Coaching and Psychological Safety: listening, trust and letting go of control

By Jade Garratt

When I first trained as a coach, I realised there were two things I wasn’t very good at:

Really listening
Allowing for periods of silence

I meant well, but I was uncomfortable with silence, and I was usually focused on what I was going to say next. This meant I might try to speak before the person was done thinking, or I’d give them space to talk, but not pay full attention to what they were actually saying.

Coaching training was therefore quite confronting for me. I had to learn to sit with silence, to resist the urge to fill it, to tolerate my own discomfort, and to trust that thinking takes time. I also had to let go of worrying about how I sounded – how clever, switched on and helpful, and instead drop into a place of trust, that the other person could, and would, find their own answers.

Psychological Safety in the Coaching Relationship

I now realise, although I didn’t have the language for it at the time, that in a coaching relationship, a lot of what we are trying to do is cultivate psychological safety. If the coachee doesn’t feel able to share ideas, reflect, admit mistakes and ask questions, we probably aren’t hearing what matters and any impact of the coaching is unlikely to be more than surface deep. Often, that starts with giving people the time and space to think – whether they do that out loud or in silence.

This connects to what we believe is the first recorded use of the term ‘psychological safety’, by Carl Rogers, who saw it as a necessary condition for creative, constructive thinking within the therapeutic relationship. Essentially, people need to feel psychologically safe before they can think freely and generate new ideas.

Coaching is not therapy, but it benefits from that same foundation of trust – a belief that the relational space between coach and coachee is safe for experimentation, trying out new ideas and as Rogers put it, “genuinely creative adaptation.”

Tom and Jade sat outside at a blue picnic bench drinking coffee

Coaching to Foster Psychological Safety

So far we’ve been considering psychological safety within the coaching relationship. But coaching also offers something powerful beyond that space – a way of leading, listening and working with others that builds psychological safety more widely.

As we often remind ourselves, we don’t make it safer for people to speak up by telling them to speak up (that usually makes it worse!). Instead, we do it over time, by fostering the conditions that help people to feel safer in speaking up, and responding better when they do. At the heart of that is cultivating curiosity rather than judgement, and listening well. When we coach, we have to listen, and active listening is a powerful psychological safety practice. It says: your voice matters, and I’m giving it my full attention.

Sometimes, of course, even if we’re taking a coaching approach in our leadership, we learn about problems that it’s on us to solve, but a lot of the time, the first step can be much closer to our coaching stance: we’re listening in order to understand. As Michael Bungay Stanier puts it:

“The key behavior change is this: Can you stay curious a little bit longer? Can you rush to action and advice-giving a little bit more slowly?”

Trusting Others and Letting Go of Control

Both coaching and psychological safety rely on humility – the willingness to admit we don’t have all the answers. And at its core, a coaching mindset is a trusting one. You trust that the other person is capable, reasonable and will more than likely arrive at just the insight they need if given the right support. You’re humble enough to know that you don’t have all the answers, and that a lot of the time, it’s the insights of those around you that allow the team to thrive. Coaching can actually help us better see and value what others are capable of.

In both coaching and leadership, the moment we stop trying to prove we have all the answers is often the moment others begin to shine.

Coaching approaches can also help to reduce power gradients. If, as leaders, we’re always telling rather than asking, giving orders rather than inviting ideas, we’re saying to people “I’m up here and you’re down there.” We’re making it clear that we’re “in charge” and that in some way at least, we consider them and their insights less useful, valid or important than our own. However, if we lead through coaching others, we begin to redistribute that power – we see our power as being power with, rather than power over, and we help empower others to make a positive difference.

To try to bring this to life, imagine how a coaching approach might shape the way a manager responds to a team member’s request:

The scenario: A team member asks their manager for a change to their working hours.

In one version of this story, the manager shuts the conversation down: “It won’t work – the job is too big, the requirements are too rigid, it’s impossible.” The team member feels fully put in their place, the power gradient increases and resentment builds.

In another version, the manager takes a coaching approach. They stay open and curious, asking questions like:

“How do you see this new arrangement working?”
“What potential challenges might we run into?”
“How could we address these?”
“Who will be affected by the change?”
“What will happen if we don’t do this?”
“How will we all know whether it’s working?”
“What support might we both need to have the best chance of success?”
“What’s a “safe-to-fail” experiment we could try first to see how it works?”

This time, the outcome is very different. The team member feels respected and trusted. They’ve had a chance to think through the practicalities and logistics and are now much more invested in making it work for themselves, their manager and the team. Of course, it might still not work, but both will have learned more by exploring it than they ever would by shutting it down.

Coaching as support for the inner work of psychological safety

There’s another side to this too – one that’s about the inner work of leadership. Receiving coaching might help us as we begin to build psychological safety in our teams. In part, this is simply because coaching gives us space to pause, reflect and consider what we might need to change. Many of us need to reconsider and unlearn habits that were formed in workplaces where psychological safety was not the norm.

But perhaps even more than that, fostering psychological safety for others can feel uncomfortable – it may mean we end up hearing things that are hard to hear, such as critical feedback or unexpected challenges to our ideas. This is a good sign – it means we’re creating spaces where people feel safe enough to share that with us – but that absolutely doesn’t mean it’s always easy to hear; sometimes it can feel pretty awful.

If we’re doing this work alone, the self-reflection and emotional regulation we need to be able to process this might be difficult. In its worst cases, we might end up just shutting down the channels of communication because it’s all too much. But if we are supported by some coaching, we might find that it offers a container and a space to work through the discomfort more constructively. So much of psychological safety work isn’t about what we do to others – it’s about the work we do on ourselves that allows us to listen openly, receive feedback without defensiveness and stay present when things get uncomfortable.

I don’t “do coaching” as much in my day-to-day work now, at least not in a formal way, but those early lessons in coaching are still with me. They shape how I listen, how I facilitate and how I try to show up. On the days when I get it wrong, when I speak too soon or fill the silence because it feels awkward, I try to remember what coaching taught me: that space, trust and curiosity can do far more than proving cleverness ever will.