Creating a Culture of Psychological Safety: Tips from the Experts
Building psychological safety in the workplace requires intentional strategies that encourage open communication and trust among team members. This article compiles proven techniques from experts who have successfully implemented these practices in organizations of all sizes. From conducting structured postmortem reviews to celebrating setbacks as learning opportunities, these 18 actionable tips provide a roadmap for fostering an environment where every voice feels valued.
- Lead With Visible Uncertainty
- Hold Weekly One-on-Ones and Skip Levels
- Frame Work as Bold Experiments
- Run a Personal Histories Sprint
- Implement a Continuous Improvement Framework
- Create a Doorway for Truth
- Meet Bad News With Steady Calm
- Own Mistakes Openly to Build Trust
- Conduct Structured Postmortem Reviews
- Separate Ideation From Later Debate
- Begin Huddles With a Candor Round
- Celebrate Setbacks as Valuable Insight
- Greet Disagreement With Genuine Curiosity
- Declare Missteps as Shared Lessons
- Praise Publicly Coach Privately
- Enforce a No Self-Deprecation Policy
- Intervene Against Dismissive Communication
- Start Meetings With Challenge Question
Lead With Visible Uncertainty
Psychological safety isn’t built through a single policy, workshop, or team offsite. It’s built in the moments between the moments, how you respond when someone pushes back, speaks up, or stumbles.
At Unicorn Labs, we define psychological safety as the belief that you can take risks, ask questions, and admit mistakes without fear of punishment or embarrassment. It’s not about being soft. It’s about creating the kind of environment where people can do their boldest thinking, and still feel like they belong.
And here’s the thing most leaders miss: psychological safety doesn’t mean avoiding conflict or discomfort. In fact, some of the most psychologically safe teams I’ve worked with have the most conflict. But it’s productive conflict: built on trust, respect, and shared intent.
One of the ways I try to foster this in my team is by making my own uncertainty visible. I make a point of narrating my thought process out loud, especially when I’m not totally sure about the direction we’re heading. I’ll say things like, “Here’s what I’m thinking, and I could be wrong. Let’s walk through it together.” It sends a powerful message: you don’t need to perform certainty to lead, and you don’t need to have the perfect answer to contribute.
We also embed regular reflection into our work rhythm, not just at year-end, but after major projects or client engagements. We take time as a team to ask: what worked, what felt heavy, and what we would do differently next time. And I always go first. I share where I missed something, where I overreached, or where I wish I’d asked for help sooner. That vulnerability sets the tone for everyone else to reflect honestly, without fear of blame or defensiveness.
These rituals might seem basic, but they create a strong foundation for risk-taking. When people know their voice won’t be dismissed or punished, they speak up sooner. When feedback is normalized, it becomes less personal and more generative. When you lead with openness, your team learns that their value isn’t based on having all the answers; it’s based on the courage to engage.
If you want people to take risks, you have to build an environment where failure is seen as a step forward, not a step out. That kind of culture isn’t created in one meeting; it’s earned in how you lead through the everyday, every time someone is brave enough to speak up, and you choose to lean in.
Hold Weekly One-on-Ones and Skip Levels
As a leader for over 25 years, I found that creating safety starts with weekly 1:1 meetings with my direct reports. By building this time together, I could learn more about each person individually, their pain points, the concerns and the opportunities they were interested in. This establishes trust and rapport that can carry over to team interactions. I also would build in monthly 1:1 meetings with indirect reports (skip-level meetings). These helped me learn about those who did not directly report to me, but who were in my organization.
I was able to identify themes across my team of consistent barriers or constraints they were facing, and offer time in team meetings to discuss these. With the established 1:1 trust, we are able to speak to difficulties and learnings with each other to continue building efficiency — especially in fast-paced environments. In some cases, I could then act to work with other leaders to remove barriers so that the team could keep their eye on the project “ball.”
Another key aspect to creating psychological safety is sharing wins and connection moments. These can be as easy as a potluck lunch (in a shared physical space) or celebrating personal celebrations at the beginning of team meetings (in a remote or hybrid environment). Once people learn the human side of colleagues, it’s easier to show up with respect, even when discussing difficult topics.
Frame Work as Bold Experiments
Creating a culture of psychological safety starts with how you frame the work. We treat everything as iterative and experimental; risk isn’t a threat; it’s an essential part of doing complex work and discovering what’s possible. When something doesn’t go as planned, the reaction isn’t blame; it’s curiosity: What did we learn? What does this teach us about the next step? What did this let us see that we wouldn’t have seen if we played it safe? Framing work as iterative and experimental makes risk expected, not feared, and that expectation itself strengthens trust and psychological safety. The more people are encouraged to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and try new approaches without fear of blame, the more they say the hard or hidden parts aloud. Each risk taken and each failure explored becomes proof that the team can stretch, experiment, and learn together. Risk and psychological safety reinforce each other: the freedom to take smart risks deepens safety, and a culture of safety makes taking those risks possible, creating the conditions for growth, innovation, and meaningful progress.
Run a Personal Histories Sprint
One of the moves we’ve made to build psychological safety is the personal histories sprint, inspired by Patrick Lencioni. Shortly after we started scaling from “there’s just the founders” to a “there’s a cool cross-functional group,” we recognized the usual symptoms. People came up with brilliant ideas but didn’t share half-formed versions of it, people sensed blockers but didn’t call them out, and there was an almost imperceptible inhibition in taking creative risks.
We figured that since people are still relatively new to each other, maybe a lot of these could be solved if they become more comfortable with each other more quickly. So we set out to find a way to shortcut the months it’ll take.
We set aside 30 minutes during a critical quarterly offsite for everyone to share a “personal history” about themselves. The questions we ask are designed to be low-risk: Where were you raised? First job? Your favorite failure story? The history shared is not meant to be dramatic deep-dive stories but to give people a glimpse of each person’s unique backstory so that it’s easier for them to recognize they’re all just humans with quirks.
What made the biggest difference is that the whole activity made day-to-day vulnerability much more approachable. Because they got to see each other as whole humans, it’s easier for people to raise concerns or make risky suggestions. Productivity-wise, we absolutely saw an uptick — we went from getting 1 rug prototype approved during a typical month for mass production to getting 2 in the next sprint.
My advice for startup leaders looking to build psychological safety: don’t treat the idea as theoretical and squishy. If you want people to be more vulnerable and take relational risks, you need to make them feel known — and the more known people feel, the safer they are. Build repeatable, low-barrier activities designed to enable this.
Implement a Continuous Improvement Framework
Building a culture of psychological safety is not a “soft” leadership skill; it is a strategic advantage. In my experience leading diverse teams, fostering this environment is the element that separates high-performing organizations from average ones. When people feel safe to take risks, you see a direct lift in engagement, retention, and innovation. Psychological safety is not simply about being nice or avoiding conflict. True safety requires the organizational courage to invite honest feedback, have difficult conversations, and let ideas challenge existing assumptions without triggering defensiveness.
The core principle is simple: remove the fear of punishment and you unlock the full intelligence of the team. People don’t hide information, they don’t protect their reputation by staying silent, and they don’t avoid experimentation. To enable this, I use a Human Factors approach looking beyond individual blame and focusing on the systems, incentives, and cognitive load that shape decisions. If errors only result in blame, the system learns nothing. If errors become signals for redesign, the organization learns continuously. Psychological safety is not protecting poor performance; it is creating a space where someone can admit a knowledge gap before it becomes a business risk.
One specific action I take is implementing a six-step framework that runs in a continuous loop. It starts with anonymous employee surveys to capture the truth without hierarchy filtering it. I follow this with facilitated feedback sessions, clarity around decision rights, and an expectation that leaders model vulnerability by sharing their own mistakes and lessons. We celebrate experiments, successful or not, through structured “What We Tried” sessions, with the only metric being learning value. The process ends with an iterative improvement cycle that adjusts policies, tools, and workflows based on what teams are actually experiencing. It requires patience, leadership buy-in, and the willingness to evolve in public.
Psychological safety is not a slogan; it is a leadership discipline. When teams know they can challenge ideas without personal risk, you gain not just better solutions, but a culture of thinkers instead of followers. That is where innovation truly begins.
Create a Doorway for Truth
Psychological safety is not about comfort. It is about whether honesty has a cost. The real danger in most workplaces is not toxic explosions. It is the tiny, forgettable moments when someone asks for clarity and hears, “I already explained it.” Silence is built one dismissal at a time.
The question leaders ask me most is how to create more psychological safety. My answer is always the same: create a safe doorway for truth. Tomorrow morning ask, “What’s one thing we’re not saying that we probably should be?” and listen without defending the old way. When people learn that truth costs nothing, they stop self-protecting and start creating. That is when psychological safety actually begins.
Meet Bad News With Steady Calm
I lead by example and strive to model the behavior I want to see.
When I receive bad news, I meet them with openness and curiosity. “Thank you for raising this issue; let’s sort it together.” This creates a solid ground for psychological safety inside the team.
On a deeper level, this is rooted in a “this too shall pass” attitude. I believe our losses are temporary, just like our wins. So I try to manage my emotional reactions in all sorts of situations: the bad is not as horrible as it seems, and the good is not as terrific as it seems.
So my team knows that in crisis situations, they won’t take criticism from me. Instead, I will want to perform a root cause analysis and look for ways to avoid such mistakes in the future.
This approach fosters a brave team that’s not afraid of making mistakes, being bold and creative. In such an environment, we make decisions faster, eliminate more errors, and nurture a culture where people know their own value and impact.
A recent example was when someone tried to mimic our website. They copied the design and layout and tried selling some services as if it were ours. This issue could have serious implications if not dealt with immediately, from reputation damage to financial losses and legal liability.
But a teammate flagged it as soon as they discovered it, and we were able to engage all necessary resources without any delays. It was possible thanks to the atmosphere where people feel safe to point at problems and move on with solving them.
Own Mistakes Openly to Build Trust
One important aspect of creating psychological safety is how feedback is given during everyday work, not in formal reviews. The first thing I do is publicly share my own errors during team meetings. So if a campaign does not achieve the expected results or if a decision is not received the way I thought it would be, I say what I overlooked and what I would do differently the next time. Therefore, it sends a very clear message that errors are not something to hide or blame, but something from which we learn together.
People have become, over time, more willing to speak up without hesitation, to oppose ideas, and to offer new suggestions without being concerned about how they will be perceived. When leaders show their weakness in a practical, work-related manner, it empowers others to take calculated risks. At Mad Mind Studios, such transparency has resulted in great ideas coming out earlier and fewer issues being discovered at the last moment.
Conduct Structured Postmortem Reviews
Psychological safety is foundational to building a high-performing team, especially as an ambitious SME where innovation, learning, and continuous improvement are crucial. People need to feel safe not only to share ideas, but to make mistakes, challenge assumptions, and have honest conversations when something isn’t working.
For me, psychological safety starts with consistency of behavior from leadership. I set clear expectations around communication, follow-through, and fairness so people know what they can expect when they speak up. We can’t ask people to be vulnerable, then respond with defensiveness, blame, or indifference. As HR, I try to model openness, transparency, and support in every interaction because culture is built through everyday behavior.
One specific action I take is running regular structured conversations when things don’t go to plan. Instead of focusing on fault, the conversation centers on:
What happened
What we learned
What we’ll change next time
If/What support the person needs
This reframes risk-taking as part of growth, not something to avoid. It also signals that we value initiative and problem-solving, even when outcomes aren’t perfect. Over time, this approach has helped people become more proactive, honest, and confident because they know they won’t be punished for trying and they’ll be supported in improving.
Ultimately, psychological safety isn’t a “nice to have” culture initiative. For a business like ours, where we’re scaling fast and building strong foundations, it’s a strategic investment in people who are capable, resilient, and willing to push boundaries.
Separate Ideation From Later Debate
We split brainstorming and debate into separate meetings. When we’re coming up with ideas, anything is on the table, and no idea is a bad one. This frees people up to really go for it in terms of generating ideas without fear that those ideas will be shot down. At a later time, we then whittle down the list of ideas once the emotional attachment to the ideas has diminished. We’ve generated our best ideas as a business since making this simple change to our meeting cadence.
Begin Huddles With a Candor Round
Creating a culture of psychological safety begins with leaders modeling the behaviors they hope to see. Teams take risks when they trust that candor is safe, disagreement is welcomed, and vulnerability is treated as strength rather than disruption. Psychological safety is not a single initiative — it’s a daily practice of how leaders listen, respond, and create space for truth.
One specific action I recommend:
Open meetings with a brief “truth round,” where every person shares one honest insight or concern related to the work. The leader goes first to set the tone. This simple practice lowers the perceived cost of speaking up, normalizes healthy transparency, and signals that the organization values learning over perfection. Over time, it builds a culture where people feel safe to contribute their real thinking.
Celebrate Setbacks as Valuable Insight
Creating a culture of psychological safety within a team starts with fostering open communication and leading by example. As leaders, we need to ensure that every team member feels heard, valued, and supported, especially when it comes to taking risks or challenging the status quo. One specific action I take is to openly acknowledge and celebrate failures as learning opportunities, not as setbacks. This approach shifts the mindset from fearing mistakes to understanding that they are an essential part of innovation and growth.
I also encourage a collaborative environment where diverse opinions are welcomed, and team members are empowered to share their ideas without judgment. By creating an atmosphere where individuals feel safe to express themselves and experiment, we encourage creativity and ownership. Over time, this builds trust within the team and allows everyone to step out of their comfort zones, knowing that they have the backing of the team and leadership to take calculated risks that can lead to success.
Greet Disagreement With Genuine Curiosity
Psychological safety is created when leaders make it safe to share hard truths. An effective action is meeting disagreement with genuine curiosity, which shows people their input will be thoughtfully considered. When reactions stay open and consistent, individuals feel confident taking risks. That single leader behavior sets the tone for honest, productive contribution and risk taking.
Declare Missteps as Shared Lessons
Our team, specifically our CEO who has said this often, reiterates and repeats that failures are lessons learned. So when someone fails, we say, “Great, you learned something.” Now take that learning, just like as if it was a class or a course, and apply it. Use it wisely. We treat it and talk about it like as if it was school or education for us all. It’s really helped our team members to feel safe to fail, to feel safe to try, and to feel safe to tell us they tried and failed. The more we fail together, the more we learn together, the better we all get.
Praise Publicly Coach Privately
Calling out people’s failures in front of the team will be remembered far deeper in the psychology of an employee than your praise. Be very careful on this point. Call out their wins in front of people and speak 1 on 1 with them when discussing improvements they need to make. When people have ideas, never steamroll them or talk over them in front of others. By staying positive in a team setting during ideation talks and simply going with the best idea while not calling out bad ideas, everyone will stay energized to give their input and you as a leader will still get to go with the best idea. And getting lots of input around ideation will allow the best thoughts of your organization to come to the top.
Enforce a No Self-Deprecation Policy
In a medical clinic relying on support staff to not only help a physician do their job safely and efficiently, it is important to create an environment where team members feel safe to be human: to learn new skills, to make mistakes and own up to them, and to feel supported when they win as well as when they have setbacks.
Something that erodes that sense of safety is shame in the workplace. One of the most effective ways I have found to eradicate shame and create an environment of safety is to create a no-negative-self-talk policy. Whenever staff made mistakes and were self-deprecating, often seemingly to engender my favor as the authority figure, I made sure to tell them we don’t do self-deprecation, saying the world will do it enough to all of us, we aren’t going to do it to ourselves, and we aren’t going to do it to each other. We are a team, and that means we build, not break, our sense of self and unity.
I found this simple act to be great for building trust and encouraging team members to feel safe to ask questions when they are unsure about something and come forward with mistakes, because it is expected to have questions and make mistakes, and no one is going to attack you for it: not even yourself.
Intervene Against Dismissive Communication
I build psychological safety by ensuring recognition is tied not only to outcomes but also to effort and critical thinking. I encourage psychological safety by actively reinforcing a culture of professionalism and respect. One action I take is intervening immediately when dismissive or unproductive communication occurs, and it signals that every team member’s input is valued and protected.
Start Meetings With Challenge Question
Creating a culture of psychological safety starts with modeling vulnerability and transparency as a leader. I openly share my own mistakes, lessons, and even moments of doubt — because when team members see that perfection isn’t the expectation, they feel safer taking initiative and speaking up. One specific action I take is starting meetings by asking, “What’s one thing that challenged you this week?” It sets the tone that struggle is normal, feedback is welcome, and growth is the goal. Especially for women and those from marginalized communities, this kind of environment is essential to building confidence and belonging.
