4. Are leaders tired of psychological safety?

If you are a senior leader, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve heard the phrase psychological safety, maybe more times than you can count. And while it explains an awful lot, it’s still hard to know how that actually helps.

Well that kind of fatigue is legitimate. Because knowing that psychological safety matters is not the same as knowing HOW to build it, without exposing yourself in ways that feel genuinely risky.

Google’s project Aristotle, which studied 180 teams, identified it as the single most important condition for team effectiveness. The evidence is overwhelming. So the real question is not whether it matters. It’s how you get there from where you are.

And if you want, you can build on Project Aristotle in a safe way.

With your current colleagues, talk about your own experiences elsewhere, outside your current team. When did you feel safe as part of a team somewhere else? And when didn’t you feel safe? And the objective is not to change anything, just to start sharing those experiences and having that kind of conversation.