Psychological safety is not “emotional safety”
When we work with teams and leaders on developing more psychological safety, we often find people confusing psychological safety with something more akin to emotional safety. This is an understandable confusion because of how many leaders feel pressure to control the emotional environment of their teams, but the two concepts are not just different - they are contrary.
Psychological safety is defined by the degree to which people can share their true feelings, experiences, and opinions – without being punished for sharing something that someone else doesn’t want to hear. It is a powerful distinguishing factor between low and high performing teams, as validated by an overwhelming amount of research across sectors.
“Emotional safety,” as defined by social psychologist and NYU ethics professor Jonathan Haidt, is the belief that “I should not have to experience negative emotions because of what someone else said or did. I have the right not to be ‘triggered’.”
The whole point of psychological safety is that teams benefit when they disagree, openly share feelings and viewpoints, and work through the “mess” of conflicting feelings and viewpoints. Teams with psychological safety build resilience while simultaneously strengthening their awareness of each other and decreasing their blind spots overall. They aren’t intentionally mean or callous, but they don’t spend time overly managing their words or strategizing how they can communicate their honest experience. They accept that people on the team will go through all the normal human emotions - including frustration, sadness, wounded pride, or worry – and embrace the fact that people won’t have to hide those feelings when they arise. Those emotions are acceptable. They are “fair game” – and the work doesn’t have to stop when someone experiences one of them.
But teams that value “emotional safety” – as Haidt shows – are operating on a completely understandable but ultimately misguided belief that these so-called negative emotions are bad for us, and they typically design norms or referee meetings that overly limit a team’s ability to hash things out in a messy way – all in the effort of trying to avoid people feeling “bad.”
In fact, human beings are wired for these emotions and while they can be challenging, they are absolutely essential to our growth, our ability to work together, and even to connect with each other on deeper levels.
A leader working hard to build “emotional safety” – that is, to make sure people don’t feel certain emotions – is not unlike an over-protective parent trying to intervene in their children’s social play when messy conflicts emerge. That parent doesn’t want their child (or other children) to feel hurt, behave in undesirable ways, or embarrass them as parents. While often well-intended, those parents end up robbing children of opportunities to develop resilience, critical social skills (like genuine apologizing and relationship repair), and even self-confidence that they can go through hard things and come out on the other side. Not only that, the parent’s over-involvement makes the play less fun. It robs children of the chance to do something they are designed to do: be really angry with each other one moment and laugh with each other one minute later.
Perhaps adults aren’t so different. When our meetings become more heavily “controlled,” they often become more tense, more boring, and less fun.
Psychological safety does not mean permission to be cruel, bigoted, or abusive. It’s not the absence of all boundaries or expectations for how we treat each other. But just like a parent who is willing to let a group of kids get into a conflict and “figure it out” - and who can resist the kneejerk reaction to get involved to spare their child any feelings of distress – leaders who value psychological safety seem to know that something good is happening when their teams enter into messy but honest conflicts and disagreements. They don’t stay silent in the face of mean-spirited or passive-aggressive interactions on their team, but they’re not scared of someone feeling frustrated or upset. In fact, they see those messy moments as the ones that teams NEED in order to 1) grow, 2) feel / process emotions, and 3) make the best decisions.
Creating psychological safety is NOT easy work. Especially when so many leaders anxiously await the next email from HR and actively feel pressure to focus on emotional safety. This is hard stuff. But if we’re attempting to make sure people don’t feel certain emotions that are normal and inevitable - then we are making our jobs A LOT more stressful and making true psychological safety downright impossible.
