Getting Teams to Actually Speak Up: Creating a Culture of Psychological Safety

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Abstract: This article examines how leaders can foster psychological safety—defined as "a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking"—to encourage authentic employee communication. It explores barriers to psychological safety including unclear expectations, competitive environments, leadership trust issues, and problematic group dynamics, while offering evidence-based strategies for improvement. These strategies include leaders modeling vulnerability, establishing clear communication norms, implementing inclusive decision-making practices, providing consistent support, and conducting regular retrospectives. The article presents real-world examples from companies like Intuit, Pixar, BuzzFeed, Citi, and Google to demonstrate how these approaches can be effectively implemented, ultimately arguing that psychological safety is fundamental to organizational learning, innovation, and competitive advantage in today's complex business environment.

Leaders know that getting employees to share their honest opinions and openly discuss ideas and issues is pivotal for organizational success. However, creating a team environment where people truly feel comfortable speaking up can be challenging. While leaders may encourage feedback and input, many teams operate with an underlying culture that discourages vulnerability or dissent. As a result, key insights are missed and potential problems go undiscovered. T

Today we will explore how leaders can establish Psychological Safety—a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999)—which is the foundation for getting employees to actually speak up. Leaders will gain understanding and tools to cultivate a culture where teams feel empowered to share and discuss without fear of negative consequences.

Defining Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety refers to "a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up" (Edmondson, 1999, p. 354). It reflects individual perceptions of how safe it feels to take risks around their team without fearing damage to social status, career prospects or relationships (Kahn, 1990). Teams with high Psychological Safety allow mistakes to be discussed freely without worrying about how it will affect someone (Edmondson, 2004). Research has consistently shown that high Psychological Safety is critical to getting teams to openly communicate, learn from failures and innovate (Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006; Carmeli et al., 2009).

Barriers to Psychological Safety

While important for performance, establishing Psychological Safety can be challenging due to various barriers:

• Unclear Expectations: Without clear communication around what type of feedback and input is desired, employees hesitate to speak up for fear of crossing a line (Detert & Burris, 2007).

• Competitive Environment: When status or credit is emphasized over collaboration, employees worry speaking up may damage their reputation or standing within the team (Bunderson & Boumgarden, 2010).

• Lack of Trust in Leadership: If leaders do not consistently follow through after mistakes or demonstrate fallibility, trust erodes and the team hesitates to be vulnerable (Liang et al., 2020).

• Group Dynamics: Dynamics like conflict, dominance by a few voices or lack of diversity limit dissenting opinions and minority views (Nemeth et al., 2004; Phillips et al., 2009).

• Overcoming these barriers requires deliberate focus from leaders to establish the conditions where Psychological Safety can develop.

Strategies for Building Psychological Safety

Research identifies several key strategies leaders can employ to build Psychological Safety in their teams:

• Model Vulnerability as a Leader: Leaders must share mistakes and lessons learned to show fallibility and gain trust. This conveys that feedback works both ways and builds familiarity with leadership's decision-making (Schein & Schein, 2017).

• Set Clear Norms and Boundaries: Make explicit what type of discourse is expected through clear feedback norms, guidelines around respect and examples of constructive criticism. Provide clarity around boundaries to curb fears of overstepping (Carmeli et al., 2009).

• Promote Inclusive Decision-Making: Directly involve employees in problem-solving and planning to surface diverse perspectives. Ensure all voices are equally heard through techniques like round-robin brainstorming (Liang et al., 2020).

• Provide Support and Follow-Through: Acknowledge attempts to speak up, thank people for taking risks and consistently address issues raised. Follow-through builds faith that input and failures do not damage careers or status (Edmondson, 2004).

• Conduct "Retrospectives": Regular reviews of past successes and mistakes anonymously within the team spotlight learnings and repair any damaged trust from incidents in a psychologically safe manner (Loch & Terwiesch, 1998).

Building Psychological Safety in Practice

• Modeling Vulnerability at Intuit: At software company Intuit, then CEO Brad Smith shared a major product failure experience to the entire company in a fireside chat. He openly discussed lessons learned to build trust. This set the tone that speaking up was valued and mistakes would be discussed transparently (Edmondson, 2018).

• Clear Norms and Boundaries at Pixar: Animation studio Pixar holds “Braintrust” screenings where any employee can provide critical feedback on works-in-progress. Clear ground rules around “plus/delta” constructive criticism establish safe boundaries for dissent (Catmull, 2014).

• Inclusive Decision Making at BUZZFEED: At news company BuzzFeed, senior staff facilitate cross-team " sandwiches"—structured feedback sessions where mixed levels share perspectives confidentially on strategies or projects. This surfaced how decisions overlooked entry-level insights (Perell, 2016).

• Follow Through and Support at CITI: Following regulatory scandals, Citi CEO Michael Corbat mandated speaking up through “Control Conversations” and “Town Halls.” Issues raised received transparent resolutions demonstrating input was heard and not held against employees (Liang et al., 2020).

• Retrospectives at Google: Google's Site Reliability Engineering team conducted anonymous weekly retrospectives, spotlighting both wins and failures without blame. This repaired trust after outages and strengthened team collaboration (Loch & Terwiesch, 1998).

These examples demonstrate how the strategies for building Psychological Safety can be applied within specific organizational contexts. When done consistently and authentically, they cultivate the conditions necessary for teams to freely share opinions.

Conclusion

In a complex, fast-paced work environment, getting accurate and valuable input from employees is critical for competitive advantage and organizational learning. However, many teams struggle with underlying cultures that discourage open discourse. As this Essay discussed, leaders play an essential role in establishing Psychological Safety—a shared belief that risks can be taken without fear of punishment or embarrassment. Through modeling vulnerability, setting clear expectations, promoting inclusive decision-making, providing support and follow-through, and conducting regular reviews of experiences, leaders can deliberately cultivate the psychologically safe environment necessary for teams to actually speak up. With a research foundation of theory and consistent application of practical strategies grounded in industry examples, this organizational leadership model equips leaders with the understanding and tools to strengthen team communication and performance. When Psychological Safety is established, innovation, problem-solving and continuous improvement can truly flourish within teams.

References

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5. Edmondson, A. C. (2004). Psychological safety, trust, and learning in organizations: A group-level lens. In R. M. Kramer & K. S. Cook (Eds.), Trust and distrust in organizations: Dilemmas and approaches (pp. 239–272). Russell Sage Foundation.

6. Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33(4), 692–724.

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8. Loch, C. H., & Terwiesch, C. (1998). Communication and uncertainty in concurrent engineering. Management Science, 44(8), 1032–1048.

9. Nemeth, C., Brown, K., & Rogers, J. (2004). Devils Advocacy: Stimulating Depth and Clarity. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 4(1), 7–19.

10. Nembhard, I. M., & Edmondson, A. C. (2006). Making it safe: The effects of leader inclusiveness and professional status on psychological safety and improvement efforts in health care teams. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27(7), 941–966.

11. Phillips, K. W., Liljenquist, K. A., & Neale, M. A. (2009). Is the pain worth the gain? The advantages and liabilities of agreeing with socially distinct newcomers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(3), 336–350.

12. Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Wiley.

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Jonathan H. Westover, PhD is Chief Academic & Learning Officer (HCI Academy); Chair/Professor, Organizational Leadership (UVU); OD Consultant (Human Capital Innovations). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.

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Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2026). Getting Teams to Actually Speak Up: Creating a Culture of Psychological Safety. Human Capital Leadership Review, 20(4). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.20.4.4