Charlotte Sweeney Associates

Thought Leadership Article

You Don't Have Psychological Safety. You Have the Rehearsed Version.

Image for Part 1/3: What really happens to psychological safety when the pressure hits? Most teams discover it was only ever performative.

This is the first piece in a short series on psychological safety — what it really is, and what gets in the way of building it.

'You Don't Have Psychological Safety. You Have the Rehearsed Version.'

This was a reflection I shared with a leadership team recently.

It's the usual story, they've done the workshops. They've aligned on their values and they've heard the Google Project Aristotle stats. The leader asks good questions in team meetings. People nod, ideas get shared and the culture survey results are okay.

And then something hard happens ... a restructure is announced, a project fails publicly, budgets get cut, someone is under-performing, the leader is under pressure, and the behaviour changes overnight. People go quiet and the honest conversations that supposedly happen here… don't. The "we can say anything" culture reveals itself to be conditional.

I've spent over 25 years working in cultural change, leadership development and DEI. I've seen this more times than I can count and I think it's one of the most under-examined gaps in how we build teams. I have observed that most teams don't have psychological safety, they have a version of it that works when nothing is at stake - I refer to this a superficial psychological safety.

 

What the experts say — and what they don't quite say

Amy Edmondson's foundational work defines psychological safety as the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Dr. Timothy Clark builds brilliantly on this with his four stages (inclusion safety, learner safety, contributor safety, challenger safety), mapping a progression from feeling able to be yourself to the courage to challenge. Both frameworks are genuinely useful.

But here's what I think both leave under-explored: stages of psychological safety can be performed - a bit like an act!

Skip Bowman, writing in 2024, makes a distinction between inner and outer psychological safety. He argues that a false sense of security can arise when teams perform harmony rather than practise it ... surface behaviours that look like openness but actually shut down genuine dialogue. Central to his thinking is the idea that leaders who are operating in self-protection mode (guarding their status, avoiding discomfort, treating challenge as personal threat) actively undermine the safety of the people around them. The leader believes they want an open and collaborative team, but their instinct to protect themselves means challenge gets shut down, honesty gets filtered, and the team learns quickly what is and isn't actually safe to say.

Harvard Business Review has written about what they call "performative psychological safety" - I suspect most people reading this have experienced it. It's what happens when a leader genuinely believes they want honesty, and also, somewhere underneath that, really doesn't. They want people to speak up, as long as what's spoken doesn't make them uncomfortable. They want challenge, as long as it doesn't challenge them. That contradiction doesn't need to be conscious to be corrosive. Teams feel it immediately, the open-door exists, but nobody walks through it and everyone knows why.

The research on what happens to safety under pressure is hard-hitting. When leaders are under stress, anxiety, or genuine threat, so-called "dark-side behaviours", their saboteurs emerge. The very leaders who championed psychological safety become the reason it collapses. A single punitive response to unwelcome news can undo months of trust and that demonstrates that the safety was always more fragile than it appeared.

The test that reveals everything

Real psychological safety isn't tested in the team meeting, the business planning workshop or the away day. It's tested when:

  • Someone delivers news the leader doesn't want to hear
  • A mistake is made publicly, and attribution matters
  • A team member pushes back on the leader's decision, in front of others
  • Restructures and redundancies are happening and people are frightened
  • The team is being asked to do something that feels ethically questionable
  • A high performer behaves badly, and everyone is watching to see what happens

 

If safety only exists in the low-stakes moments, it isn't safety ... it's politeness with a rebrand.

Why superficial psychological safety is so easy to mistake for real safety

Three reasons this is hard to see:

1. Comfortable silence masquerades as harmony. When teams have performative safety, people don't express their views, they withdraw. Ideas stop flowing, honesty gets filtered, concerns are shared in private rather than within the team meeting. It can look and feel like a cohesive team right up until it isn't.

2. Leaders believe their own intentions. Most leaders who fake psychological safety, consciously or not, genuinely want it. They think they're creating it because they've made the right noises. As we all know, impact and intention are very different and teams take behaviour under pressure into account much more than what has been said in speeches in calmer situations.

3. Survey data is collected in calm conditions. Most pulse surveys and culture measurements are collected in the calmer times. I've heard many leaders debate when to launch a culture survey to get the best results. In times of calm, teams say they feel safe because, at that point, they mostly do. The measure doesn't capture how the culture behaves when it's actually needed.

What shifts superficial safety into the real thing

This is where I think more honest conversations are needed. It isn't about more workshops. It's about deliberate, uncomfortable tests of safety, and consistent behaviour when those tests arrive.

  • Test it before you need it. Actively create conditions that create pressure. Share genuinely bad news and watch how it's handled. Run a pre-mortem on a live project. Ask the team to challenge a decision you've already made and mean it.

 

  • Make the repair visible. When safety breaks, and it will, what matters most is what happens next. Does the leader notice? Do they call it out? Do they go back to the person who was shut down and acknowledge it? Rupture and repair is where deep safety actually gets built ... pretending the rupture didn't happen is what creates the superficial version.

 

  • Watch what happens to those who tell the truth. Every team has them, the people who say want is needed event when it's a tough message to share. What happens to them? Are they subtly labelled as difficult? Are they passed over? Do they eventually leave? The fate of those people tells the team everything about whether safety is real or not.

 

  • Accountability has to coexist with safety. One of the most common ways superficial safety masquerades as the real thing is when teams confuse it with cultures that have low-accountability. Real psychological safety isn't the absence of consequences, it's the presence of fairness and respect even when consequences exist. When accountability disappears in the name of "safety," resentment builds and people disengage.

 

  • Leadership behaviour under stress is the only measure that counts. Leaders need to take the time to continually build their own self-awareness of how they respond when they're threatened, embarrassed, or under pressure, because that's the only context in which their behaviour actually determines whether safety is real or not.

What I want us to stop doing

I want us to stop measuring psychological safety by whether people speak up in structured sessions designed for speaking up.

I want us to stop treating it as a cultural characteristic that gets built and then maintained. It's dynamic. It degrades. It has to be actively renewed, especially after times of stress and pressure.

And I want us to stop enabling leaders to declare it exists because they want it to.

The question isn't "do you have psychological safety?"

The question is: what happens here when the truth is inconvenient and the going gets tough?

The answer to that truly shapes your next steps.

 

Authored by: Charlotte Sweeney OBE

 

This is the first piece in a short series on psychological safety — what it really is, and what gets in the way of building it. If you missed the previous articles on how psychological safety looks different across global cultures, as well as superficial psychological safety, you can read them here: 

Part 2: Psychological Safety Looks Different Depending on Where You're Standing. Charlotte shares her thoughts on a blind spot in how we talk about psychological safety across global teams

Part 3: You Can't Build Real Psychological Safety Without Conflict. Here's Why That Matters. Charlotte challenges a common myth: psychological safety isn’t the absence of conflict; it’s the ability to work through it without losing trust

 

Interested in more insights? Read the latest our 'Inclusive Leadership 10 Years On' series on Linkedin. 

 

References and further reading

Foundational frameworks

  • Edmondson, A.C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
  • Edmondson, A.C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
  • Clark, T.R. (2020). The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation. Berrett-Koehler.

 

On performative and superficial safety

 

Tuesday, 30 June, 2026

Tags

psychological safety Leadership behaviour cultural change leadership development

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