Safety Is Not Soft

In offices around the world, people perform a daily ritual so common and so quiet that most leaders never notice it. Someone senses a problem forming but hesitates before naming it. Someone else edits their idea into something smaller, safer, less likely to attract the wrong kind of attention. In São Paulo, a project manager lowers her voice before contradicting a senior director. In Mumbai an engineer waits until after a meeting to share a risk he discovered hours earlier. In Toronto, a designer deletes half a sentence before sending it, unsure whether honesty is a liability she can afford today.

This choreography is not accidental. It emerges from a belief woven deeply into organizational life: that psychological safety is soft, naïve, a kind of sentimental luxury for people who cannot stomach the “real world” of high performance. It is a belief that seems to travel effortlessly across continents, perhaps because it flatters an enduring narrative about strength. Fear, the narrative suggests, keeps everyone sharp. Fear delivers results. But fear also constricts human thought. It rearranges the interior of a person’s mind into something smaller and more cautious. Safety, by contrast, is what allows thinking to unfurl.

Across industries and cultures, this unfurling is what distinguishes organizations that learn from those that repeat themselves. In Mumbai, a global bank uncovered that junior analysts were consistently choosing silence over accuracy. The cost of speaking up had become higher than the cost of letting small anomalies slide. After the bank redesigned its “challenge procedures” to ensure psychological safety, error detection increased dramatically, and trading volatility stabilized. In Copenhagen, an energy firm found that its engineers were withholding near-miss data because past disclosures had been met with quiet punishment. When the firm adopted a new safety model inspired by high-reliability industries, their incident rate dropped by double digits. These are not soft outcomes. These are profitability outcomes.

Psychological safety is often misunderstood because it refuses to behave like the caricature people expect. It is not ease. It is not the absence of conflict. It is the structure that makes honest conflict possible. Amy Edmondson’s work makes this clear. High-performing teams do not avoid confrontation; they navigate it without collapsing into hierarchy or ego. Google’s Project Aristotle confirmed the universality of this finding across cultures, from Mountain View to Zurich to Seoul. And Ella Washington’s research shows that organizations committed to global equity efforts cannot succeed without psychological safety because inclusion without safety becomes performance, not transformation.

Leadership cultures, especially those shaped by American ideals of individualism and certainty, tend to valorize quick, confident decision-making. But quickness is not clarity, and confidence is not correctness. In Nairobi, a telecommunications firm learned this after a failed product launch that could be traced back to a single meeting in which no one was willing to contradict the executive sponsor. The firm’s post mortem revealed that five separate employees had noticed the flaw, each assuming it was safer to stay quiet. After implementing cross-level challenge mechanisms, the organization’s innovation cycle improved in ways that felt almost improbable. Suddenly, people were speaking. Suddenly, performance metrics began to shift. Safety does not slow teams. It allows them to accelerate in the right direction.

The irony is that psychological safety does not spare leaders from difficulty. It often brings them more of it. More honesty. More contradiction. More complexity. But complexity is the truth of modern work. Supply chains stretch across countries whose histories collide rather than align. Teams work across time zones where misinterpretations multiply quietly. Markets shift faster than bureaucracies can respond. In this landscape, organizations cannot afford the silence that fear produces. They need the intelligence that emerges when people feel they can tell the truth.

This is the part that resonates most with me, the way psychological safety reveals something about what work has become. Work is no longer a neatly bounded activity happening between nine and five. It is an ongoing negotiation of identity, power, and collective survival inside institutions that are still learning how to hold all of that. Safety is not softness in this context. It is the only condition under which people can stay whole while doing work that grows more complex each year.

In the end, psychological safety shifts the question from “How do we make people comply?” to “How do we make it possible for people to think?” It asks leaders to trade the illusion of control for the reality of intelligence. It asks organizations to treat honesty as an asset rather than a threat. And it gives teams, from Buenos Aires to Berlin to Manila, a chance to work in ways that expand them rather than diminish them.

Safety is not soft. It is the quiet, necessary architecture of progress. The leaders who understand this will be the ones capable of building organizations that can withstand the volatility of this century without losing the humanity of the people inside them.

Key Takeaway

Psychological safety is not comfort. It is the global performance infrastructure that determines whether people can surface truth, challenge assumptions, and make decisions that withstand complexity. Teams do not become weaker when they feel safe. They become smarter.

Practical Tool for Leaders

Global Truth-Surfacing Protocol

A three-step practice senior leaders can use to operationalize psychological safety across cultures and time zones.

1. Make Contradiction a Formal Contribution

• Tell your teams explicitly: “Pointing out what might go wrong is part of your job.”

• Normalize contradiction as expertise, not defiance.

• In global teams, people come from cultures where the distance between leader and employee can feel wide or narrow. Leaders have to recognize this and create shared norms that make dissent feel possible for everyone.

2. Ask for the Information You Cannot See

At the end of every major meeting, ask four questions:

• What feels unclear right now?

• What assumptions should we test before we move forward?

• What did you almost say but did not?

• What risk might someone closest to the work already see?

This single practice radically increases the flow of early signals.

3. Protect Early Risk Reporting

Reward the first person who surfaces a risk, not the person who fixes it later. This shifts your culture away from late-stage heroics to early detection, which is the hallmark of high-performing global organizations.

📚 Further Reading on Psychological Safety, Global Leadership, and Organizational Risk

Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley. 🌱 The foundational text on psychological safety. Edmondson synthesizes decades of cross-industry research and provides evidence that teams with safety outperform those without it across global contexts.

Edmondson, A., & Lei, Z. (2014). Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 23 to 43. 🌱 A rigorous academic review tracing the construct’s origins, applications, and implications across teams in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Google re:Work. (2015). Project Aristotle: Understanding team effectiveness. https://rework.withgoogle.com. 🌱 Google’s multinational study demonstrates that psychological safety, more than any other factor, predicts high team performance in diverse cultural environments.

Washington, E. F. (2022). The necessary journey: Making real progress on equity and inclusion. Harvard Business Review Press. 🌱 Shows how inclusion collapses without the foundation of safety. Provides global case examples and strategies for cross-cultural equity work.

Hofstede Insights. (2020). Cultural dimensions and workplace communication (Report). 🌱 A global research framework explaining how cultural differences in power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and communication styles influence psychological safety across regions.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press. 🌱 Demonstrates that autonomy, competence, and relatedness drive human performance across cultures. Psychological safety strengthens all three.

Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2015). Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty. Wiley. 🌱 A classic text on high-reliability organizations showing that early risk detection, not control, prevents large-scale failures.

Kanai, T., & Wakabayashi, M. (2017). Leadership and psychological safety in Japanese corporations. Asian Business & Management, 16, 117 to 137. 🌱 Provides cross cultural evidence that psychological safety enhances innovation in hierarchical contexts.

Center for Creative Leadership. (2023). Building belonging and psychological safety in global teams. CCL Press. 🌱 Practical, research-informed guidance on psychological safety for leaders managing distributed and multicultural teams.

© Susanne Muñoz Welch, Praxa Strategies LLC. All rights reserved.