Leadership Mirror · Explore · 6 min read
Trust & Psychological Safety
Making it possible to speak candidly
What happens in your team immediately after someone says something difficult?
A leader can sincerely invite honesty and still make speaking up feel risky. The response to a concern may be hurried, defensive or quietly dismissive. People then have to choose between contributing useful information and protecting themselves from an uncomfortable reaction. What remains unsaid is often invisible to the leader.
Trust and psychological safety develop through experience, including how uncertainty, disagreement and mistakes are handled. This does not mean making every conversation comfortable or avoiding standards. People need to be able to raise a problem early and also understand what responsible work requires. If Connect appeared in your Mirror, consider how listening translates into action. If it appeared less often, look for one moment where a different response could make it easier for someone to contribute.
What might be happening?
Someone deciding whether to speak is evaluating more than the quality of their idea. They may be wondering whether the concern will embarrass a senior colleague, expose their own uncertainty or create more work without changing anything. A leader’s intention to be approachable matters, but the person’s experience of previous conversations may matter more in that moment.
A familiar pattern begins when a leader responds to bad news by explaining why the concern is probably wrong. The explanation may be accurate, yet it arrives before the person has finished describing the issue. They learn that bringing information requires defending it immediately. Next time they may wait until they have overwhelming evidence, even when the team would benefit from an earlier warning.
Listening does not require immediate agreement. You can ask for the observation, thank the person for raising it and explain how you will check it. If the concern is mistaken, clarify that respectfully. If a standard has been missed, discuss the behaviour and consequences. The way you examine a concern can keep the conversation open while preserving the responsibility to make a sound decision.
For example, someone notices a flaw in a workshop plan just before delivery. You can make space to understand the issue, decide which adjustment is needed and later review how it arose. If you focus first on who should have spotted it, others may become more cautious about bringing the next problem. Separate the immediate need to obtain useful information from the later need to examine responsibility.
Safety can also vary across relationships. An experienced colleague may feel able to challenge you while a newcomer remains silent. Notice whose contributions receive attention, who is interrupted and whether disagreement carries different consequences for different people. An invitation addressed to everyone does not guarantee that everyone experiences the same permission to use it.
The leadership tension
Candour
Work-relevant questions, concerns and mistakes become available to discuss. Honest information helps people learn while keeping expectations and responsibility clear.
Interpersonal risk
Speaking honestly can feel risky, especially across differences in authority or status. Humiliation, blame or an unreliable response can make useful information harder to obtain.
Psychological safety and clear accountability can both be high. Safety is about interpersonal risk, not relaxed standards or constant comfort. The practical tension is whether people can speak candidly while expectations, responsibility and fair follow-through stay clear.
Research lens
A few useful ideas can help make sense of this behaviour. The practical connections below are Greymatter’s interpretation of the research; these sources do not validate your Mirror result.
Psychological safety
Research-supported construct
Edmondson and Bransby’s review examines psychological safety across an established body of organisational research. The concept concerns the perceived consequences of interpersonal risk, such as asking for help, admitting a mistake or challenging an assumption. It is about whether these contributions are possible in a work setting, rather than whether people always feel relaxed or agree with one another.
A practical implication is to inspect what happens after the invitation to speak. Does a concern receive curiosity and follow-through? Can a colleague question a plan without being treated as disloyal? You can maintain a demanding standard while investigating why it was missed. The review provides a lens on conditions for contribution and learning; it cannot tell you whether your team feels safe from your Mirror responses alone.
Source: Amy C. Edmondson & Derrick P. Bransby (2023) (opens in a new tab)
Trustworthiness and risk
Research-supported construct
Mayer, Davis and Schoorman’s model distinguishes trust from simply predicting another person’s behaviour. It describes trust in terms of willingness to be vulnerable and identifies perceived ability, benevolence and integrity as important aspects of trustworthiness. Someone may believe you are highly competent while still doubting whether you will treat a difficult disclosure fairly. Trust is also specific to the situation and the risk involved.
For leadership, this suggests looking beyond friendliness. Do you follow through on commitments? Explain decisions consistently? Protect sensitive information appropriately? Admit when you lack expertise? These behaviours give people evidence about what they can expect. If a colleague is hesitant, ask what would make the next step workable rather than requesting trust as a personal favour. Confidence in a relationship develops through what happens.
Source: Roger C. Mayer, James H. Davis & F. David Schoorman (1995) (opens in a new tab)
When this helps and when to watch it
When this helps
- People hold different pieces of information.
- A mistake or emerging risk needs to be raised early.
- Someone needs to ask for help or admit uncertainty.
- A plan benefits from questions across roles or levels of seniority.
When to watch it
- Listening becomes agreement without examining evidence.
- Harmony prevents a needed standards conversation.
- You invite concerns but rarely explain what happens next.
- Some colleagues can challenge openly while others face a colder response.
Experiment
Try it this week
Practise the first response
- Choose a routine planning or review conversation this week. Invite one specific kind of contribution, such as a risk the plan may be missing. Explain why it would help the work, and allow people time to think rather than demanding immediate disclosure.
- When a concern arrives, pause your explanation. Summarise what you heard and ask one question to understand it. Thank the person for making the issue visible. You do not need to promise their preferred solution; say what you will check or decide and by when.
- Follow through on that next step. If you cannot act on the concern, explain the reason. Notice whether the conversation produced new information and whether you responded differently to a familiar colleague and someone with less authority. Keep sensitive or serious concerns within the appropriate procedures rather than turning them into a public exercise.
Reflect afterwards
What did my first response make easier or harder for the person to say next?
Think about it
- Which concerns might people delay bringing to me?
- How do I show that asking for help and meeting standards belong in the same conversation?
- Whose perspective is easiest for me to hear, and whose requires more deliberate attention?
One open conversation cannot establish a team climate. Treat the experiment as a small piece of evidence about your own response. Repeated invitations, fair reactions and reliable follow-through give people more to work with than reassurance alone. You can ask others how they experience these moments, while recognising that they may need time before answering candidly.
Explore further
These are three curated starting points. External resources open in a new tab.
Accessible article
Leading in Tough Times: Amy C. Edmondson on Psychological Safety (opens in a new tab)
Edmondson explains psychological safety and why it can coexist with accountability.
Web interview
Book
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (opens in a new tab)
Develops practical ways to make speaking up and learning possible at work.
Author overview; full book requires library access or purchase
Research review
Psychological Safety Comes of Age: Observed Themes in an Established Literature (opens in a new tab)
A research review that places the concept in a wider body of evidence and open questions.
Publisher review; access options vary