# What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety

*Edmondson · Origins, Voice & Silence · Harvard Business Review · 2025 · Paywalled*

A myth-correcting HBR piece from psychological safety's original architect, structured around six misconceptions the authors report hearing repeatedly from executives and consultants. (1) PS is not niceness: safety and comfort aren't synonymous, and 'nice' often functions as code for withholding honest disagreement; the contrast drawn is Kennedy's silenced Bay of Pigs advisors in 1961 against the deliberately structured, candour-forcing process he instituted afterward for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. (2) PS doesn't mean your view prevails — it means being heard, and leaders can disagree with input, and should sanction genuinely problematic conduct (bullying, harassment, unethical behaviour), without that undermining PS. (3) PS isn't job security: it's freedom to be candid, illustrated by Google employees who conflated 2023 layoffs with a PS violation, when the employee who stood up in a town hall to criticise the layoffs to senior leadership was, ironically, demonstrating PS existed. (4) PS and accountability aren't opposite ends of one spectrum but independent dimensions — high PS with low standards isn't excellence, and both need to be high together for performance in uncertain environments. (5) PS can't be mandated by policy, illustrated by Rhode Island's 2024 Workplace Psychological Safety Act (which would have let employees sue employers over it, and stalled in the state senate); it's built interaction by interaction through three leader tools — messaging (naming the challenge honestly), modelling (asking genuine questions, admitting not knowing), and mentoring (feedback on how well people invite and respond to input). (6) PS doesn't require top-down sponsorship: the authors' own research finds PS varies substantially team to team even within a single strong corporate culture, meaning it's inherently local, and anyone at any level can build a pocket of safety within their own team without waiting for organisation-wide change — evidenced by a retail operations executive who improved his team's PS by deliberately slowing his own meetings down, independent of the wider company culture. Closes with a practical road map: naming and returning to shared goals (paradoxically, talking less about psychological safety directly and more about why the work matters is presented as the more effective route to building it); a compact three-dimension tool for assessing conversation quality in real time — are people contributing and listening, is advocacy paired with inquiry, is the group actually making progress — offered as a lighter-weight companion to the fuller Productive Conversation Matrix Edmondson develops elsewhere with Besieux (2021); and structural rituals for reflection, illustrated by PepsiCo UK's weekly progress-sharing (designed to avoid the 'big reveal' failure mode of only sharing once work feels finished) and Microsoft Western Europe's 'failure parties' under Cindy Rose. Both authors disclose paid consulting work for companies discussed in the article (Edmondson for Google and Microsoft, Kerrissey for Google).

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-kerrissey-2025/
- **View the source paper:** https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety
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## Connected concepts (9)

- [Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-1999.md) (paper)
- [The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-2018.md) (paper)
- [What is PS?](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/about-psychological-safety.md)
- [Psychological Safety Comes of Age: Observed Themes in an Established Literature](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-bransby-2023.md) (paper)
- [PS Isn't Enough](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-isnt-enough.md)
- [Reflections: Voice and Silence in Workplace Conversations](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-besieux-2021.md) (paper)
- [Taking Your Team Behind the Curtain: The Effects of Leader Feedback-Sharing and Feedback-Seeking on Team Psychological Safety](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/coutifaris-grant-2021.md) (paper)
- [Barriers to PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/barriers-to-psychological-safety.md)
- [PS Index Critique](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-psychological-safety-index-a-critical-look.md)