The Psych Safety Team

About us

The Psychological Safety Collective

We're a collective of people from all over the world, with a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences.
We believe in helping to make the world of work a safer, higher performing, more inclusive and equitable place.

When teams feel safe to speak up, they thrive, and the organisation thrives.

We believe that an organisation is built around relationships. So when psychological safety is overlooked, those relationships are too. And your organisation suffers. Let’s stop that from happening.

Tom Geraghty

Founder / CEO of Iterum Ltd

After completing a degree in ecology, Tom’s first job title was “Experimentalist”. From there, he moved into technology to become a CIO, CTO, and to being an organisational change consultant.

Tom once worked in an environment that cultivated fear. Where people were afraid to speak up, suggest new ideas and admit mistakes. The business suffered and was going backwards. And people weren’t happy. Needless to say, he didn’t stay there very long.

But from experiencing how not to do things, it made him driven to learn and teach others how to do things. To help organisations create an environment that promotes change, experimentation and support.

Tom founded Iterum Ltd as a vehicle to deliver a new approach to training and consultancy around the world of work. Iterum has clients globally, including healthcare, aviation, manufacturing and technology, and is the organisation behind psychsafety.com Today, Psych Safety is the primary source of psychological safety content around the world. A continuously evolving platform that pulls together all of Tom’s, and others’, resources for others to benefit from.

Tom is also a father, an avid mountain biker, and holds an MBA and a post-graduate diploma in Global Health & Humanitarianism. Full bio is here.

Jade Garratt

Director of Education

Jade’s first degree in Physics from Oxford University may have taught her a lot about Science, but she found the learning environment elitist, competitive and unsupportive. However, she credits this experience with giving her a clarity about her values. In her career since, which has spanned teaching, teacher education, leadership and curriculum development, she strives to create healthy, inclusive and psychologically safe educational spaces. The opposite, in fact, of the environment she experienced.

Undeterred from pursuing a career in education, Jade has 15 years of experience across various sectors, including secondary education, the charity sector, policing, higher education and private industry. Jade is an advocate for lifelong learning, holding positions from classroom teacher to senior leadership in educational enhancement. Alongside this work she has gained a Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership and is working towards a PhD in Educational Practice with the University of Nottingham.

Jade helps ensure all our courses, workshops and tool kits deliver the outcomes that you want, making sure you have the knowledge, skills and resources to enable you, your teams and organisations to thrive.

Jade’s full bio is here.

Nick Hayward

Web Developer

Nick’s a web designer, front-end developer and WordPress specialist. Having escaped agency life around fifteen years ago to help small businesses prosper online, he roamed SE Asia & Europe with his laptop and now lives on a narrowboat back in the UK. He has a keen interest in Psychology, cycling and sustainability and runs Intention web design, the Freelance Freedom blog and the EcoNotts eco directory.

Bea Poyton

Content creator and researcher

Bea is a Classical Civilisation student studying at the University of Nottingham. She has experience in PR and is interested in management consultancy and culture in the business world, hence finding her way to our team. Bea is also super-creative – during lockdown, she completed a Diploma in Cryptozoology (the study of mythical animals!) followed by another in cake baking and decorating. She loves to write, spending time on her own novels as well as academic research and articles.

Tom Barron

Marketing Specialist

Tom loves to research, innovate and develop new solutions in the world of digital healthcare. Since his early career training to become a psychologist in the NHS, he’s led content and marketing teams at successful mental health applications and honed his UX and research skills across an MSc in Digital Healthcare and research projects at the Technical University of Vienna. He’s the founder and leader of HealthTechTom.

Tom loves bringing attention to the world of psychological safety because 1) he believes it is a fundamental aspect of modern working and 2) has seen the impact both negative and positive levels of psychological safety can have on a team. Through his words and content, he leads the growth of Iterum’s LinkedIn channel.

Deisa Tremarias Grimau

Resident Illustrator

Communicating is Deisa’s lifetime passion: in this process, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Literature with a mention in creative writing and a publishing diploma from Venezuela’s Central University. After that, she continued developing verbal and writing studies to match with graphic design and how to explore the visual appeal and the function of comprehensive management in illustration.

The next moves are taken through 10 years of working with books, magazines and printed materials and also with digital formats in various publishing houses, advertising companies and related freelance projects. Deisa’s workshops, courses and presentations are focused on creativity as the foundation for connecting people and ideas with interesting and attractive results: she believes in play and experimentation as part of the dynamic in the creative process.

When Deisa isn’t drawing something or tattooing someone, she enjoys street art, spending time with her daughter and friends, chatting about life, time and memes, as well as exploring new spots at natural spaces to observe and restore energy.

Diana Stepner

Community Moderator

Diana is a Silicon Valley native who believes in the power of putting people first. For over 20 years, Diana built and led global product teams – discovering launching people is even more rewarding than launching products. This awareness led her to focus on coaching, combining extensive product leadership experience with a human-centred approach to help ambitious product leaders unlock their full potential.

Diana’s background includes leading teams in startups (E.piphany, Cheapflights – bought by Kayak, and SimplePractice), enterprise organizations (Salesforce, Monster, Pearson), digital agencies (Razorfish, part of Publicis) and software consulting (Epsilon, E.piphany). She also has a MIMS from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Boston University.

You can find more about Diana at dianastepner.com!

Navya Adhikarla

Expert Contributor

Navya Adhikarla has written articles for psychsafety.com, including “(Don’t) Look me in the Eye: The Challenge of Eye Contact”.

Navya is a hopeful, courageous, and caring leader who is sometimes (mediocrely) witty. She’s an Engineering Management graduate from Duke University, with experience in consulting, project & program management and public speaking. Navya has engaged in coaching professional students and teams in Leadership & Management during her time as a professional student, and strongly believes it to be both my inherent gift and purpose. If there’s three things she believes in, they are:

the transformational power of inclusion, innovation and superior leadership;
that purple is truly her colour;
and that she is the world’s best self-proclaimed vegetarian chef in the making.

As much as she loves creating art, she means to change the world with her writing (her personal blog: https://thefryingspansandflyingpuns.wordpress.com). Oh, did we mention she’s multiply neurodivergent and that her nickname in grad school is “The Purple Wonder”?

Balázs Szakmáry

DevOps Specialist

Balázs has been interested in the factors that make software developments efforts succeed ever since he got his first degree in software engineering. Collaboration methods, processes, and tools have been his main thing since 2012. He has built and led DevOps and IT teams for smaller and bigger organisations, keeps thinking about collaborative processes, and believes that correctly chosen and configured tooling makes everybody happier and work together more effectively. He has a passion for problems involving version control, legacy code or tools, embedded or safety-critical applications, and unusual hardware.

Balázs can sometimes be heard exclaiming “DevOps is culture!”, which is usually followed by a passionate talk about the importance of psychological factors in delivering high-quality software at high speed. He is a great storyteller who can always bring a real example from one of the companies he has worked with.

Balázs’ Greatest Hits:

– In 2012, he helped 150 developers go from a very painful trunk-based workflow with daily builds, to Git feature branches with repeatable builds for every commit. This included teaching the developers about Git and some black magic to make all the history look perfect in the new repos.

– He was a founder of a very ambitious high-tech startup that eventually failed. He learned a lot from this.

– He’s restored two IT teams to good health by getting them organised and hiring the right people to fill the skills gaps.

– Balázs once built a “test rack as a service”, to allow embedded hardware prototypes to be used both by the build system and developers working remotely.

– For a while, he was responsible for Finland’s largest Jira instance.

He likes spending his free time outdoors, cycling, hiking, climbing, or just sitting on a rock by the sea with a book and some tea.

You can find Balázs’ full bio on LinkedIn.

Why should you trust us?

We don’t believe there’s one ‘best’ way

We don’t adhere to one particular framework. Every team is different, so every approach to change is different. That’s why we take the time to understand how you and your team work and what you’re trying to achieve – and suggest the best roadmap for you. And if something isn’t clicking? We simply switch it up.

Shared learning = more value

We’ve held senior leadership positions and we work with clients in many industries, including technology, aviation, healthcare, education and more. And practices that work for one can work for another. So we use shared learnings to get the most out of your organisation – regardless of industry.

We move with the industry, and with the research

Psychological safety is all about continuous improvement. So we stay up to date on best practices by regularly talking with the psychological safety community and being involved in academic research across numerous institutions. Plus, we never stop reading. So you’ll always feel like you’re moving forwards with us, never backwards. We adhere to our core principles of psychological safety, which you can read here.