One of the times I damaged psychological safety
There are two things that build psychological safety on a team.
Someone takes a risk to say something honest.
(Everyone sees that) They don’t get punished for it.
Every time those two things happen, then safety is increased. It’s a very simple idea that can be very hard to do.
For leaders, the breakdown is usually not with #1. Most leaders at least say that they want their teams to be honest. The hard part is #2. Because sometimes we punish people without even realizing it.
I wish I could say that I never punished someone for being honest - but that wouldn’t be true. Back when I was a principal, I was participating in a professional development session with my team about the racial dynamics that were present in our school. The staff was talking about how empowered (or not) they felt to push back on some of our policies and practices. One of our teachers, John Pettaway, talked about a moment when he had felt shut down by me.
It was a key moment in the conversation - the first time someone had taken a risk to talk about a specific instance and involving me, no less. If people got to see John make that comment and go unpunished – maybe even received with curiosity – it could have been a real moment of building psychological safety.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t see that. At that moment, I was too emotionally activated. The entire session had put me on the defensive and now I felt a personal wound because John and I had a real relationship and sense of loyalty to each other. I couldn’t see a teammate taking a risk to be truthful. I just felt attacked.
And that’s when I did something I almost immediately regretted. I reacted.
I responded to John. I gave an obvious throwaway line about appreciating his honesty (which might have been genuine later but I wasn’t there yet) and then said I was frustrated that he had shared this with me for the first time in front of the whole staff instead of coming to talk to me personally.
This was a moment where the team was looking to see how I would respond and whether John would be punished for taking a risk. And the only reasonable conclusion to draw was that: yes, he had. “I wish you had come to me first” might have felt reasonable and justified to me in my heightened and defensive state. But for the staff, it was just a white man in leadership telling a Black man – who just took a risk to share feeling shut down – getting shut down all over again.
It was a moment that could have built psychological safety and instead it diminished it. Maybe significantly.
For leaders who want to build psychological safety, they have to see risks as the building blocks to create it. When someone takes a risk to be honest, they’re handing you a gift. When you internalize that, you can start to see those moments as assets and not threats.
But it’s far from easy. Sometimes those risks will come in the form of someone on the team taking a risk to disagree with you, push you, or criticize you. Your nervous system may tell you that you’re being attacked and need to fight or flee.
If you can resist reacting to that urge – if you can just slow down and stay listening – then you are performing a small leadership miracle. You are creating an environment where people can be honest. And it may not take long before you see that perhaps you are not being attacked, after all. And that the most scared person in the room is probably the one speaking up.
