7 Myths about Psychological Safety that No One is Busting

A lot of leaders scoff when I talk about psychological safety, because they got a false idea of what that meant from an abundance of influencers misusing the buzzword. They worry that if they try to rollout psychological safety (”and how do you even do that,” they wonder) their team will be crying about safety anytime they’re asked to do something remotely out of their comfort zone.

“So here’s the thing,” I explain. “That will only happen if you really misrepresent the concepts of psychological safety. True psychological safety empowers team members to bravely step out of their comfort zone and take strategic risks to crush their goals.”

But leaders are stuck behind misconceptions of psychological safety instead of maximizing on the science that can propel their team into the top echelons of performance.

Here are seven common myths that keep well-intentioned leaders stuck at the surface level of psychological safety, missing the deeper work that truly transforms teams.

1. “Psychological safety means no one ever feels uncomfortable.”

Comfort isn’t the goal. Emotional safety doesn’t require avoiding discomfort; it requires knowing discomfort won’t lead to punishment, humiliation, or retaliation. It’s about being able to feel discomfort without that triggering a fear response – because your team knows they’re allowed to feel discomfort. Sometimes the most uncomfortable conversations are the ones that transform working relationships and allow the office to become a healthier place – but only if people can trust they won’t be punished for honesty.

2. “Psychological safety means no accountability.”

Psychological safety doesn’t erase accountability. It strengthens it. When people feel safe, they’re more likely to own mistakes, speak honestly, and work through challenges. Safety isn’t the absence of hard conversations; it’s the condition that makes hard conversations possible. In my work on trauma-informed leadership, I’ve found that accountability without safety leads to fear, and safety without accountability leads to stagnation. Leaders need both safety and accountability to grow a high-performance team.

3. “Psychological safety takes too much time.”

Not really. The amount of time it takes to make the same utterance with or without psychological safety is maybe 30 seconds of extra labor. But then it reduces the number of conversations you have to repeat over and over again, because your team didn’t feel safe enough to be honest in the first conversation. Building safety from the start prevents the far bigger costs of dealing with blow-ups, personnel issues, and turnover down the road. If you’ve ever spent weeks cleaning up after an interpersonal conflict or rehiring after a resignation, you know: the extra 30 seconds it takes to make sure people feel safe delivers on the ROI.

4. “Psychological safety is built through big moments.”

Actually, it’s built in the micro-moments: the sigh before you respond, the pause to ask a clarifying question, the way you handle a correction in a team meeting. Remember those 30 seconds I talked about? It’s the small interactions that carry the weight. My research shows that the cumulative effect of seemingly minor events which erode psychological safety (i.e. being omitted from conversations, tone-policing, public corrections) correlate with workplace trauma. Small things can make an unsafe work environment and small things can make a very safe work environment. Small things have a big impact.

5. “If we launch some psychological safety initiatives, people will feel safe.”

Nope. Many leadership strategies assume that employees are working from a place of safety or at least neutrality, but more often that suspected, people are often operating out of a sense of danger. According to my research, 80% of the workforce has experience workplace trauma. When I prompt my clients to consider their employees and known trauma-history, they’re often surprised to realize the majority of their team is operating out of danger – be it living in an abusive relationship, fear of losing their job after company-wide lay-offs, or any other number of factor that has them anxious to say or do the wrong thing in the workplace. A launch of new initiatives won’t comfort those operating out of danger. They’ll only speak up when they earnestly believe it’s safe to risk disappointing you. Big difference. You can’t program your way into psychological safety. You have to earn it, thru the small moments (see above).

6. “Psychological safety is just about feelings.”

It’s actually not about the feelings. It’s about not letting feelings be a point upon which we judge, shame, punish, or humiliate others. Feelings are a very peripheral part of psychological safety. In a psychological safety workplace, people WOULDN’T feel afraid, anxious, or nervous about speaking up, asking questions, and making mistakes. And if emotions show up, their emotions won’t be treated as a red-herring for the real problem that’s eliciting those emotions in the first place. Their leader is going to be focused on empowering their employee in the face of this challenge. It’s not really about the feelings at all.

7. “When new hires enter a psychologically safe workplace, they’ll immediately feel safe.”

It’s easy to assume that once safety exists, it’s permanent – or that new hires will automatically feel safe just by entering a safe workplace. But people carry previous life experiences and trauma histories that shape how they perceive safety, no matter how safe the current space seems. Psychological safety isn’t transferable by osmosis. I know from experience that when people walk into our offices, they’re shocked at the atmosphere of psychological safety, they can immediately sense it, and still each one of them needs to go through the process of learning how to lower their defenses. This is a normal part of integrating into a culture and leaders need to be patient as they onboard new team members.

The leaders I work with are good leaders (bad leaders don’t invest in leadership coaching). And yet they’re are often shocked to learn how easy it is to create psychological safety.

For too long it’s felt like this megalith of a concept too abstract and difficult to implement, and then my clients start to see their culture shift after only a couple weeks of coaching.

It’s all about the small things. They make a huge impact.

If you’d like to know which small tools to implement, you can find a list in my free research findings and see how likely each tool was to increase the sense of psychological safety in the workplace (spoiler alert: it was over 90% for all 9 tools.)