Increasing Psychological Safety Starts with the Boss
David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. In this article you learn what psychological safety is, why Google and Pixar see it as the key to strong teams, and how you increase it as a manager or owner. The core: it starts with the behaviour you model yourself.
At Pixar, everyone gets to give feedback on every film. From the intern to the CEO. Three rules apply: be honest, park your ego, and treat criticism as help to make it better. No film escapes it, however senior the director.
That is a deliberate choice to protect one thing: the safety to say out loud what you see. If you lead a team or run a company, that is the skill worth more to you than almost anything else. And increasing psychological safety starts with you.
What Google and Pixar both discovered
Google spent years looking for the recipe for the perfect team. They called it Project Aristotle and studied more than a hundred and eighty teams. Going in, they assumed the obvious: put the best people together and you get the best team. The data said otherwise. Who was on the team predicted little. How the team treated each other predicted everything.
Of the five things that set the best teams apart, one stood far above the rest: psychological safety. The sense that you can take a risk without looking foolish. Without it, the other four collapse. No honest feedback, no reported mistakes, no sharp question at the right moment.
What psychological safety actually is
First, clear up a misunderstanding. Psychological safety is not about being nice. Being nice is pleasant and it has its place, yet it sits apart from safety. A team can be friendly and polite and still be terrified to say anything that carries risk.
Leaders also get this wrong: they confuse safety with trust. Trust is about you and one other person: do I dare make myself vulnerable to them. Psychological safety is about the whole environment: can I say something without fear of being laughed at, or penalised for what I say.
That difference decides where you put your effort. Trust you build in one-on-one conversations. Safety lives in the norms of the whole group. And your team reads those norms off you, all the time. In a safe group people dare to speak up, dare to admit a mistake, dare to ask a question that might sound stupid.
The three things that undermine safety
If you want to work on increasing psychological safety, it helps to know where it breaks down. There are three underminers, and they usually happen by accident.
The first is punishing signals from the undercurrent. Someone floats an idea carefully, and you react with irritation or talk straight over it. To you, a small reaction. To the group, a lesson: here, you keep this kind of thing to yourself.
The second is vagueness. Unclear roles, unclear goals, unclear expectations. Where people do not know what is expected of them, they play it safe. And playing it safe means no risk, no question, no dissent.
The third is stigmatising, generalising and gossip. Gossip never stops entirely, that is human. The point is how you do it. Agree with your team that it happens with respect for each other. A group that tears people down behind their backs teaches everyone to hold back where it counts.
Why it starts with you
There is a consistent finding in the research: the better the relationship between leader and employee, the higher the experienced safety. As the person in charge, you weigh more heavily than anything else in the team. That is uncomfortable and it is also good news, because it means you can do something about it.
A boss who openly admits not knowing something makes it easier for everyone to do the same. Be real, not perfect. Show more of yourself than you are used to. That is the signal the rest will follow. For managers who want to work on this directly, coaching for managers is a logical place to start. For owners and directors who want to steer this across a whole company, executive coaching amsterdam goes a step deeper.
What you can do on Monday
Start small and visible. In the next meeting, ask a question out loud that you do not have the answer to. Respond to a reported mistake with genuine interest. Actively ask for the dissenting view, especially from the people who stay quiet.
And name tension in time. If something hangs between people, do not breathe it away until next week. Name it within two days, calmly and without pointing a finger. The longer a tension sits, the more people learn that here, you had better not speak.
So you do not ask yourself whether your team is open enough. You look at your own behaviour as a leader, because that rewards openness or punishes it. And that is a question about you, not about them.
This is exactly the work I do with the leaders I coach. Want to explore what this means for your team? Plan your free introduction here.
