Psychological safety

Psychological safety is the shared belief among team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — speaking up with a dissenting view, admitting a mistake, asking a basic question, raising a concern about a sensitive topic. Harvard's Amy Edmondson coined the term in 1999. Google's Project Aristotle, a multi-year internal study of high-performing teams, identified psychological safety as the single strongest predictor of team effectiveness — outweighing the team's composition, skill mix, or even how well team members liked each other.

Psychological safety is not the same as being nice, avoiding conflict, or lowering standards. High-safety teams typically have high standards and high candor — disagreements are surfaced fast and addressed directly. Low safety shows up as silence in meetings, after-the-fact complaints, sandbagged commitments, and slow detection of problems. Leaders build it by responding well to bad news, asking for dissent explicitly, and admitting their own mistakes first.