Sara Gray | Chief of Staff
What does safety look like in the workplace?
If I had to guess, most people would say fire alarms, making sure you lock the door before leaving at night.
But I’m talking about psychological safety at work.
Old corporate hustle culture treats psychological safety as a nice-to-have for companies that can afford to be ‘soft,’ not a requirement for companies trying to win. But your company culture lives and dies with how well you create a safe work environment. Successful teams use safety as the foundation for how they win.
In 2012, Google ran a multi-year internal study, Project Aristotle, to figure out what actually separated its highest-performing teams from the rest. They tested everything: seniority, tenure, personality mix, workload. What mattered most was psychological safety. Teams with higher safety kept their people longer, made better use of the range of ideas already in the room, brought in more revenue, and were rated as effective by their own executives twice as often as lower-safety teams.
It isn't just Google either. A Harvard study of more than two hundred companies found that a strong, adaptive culture increased net income 756% over eleven years. Safety isn’t a retention or morale issue. It's actually a revenue timing issue, because the cost of silence doesn't show up until the exact week you can least afford it.
What is psychological safety?
Your core values are not how you create safety. They can certainly help if your team is truly living those values. But creating safety is less about what you say and all about what you do.
In Daniel Coyle’s book The Culture Code, he explains that in the workplace, cues like eye contact, proximity, energy, how people take turns talking, small courtesies, and saying thank you are all ways to demonstrate safety. It’s small, repeatable behaviors that tell someone they are safe and welcome.
Here is a simple example:
You are in a meeting to discuss how you are going to increase top line revenue for next year.
You came prepared for the meeting and have three ideas that you would like to share with everyone in the room.
After you share your first idea with passion, everyone stares blankly. One person at the table rolls their eyes and says, “There is no way that will work. You need to come back to reality.”
Who is going to speak next?
Are you going to share another idea?
There is no safety in this room. The ideas died before they even started flowing from a simple eye roll and two sentences. Most people would either shut down or become defensive. Your meeting is no longer productive, time is now being wasted, and you are no closer to hitting your goal than when the meeting started.
If we replay that example, and after the idea is shared, everyone at the table is leaning in, nodding their heads. That same person chimes in and says “I like that start. What if we added this.”
The energy in the room shifts.
People are engaged, ideas and conversation are flowing and you now have ideas that can help your business grow instead of a room full of people who are frustrated and afraid to speak up.
That is safety. And a small shift in body language or a simple “yes, and” sentence can determine whether you see success.
There is a clear distinction here though. Being nice is not the same as creating safety. Safety allows you to step into constructive conflict.
Conflict is not the enemy.
Most workplaces treat conflict like a fire to put out. Someone raises a hard question in a meeting, and the instinct is to smooth it over, table it, or ‘take it offline.’ That instinct feels like leadership. It's actually avoidance, and it's expensive.
In the book Five Dysfunctions of A Team, Patrick Lencioni introduces a pyramid that showcases the behaviors that create successful teams. He puts trust at the base of the pyramid that builds in order to have conflict, commitment, accountability, and results.
And he's specific about what real conflict looks like. It's not personal friction or people getting defensive. It's what he calls ideological conflict: people arguing about the idea, not each other, because they trust the argument won't cost them the relationship.
Teams that trust each other can disagree about the hard problem directly, in the room, instead of nodding along in the meeting and having the real conversation afterward, in private, with someone else. Skip the argument, and you get compliance instead of commitment. A "yes" in the meeting that doesn't survive contact with the first hard week.
But there is an important pre-step to trust.
You can't ask a team to argue honestly about a hard problem if they don't yet trust that disagreeing won't cost them something. And you can't build that trust by declaring it, or writing it into a values statement. Trust is built through those small, repeated signals that tell someone it's safe to be honest.
That's the layer most teams skip. They try to install conflict, or commitment, or accountability, directly without ever building the safety that makes any of it survivable. It works, for a while, right up until the pressure tests it. Then the team that never built trust finds out its conflict was never real, its commitment was compliance, and its accountability had nowhere to stand.
Safety isn't the soft part of this model. It's the part that makes everything above it load-bearing.
Test it before the pressure hits.
We're heading into the second half of the year. Now is usually the time when the pressure to move fast starts to outweigh the instinct to move carefully. This is exactly when safety gets tested. And it’s exactly the time that you need safety to carry everything that follows: the trust, the constructive conflict that leads to buy-in, accountability and results.
So before you get aggressive with your goals this quarter, test the foundation you're building on. A few honest questions to ask your team, and yourself:
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When was the last time someone on your team admitted a mistake in front of the group, without it costing them?
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In your last three meetings, did anyone actually disagree out loud? Or did the disagreement happen after in private?
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If someone's behind on a deadline right now, do they feel safer telling you today, or hiding it until it's unavoidable?
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When you push back on an idea, are you closer to the eye-roll or the "yes, and"?
Don’t get caught in the trap of “safety is fluffy,” or “safe work environments are less productive.” Safety is where the real work is done that drives a company forward. If you're heading into your busiest season and you're not sure your team's foundation will hold, my door is always open.
