You Can’t Create Psychological Safety for Someone Else.

Organisations are doing a lot of work around psychological safety, introducing open-door policies, speak-up cultures, leadership training, feedback frameworks and values that encourage people to be brave, alongside the now familiar messages that there are no stupid questions, challenge is welcome and mistakes should be seen as opportunities to learn.

There is nothing wrong with any of this and, done well, much of it can contribute to creating a healthier working environment, but at PasedaLeader we think there is something fundamental missing from the way psychological safety is so often discussed.

You cannot create psychological safety for another human being.

You can create conditions that make it more likely that somebody will feel safe, you can remove obvious threats, behave consistently, invite challenge, respond well when somebody disagrees with you and demonstrate through your actions that making a mistake will not result in humiliation, judgement or punishment, but you still cannot determine how safe another person feels.

That happens within them, shaped not only by what is happening around them now, but by everything they have learned and experienced before they walked into the room.

Which means we need to think about psychological safety as more than something we create in the environment around people.

Safety is an internal experience

Put ten people in exactly the same meeting, with exactly the same leader, hearing exactly the same conversation, and there is every chance they will experience it in ten different ways.

One person may happily challenge what is being said without giving it much thought, another may have a completely different opinion but decide it is better to keep it to themselves, while somebody else may spend much of the meeting reading the room, watching the leader’s reactions and trying to work out whether they are prepared to say what they really think.

Another person may not even consciously recognise that they are holding back because staying quiet, being agreeable or waiting until they are absolutely certain before contributing has become such an established way of operating that it simply feels like part of who they are.

None of us arrives at work as a blank sheet of paper, responding only to what is happening in front of us today. We bring with us everything we have learned about authority, conflict, rejection, mistakes, belonging, credibility and what happens when we get something wrong, alongside experiences from previous organisations and previous leaders, as well as all sorts of experiences that happened long before we ever entered the workplace.

Someone may have learned very early that getting something wrong leads to embarrassment or criticism, while somebody else may have spent years working for a leader who regularly said they welcomed challenge but became defensive whenever anybody actually provided it. Another person may have built much of their professional identity around being competent, knowledgeable and dependable, which means admitting that they don’t know something carries far more weight for them than anyone around them might realise.

So when an organisation says, “It’s safe to speak up here,” somebody can understand the message completely, recognise that there is no obvious reason why they shouldn’t speak and still find themselves unable or unwilling to do it.

We can tell people that their voice matters, that there are no stupid questions, that healthy challenge is encouraged and that mistakes are opportunities to learn, but those messages do not automatically override everything a person already believes about what happens when they get something wrong, disagree with somebody more senior, expose a vulnerability or risk being judged.

This doesn’t mean the environment doesn’t matter; it matters enormously. If people are punished for speaking up, mistakes are weaponised, challenge is met with defensiveness, bullying is tolerated or people learn through experience that honesty has consequences, then there is an organisational problem that needs to be addressed.

But improving the environment does not mean everybody within it will suddenly experience it in the same way, and this is the distinction we think is missing from much of the conversation about psychological safety.

An organisation has responsibility for the conditions it creates.

An individual experiences those conditions through everything they bring with them.

We need to be able to hold both.

What we call a behaviour may actually be protection

One of the reasons this matters so much is that not feeling safe internally does not necessarily look like fear, anxiety or somebody visibly shrinking in the corner of the room.

It can look like the leader who prepares obsessively because the thought of being asked a question they cannot answer feels unbearable, the employee who agrees with everybody because disagreement carries the possibility of rejection, the high performer who works increasingly ridiculous hours because asking for help would mean admitting that they cannot manage everything, or the senior leader who becomes controlling under pressure because uncertainty feels far less tolerable than taking everything into their own hands.

It can show up as perfectionism, people-pleasing, over-preparing, staying quiet, needing to be right, avoiding difficult conversations, rescuing other people, taking feedback incredibly personally, becoming defensive when challenged or constantly looking outside ourselves for reassurance that we are doing a good enough job.

We can easily label these things as personality traits, performance issues or leadership weaknesses and then set about trying to correct the behaviour, telling the perfectionist to lower their standards, the people-pleaser to set better boundaries, the controlling leader to delegate more or the quiet team member that they need to find their voice.

But sometimes what we are seeing is a protective behaviour that has been learned over many years because, at some point, it worked.

If being perfect reduced criticism, perfectionism made sense.

If being agreeable protected a relationship, people-pleasing made sense.

If staying in control reduced uncertainty, control made sense.

If keeping quiet meant avoiding judgement, silence made sense.

That doesn’t mean those behaviours continue to serve the person well, particularly as they become more senior and their behaviour has a greater impact on others, but simply asking them to stop behaving that way without understanding what sits underneath it is unlikely to create sustainable change.

Leaders have an internal state too

This becomes particularly important when we talk about leadership, because we place enormous responsibility on leaders to create psychologically safe environments for everybody around them without spending nearly enough time considering what happens inside the leader when they themselves feel exposed, challenged or uncertain.

A leader may understand perfectly well that they should invite challenge, but if disagreement feels like a threat to their credibility, what happens when somebody strongly questions a decision they have made?

They may know that vulnerability is important in leadership, but can they genuinely say “I don’t know” in front of their team without feeling that they have somehow diminished themselves, and can they acknowledge that they made the wrong call without immediately needing to explain all of the perfectly reasonable circumstances that led to it?

Can they ask for help without experiencing it as weakness, sit in a room with people who know far more than they do without needing to prove their value, hear difficult feedback without constructing their defence while the other person is still speaking, or allow somebody else to be right without feeling that their own credibility has somehow been reduced?

These aren’t things we solve by giving somebody another leadership model or explaining the behaviours associated with psychological safety, particularly when most experienced leaders could already describe those behaviours perfectly well.

The more useful work is understanding what happens to the person underneath the leadership role when they feel challenged, exposed, uncertain or under pressure, because what is happening internally will inevitably find its way into how they behave, and how they behave becomes part of the environment everybody else is working within.

This is where the individual and organisational aspects of psychological safety meet, because the leader who does not understand their own internal responses may unintentionally create exactly the conditions they have been taught to avoid.

We need to broaden the psychological safety conversation

At PasedaLeader, we think organisations need to continue doing the work that makes it easier for people to speak, challenge, admit mistakes, ask for help and contribute honestly, but we also think we need to stop pretending that the right culture, the right leadership behaviours or the right words can determine how another human being feels.

They can’t.

What they can do is create better conditions.

The rest requires us to become much more interested in the individual, in what they believe about themselves, what they have learned to protect, what they fear might happen if they get something wrong and what sits underneath the behaviours we see every day at work.

An open door doesn’t mean very much if something within you makes walking through it feel risky, just as repeatedly being told that mistakes are opportunities to learn will change very little if getting something wrong feels like evidence that you aren’t good enough, aren’t as capable as people think you are or might somehow lose the respect you have worked incredibly hard to earn.

This is the part of the psychological safety conversation we believe has been missing, and it is why our work with leaders and organisations goes beneath the behaviour people can see rather than simply teaching people more about how they are supposed to behave.

If we genuinely want people to contribute, challenge, take appropriate risks, admit mistakes and show up more fully, then of course we need to pay attention to what is happening around them.

But we also need to understand what is happening within them.

Because lasting change starts within.

Change from within. Developing human-centric leaders.