Performance & Culture • 7 MIN READ
How to Build Psychological Safety in Your Team
MAY 18, 2026
Google's Project Aristotle found psychological safety to be the strongest predictor of high-performing teams. Here is how managers can build it deliberately.
What it looks like in practice
Psychological safety is visible in specific team behaviours. In teams with high psychological safety: people speak up in meetings even when their view contradicts the majority, mistakes are surfaced early rather than hidden, questions are asked openly rather than only in private, and disagreement is expressed directly rather than through passive resistance. In teams with low psychological safety: meetings are characterised by silence from junior members, problems emerge only after they have grown significantly, and the safest strategy for most team members is to say nothing that could be wrong.
Four behaviours that build safety
Amy Edmondson's research identifies four manager behaviours that are most associated with building psychological safety: framing work as a learning problem rather than an execution problem, acknowledging your own fallibility by naming your uncertainties and mistakes openly, being genuinely curious by asking genuine questions and listening actively to the answers, and responding to problematic speech acts (blame, criticism, insults) by redirecting towards problem-solving rather than allowing them to go unchallenged. These behaviours can be practised deliberately, and their impact on team safety is measurable within one or two survey cycles.
