let us understand exactly why we missed, so we do not repeat it.”

They avoid direct feedback in performance reviews and call it being supportive.

They keep a struggling executive in role far too long because “this is a safe place to grow.”

In the name of safety, they quietly lower the bar.

Here is the cost. Once people realize that outcomes and promises no longer matter as much as emotional comfort, the strongest performers start to pull back. They stop putting their name on the hard problems. They stop counting on the system to protect their effort.

That is when culture stops being a competitive edge and becomes a cushion for avoidance.

How The Language Of Safety Gets Weaponized

This is where it gets tricky. Because the people who twist safety into a shield are often smart, well intentioned and fluent in all the right words.

A manager who dreads conflict uses “I want this to feel safe” as a way to dodge tough conversations with a toxic high performer.

A senior leader who hates being challenged calls blunt questions “not safe” so they can keep control of the narrative.

An employee who keeps missing deadlines frames every performance conversation as “harmful to my psychological safety” so their manager backs off.

In each case, safety language is doing the same job. It is moving the spotlight away from behavior and results, and toward how uncomfortable it feels to talk about them.

Research on employee voice backs this up. In a classic study, James Detert and Ethan Burris found that people speak up when they believe their input will lead to constructive action without personal cost, and they stay silent when they expect nothing good will come from it or that it will backfire (Academy of Management Journal).

Now flip that insight.

When people learn that raising concerns about performance or behavior gets labeled as “unsafe,” they shut down those concerns. When they learn that playing the safety card gets them out of scrutiny, they lean on it.

In other words, you end up with the worst of both worlds.

The people who need real protection do not trust it. The people who like avoiding accountability learn a powerful move.

Your job as a CPO or CEO is not to blame individuals for this move. Your job is to rip the move out of the operating system.

Accountability Is Not The Enemy Of Safety

This is the part leaders love to overcomplicate. You do not need a philosophy seminar. You need one hard sentence.

Accountability is not optional if you want real psychological safety.

Safety without accountability turns into learned helplessness. People feel protected, but they also feel like their work does not really matter. They see that misses are managed with soft language and no real follow through. They stop believing the scoreboard is real.

On the other hand, accountability without safety gives you fear based compliance. People hit numbers by hiding risks, gaming metrics and stepping on each other.

The only sustainable configuration is both.

People need to know two things at the same time.

1. If they speak up about a risk, mistake or ethical concern, they will not get punished for telling the truth. That is psychological safety.

2. If they commit to a result and repeatedly fall short without learning or change, there will be clear consequences. That is accountability.

Those two conditions do not fight each other. They support each other. A team that trusts it can tell the truth will see risks faster. A team that knows commitments matter will actually act on what they learn.

The gap in most companies is not intent. It is structure. Leaders say the right words, then run systems that reward comfort over clarity.

Which is why the fix here is not another training. It is a hard reset on how work runs.

Install Accountable Safety In Your Operating System

1. Rewrite Your Definition Of Psychological Safety

Stop treating safety as a feeling and start treating it as a promise.

Publish a definition along these lines in your leadership principles and team charters.

“Psychological safety here means you can raise risks, dissent and admit mistakes without fear of personal retaliation, and you will still be held to clear standards for behavior and performance.”

Say it in plain language in your next all hands. Then repeat it until people can quote it back to you.

If you do not define safety this way, your culture will define it for you. It already has.

2. Separate Blame From Consequence

Blame is about shame. Consequence is about standards. You need to kill the first and double down on the second.

In postmortems, ban language that attacks people. Replace “who screwed this up” with “what did we miss in our assumptions, handoffs or decisions.”

At the same time, get very specific about follow up. Who owns the fix. What changes in the system. What we will do differently next time.

When people see that misses lead to learning and concrete change, not humiliation, they stop flinching and start telling the truth earlier.

3. Make Ownership Impossible To Miss

Accountability collapses inside vagueness. If no one owns it, no one failed to do it.

Every meaningful initiative needs a named owner, a clear outcome and a visible review date. Not “the team.” Not “we all.” A person with a name.

Use simple language in docs and tools. “Direct owner. Outcome. Date.” When a deadline slips, talk about what happened in that person’s world, what tradeoffs they faced, and what they will change.

This is not a witch hunt. It is respect. You are treating people as adults whose commitments matter.

4. Instrument The Disappearing Truth

You do not have to guess when safety is getting used as a shield. The signals are in your communication exhaust already.

When accountability erodes, you see hedge phrases climb and strong ownership language fall. “We will ship” becomes “we should be fine.” “I recommend” becomes “there might be a concern.” You see dissent vanish from big decisions while side channel commentary spikes later. Workplace and similar tools are designed to catch exactly these micro patterns across psychological safety, alignment and execution risk long before they blow up targets.

Stop treating those patterns as soft. Treat them like early warnings that your culture is starting to protect comfort more than performance.

5. Make Honesty A Job Requirement, Not A Hero Move

Right now in most companies, speaking up is optional. Which means only the bravest or most fed up people do it.

Flip that.

Write a simple rule into your operating norms. “If you see a material risk to customers, ethics or commitments, you have 48 hours to raise it with your manager or the relevant owner.”

Tell new hires this is part of the job. Judge managers on whether their teams actually do it. When someone raises a hard issue early, reward them in public. Name it as the behavior you want repeated.

Now staying silent is not just safe. It is failing at your role.

The Question Every CPO Should Put In Front Of Their CEO

You do not fix this by tweaking engagement scores. You fix it by telling the truth at the top.

Walk into your CEO’s office with one question.

“If we muted all the slogans about psychological safety and only watched how we handle missed commitments and hard feedback, would you say this is a place where people are safe to tell the truth and still fully accountable for results?”

Do not let anyone answer with vibes. Look at real signals. How often do leaders share a tough decision with clear logic and next steps instead of vague reassurance. How often do underperformers get coached hard and moved when they do not shift. How often do the people who surface uncomfortable realities early get rewarded instead of sidelined.

If those examples are rare, you do not have a safety problem or an accountability problem. You have a leadership problem.

The good news is that this is fixable. You already have people in your company who are telling the truth and owning their work. Your job is not to inspire them with another speech. Your job is to build systems that make their way of operating the norm, not the exception.

When you do, psychological safety stops being a shield against accountability. It becomes what it was always meant to be. The confidence that this is a place where the truth helps you win.

That is the only kind of safety worth building.