No, Psychological Safety Is Not Just About Being Nice

I need to get something off my chest.

If I hear one more person confidently explain psychological safety and get it completely wrong, I might scream into a pillow. Professionally, of course.

Look, I get it. The term SOUNDS soft. "Psychological safety" has the word "safety" right there in the name, and people hear that and immediately picture a workplace where nobody ever gets uncomfortable, where we all hold hands and agree and lower the bar so nobody feels bad. A perpetual group hug with a Slack channel.

That is not what this is. And the fact that this keeps happening is not just annoying. It's actively getting in the way of organizations doing the thing that would actually help them.

You know it's bad when the person who COINED the concept has to write a whole article correcting everyone. Amy Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey published a piece in Harvard Business Review in 2025 called "What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety," and it identifies six misconceptions that have, in their words, led organizations astray. SIX. The woman who gave us this framework is essentially saying, "That's not what I said, and y'all need to stop."

I felt so seen.

So let me walk through the myths I keep running into, drawing some on Edmondson and Kerrissey's work and a few I keep encountering on my own.

So What IS It?

Psychological safety is a shared belief among team members that it's okay to speak up with candor. That's it. Can you ask a question without looking stupid? Can you flag a concern without getting shut down? Can you admit a mistake without it becoming a career event?

It's about interpersonal risk on a team. Not comfort. Not warmth. Not vibes.

And here's the thing Edmondson keeps having to say over and over: it's not a trade-off with performance. Psychological safety and accountability are separate dimensions. You need BOTH. High psychological safety with high accountability is where teams actually learn and perform. High psychological safety with low accountability? That's just a comfort zone, and nobody serious is advocating for that.

The Myths I Keep Running Into

"It means being nice."

Edmondson and Kerrissey draw a distinction here that I think is really important: there's a difference between being nice and being kind. Nice avoids the hard conversation. Kind has it, respectfully and honestly. Psychological safety isn't about dodging conflict. It's about making sure the conflict that NEEDS to happen actually can. When it exists, people expect hard truths to be shared. That doesn't mean those conversations feel good. It means they're allowed to happen.

"It means lowering the bar."

This is the one that really gets under my skin. The whole point of psychological safety is that people perform BETTER when they're not spending all their energy managing how they're perceived. They report errors. They ask for help. They challenge assumptions. That's not softness. That's how you avoid the kind of catastrophic failures that happen when everyone in the room knows something is wrong and nobody says it.

"Bring your whole self to work."

Okay, here's where I want to be careful, because I'm genuinely still working through what I think about "bring your whole self to work" as a concept. There's a version of it I find compelling, and there's a version that makes me nervous. But here's what I DO know: it's not what psychological safety means. Edmondson actually co-authored a piece with Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic that makes a pretty direct argument that psychological safety and "bring your whole self" are not the same thing, and that conflating them can actually undermine what you're trying to build. Psychological safety is about candor in service of the work. It's about the team being able to function at a high level because people aren't afraid to contribute. That's a narrower, more specific, and frankly more useful concept than a general invitation to self-expression.

"It's basically psychosocial safety."

I'll extend some grace on this one because the terms genuinely sound like the same thing. They're not. Psychosocial safety is a broader framework about the overall work environment: workload, job demands, role clarity, protection from harassment, organizational design. It's the system-level stuff. Psychological safety is specifically about the interpersonal dynamics within a team. Can I be candid with YOU, right now, in this meeting, without it costing me? You can have strong psychosocial safety policies on paper and still have teams where nobody speaks up. And you can have a psychologically safe team operating inside an organization that's burning people out with unsustainable workloads. They're related, but they're solving different problems.

"It's a policy."

This one shows up a lot in organizations that want to check a box. Edmondson and Kerrissey are pretty clear on this: you can't mandate psychological safety into existence. Telling people they MUST have it won't produce it. It's built interaction by interaction, in the small moments where someone takes a risk and the team either rewards that or punishes it. That's a leadership behavior, not an HR rollout.

Why I’m on this Soapbox

Because this matters! When organizations get this wrong, they implement the wrong solutions. They do "be kind" campaigns. They create psychological safety "programs" that are really just engagement surveys with a new label. And then when nothing changes, they conclude the concept doesn't work.

It didn't work because you weren't doing it.

Meanwhile, the organizations that actually understand this, the ones seeing fewer errors, faster learning cycles, better retention, they're not making things comfortable. They're making candor normal. They're building environments where speaking up isn't an act of courage. It's just how the team operates.

Edmondson and Kerrissey actually say something I love: that sometimes, talking LESS about psychological safety and more about the goal, the context, why everyone's input matters, is the first step toward building it. I think that's brilliant. Stop selling the concept. Start doing the thing.

The Bottom Line

Psychological safety is not niceness. It's not self-expression. It's not a policy, a program, or a perk. It is a team-level condition that enables learning and performance, and it requires BOTH candor and accountability to work.

And if the person who literally created this framework has to keep correcting the record? Maybe it's time the rest of us paid closer attention to what she actually said.