The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety

I recently tried to work out how many people have attended one or more of our workshops on psychological safety, including our workshops for teams and organisations, our online workshops, and any we’ve run at conferences or events. I got to about 3,000 and my maths gave up on me – suffice to say it’s something more than that. Whatever the actual number is, it’s a lot of people, and through that work, over time we’ve surfaced the top ten ways to build psychological safety, 150 behaviours to foster psychological safety, and now we present the Seven Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety.

These are some of the most common and most damaging things that we’ve found managers and people in authority say that impact psychological safety in the workplace. There are, of course, many, many other things that people can say or do that damage psychological safety, but in this article we’ve surfaced the seven that come up most often and are generally ubiquitous across contexts and cultures. 

1. “That’s a terrible idea.”
2. “You should know that by now.”
3. “Whose fault is this?”
4. “Everyone is replaceable.”
5. “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.”
6. “Just get it done.”
7. “Not now, I’m too busy.”

I find these all really interesting. Some are reasonably well known, and others maybe less so. Some may even be surprising. Let’s have a quick look at each one:

1: “That’s a terrible idea.”
Quite simply, even if it is a “terrible” idea, this reaction tends to shut down any further suggestions not only from the person who suggested it, but other people who have observed this interaction. None of us want to be embarrassed and told our idea is terrible, and there are much kinder ways of parking an idea or suggesting that it needs more work.

2: “You should know that by now.”
One of the common assumptions of psychological safety is that gets easier as we get more experienced and spend more time in the team. This is largely true, but certain interpersonal risks, such as asking what an acronym means in a meeting, can get *more* difficult as become more experienced or senior. And this response is partly why; there are many things that we might feel that “we should know by now” by dint of our expertise, and thus cannot ask in a group setting. This type of response reinforces that fear. This particular dynamic is also one of the ways in which the “four stages” model breaks down in practice.

3: “Whose fault is this?”
Rather than investigating context, local rationality, and systemic causes of incidents, blame cultures look for someone to point the finger at. This not only reduces our ability to truly investigate the multiple causes of failure (because blame often constitutes the end of an investigation), but is kryptonite to any future investigations that require people to admit to errors and mistakes, lest they get the blame and resultant punishment. 

4: “Everyone is replaceable.”
This is a common “management by fear” technique to attempt to make people work harder and longer through a fear that their job is at risk. A great deal of evidence shows that while fear can achieve short term results, it’s not an effective long term strategy. Employees with greater employment protections experience less job insecurity, leading to a greater focus on long-term goals and innovation. They may feel more empowered to take intelligent risks, speak up about inefficiencies and concerns, or suggest improvements. Making employees primarily focused on job preservation rather than actual performance is not an effective management strategy!

5: “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.”
We’ve covered this before, and the statement is often well meaning, but can result in people feeling that they can’t bring a problem *unless* they have a solution for it. Of course we want to encourage thinking of solutions and ideas, but people are often not in a position to do so due to their (necessarily) narrow focus on their area of work, or their experience and expertise. Importantly sometimes the problem may be particularly large or urgent enough that it’s more critical to hear about it quickly rather than have someone take time to think of solutions before raising it.

6: “Just get it done.”
Usually heard in response to concerns about being able to complete something successfully, on time, to budget, or even safely, this is essentially “I don’t want to hear your input, I just want it done.” And this can lead to not just lo psychological safety, but to disaster.

7: “Not now, I’m too busy.”
I guarantee there is a manager saying this somewhere in the world right at the moment you’re reading it. Whilst to some degree it may be true – managers, particularly middle managers, are under so much pressure from above and below, that time is a luxury many don’t consider they have. But this is not the way to respond to someone asking for your help or trying to tell you something. It says to the team member that whatever the manager is working on is more important than the team member’s voice. A very effective way to silence the voices of team members.


I also feel compelled to note that saying these things as a manager doesn’t make you a bad manager, or a bad person. I’ve said all of these at various points in my career, and fortunately learned over time that there are better ways of managing and leading people. There may also be certain exceptions where some of these statements are justified, and even necessary, but that doesn’t make it good general practice.

What else would you add?

Further reading

Behaviours that damage psychological safety
The top ten ways to build psychological safety
The Chernobyl Disaster
Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions
150 Behaviours that foster psychological safety
The four stages of psychological safety

Job security matters: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the relationship between job security and work attitudes

Practical Psychological Safety in Education

As well as Delivering Effective Feedback and our core workshops focussed on psychological safety, we have two new online workshops on psychological safety in education available to book now!

Psychological safety is fundamental in creating healthy, inclusive and successful learning environments for students, teachers, educators and leaders alike. In these workshops, we delve into the practices and activities that foster psychological safety in the classroom and staffroom. Full of practical tools, strategies and approaches, you’ll leave with lots of ideas about what to try next to establish and build psychological safety in your educational spaces. 

You can attend only the workshop that is most relevant to your context, or book both. Each is designed to be accessible as a standalone workshop, but they do complement and build on each other. By booking both workshops, you will receive a 10% discount. 

These Psychological Safety in Education workshops are relevant to those working with students of all ages and stages, from pre-school to Higher Education, work and training. Find out more at psychsafety.com

All attendees receive a Credly Badge, a certificate of completion to confirm attendance, further reading, materials and resources used in the session, a copy of the Psychological Safety Action Pack and a licence to use it in your organisation, access to a private alumni group, and some swag! Book here!

Psychological Safety in Practice

Psychological Safety in education

This is a great two-part podcast episode from Gail Markin featuring our own Jade Garratt speaking on psychological safety in education. I love Jade’s context-specific definition of psychological safety as “creating the conditions for collaborative learning”, and the distinction between how teachers are often adept at creating psychological safety in the classroom, but there are different challenges to creating psychological safety between teachers and in their teams.

Success depends on welcoming—not shooting—the messenger.

This is a wonderful article by Amii Barnard-Bahn about the actual practice of delivering bad news, especially when against a power gradient. Amii describes a 6-step process of:

1. Prepare your audience
2. Rehearse confident delivery
3. Be present and focused
4. Convey benevolent intent
5. Explain without justifying
6. Add a sense of urgency

Thanks to Amy Edmondson for the share.

A failure of leadership at Sonos

In May of this year, Sonos rolled out an update that borked some older hardware and removed core features from systems that users relied on. That failure led to a public apology, and whilst it’s clear that whilst there were many technical reasons for the debacle, including 20 years of technical debt, at its core, it was a failure of leadership.

Employees report “yelling” and “screaming” in meetings as they tried to warn higher-ups that the app wasn’t ready for production, and developers who worked on the app said during a meeting that they were worried about losing their job if they kept questioning the app’s release.

With echoes of “production pressure” that led to the normalisation of deviance and the Challenger disaster, it’s claimed that Sonos’ desire to get new customers and please investors was more important than ensuring that old hardware would work properly with the new app. Leaders “thought they were making a big, bold decision. It was the wrong decision.”

Since the incident, Sonos has laid off 100 employees.