The Performance Gap: Issue 10

Last week I wrote about high performer fragility - specifically about why the conditions that produce consistent high performance can also produce a brittleness that organisations rarely see coming. One of the conditions that makes genuine development possible (that allows someone to be uncertain, to try something new, to admit when something isn't working) is what this week's issue is about.

Psychological safety doesn't mean what most organisations think it means

Psychological safety has become one of the most used phrases in organisational development. It appears in leadership frameworks, team effectiveness models, and culture surveys.

In most of those contexts, it has come to mean something like: People feel comfortable, the environment is supportive, and nobody gets shouted at.

This is not what Amy Edmondson's research found. And the gap between what the research says and what organisations have done with it is one of the more consequential misapplications of evidence in the field.

What Edmondson actually found

Edmondson's original research, conducted in the late 1990s in hospital nursing teams, was investigating medical error reporting. She expected to find that better-performing teams made fewer errors. She found something different: Better-performing teams reported more errors.

The explanation was not that better teams were more mistake-prone. It was that better teams had created the conditions in which people felt safe enough to surface errors, admit uncertainty, and raise concerns - rather than hiding them to protect themselves from judgement.

She called this psychological safety: The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

The critical word is belief. Psychological safety is not a feeling of comfort. It is a cognitive assessment - a judgement people make, often unconsciously, about whether the interpersonal risk of speaking up is worth taking.

And speaking up, in Edmondson's framework, is not easy or comfortable. It is risky. Psychological safety is the condition that makes people willing to take that risk - not the condition that removes the risk entirely.

Why most organisations have got this wrong

The organisational response to psychological safety research has, in many cases, optimised for comfort rather than candour. Team-building activities, positive feedback cultures, and the instruction to 'be kind' are not the same thing as creating the conditions for honest disagreement, challenge, and error reporting.

In fact, a culture that prioritises harmony and comfort can actively suppress psychological safety in Edmondson's sense - because the implicit message is that difficult truths are unwelcome. The person who raises a concern, challenges a decision, or admits a mistake is violating a social norm. That is the opposite of what the research describes.

What genuine psychological safety looks like in practice

Leaders who respond to bad news with curiosity rather than blame. Not “who is responsible for this?” but “what can we learn from this?”

Explicit permission to challenge - not just tolerated but modelled. The leader who says”I'd like someone to tell me what I might be missing here” is doing more for psychological safety than any culture statement.

Clear distinction between no-blame and no-accountability. Psychological safety does not mean poor performance or behaviour has no consequences. It means honest communication about both is not itself a risk. Most organisations fail to hold these two things separately.

The leader who admits uncertainty. “I don't know yet” and “I was wrong about that” are among the most powerful things a senior leader can say. They signal that honest assessment is valued over confident performance - and they give everyone else in the room permission to do the same.

The question for the week

Think about the last time someone in your team or organisation raised a concern, disagreed with a decision, or admitted a mistake. What happened next, and what signal did that send to everyone else in the room? If the honest answer makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is informative.

Issue 11: What gets measured gets managed - and eventually gamed. Goodhart's Law and what it means for almost every performance framework your organisation relies on.

Dr Andrew A Walker | Chartered Psychologist | Leadership Coach | andrewantonywalker.com

If something in this issue resonated and you’d like to think it through in the context of your own organisation or leadership - a Chemistry Session is a free 30-minute conversation. No pitch, no obligation. Book here.