Leaders are not solely responsible for psychological safety.

We all are.

Do only leaders influence psychological safety? Is psychological safety “done to us”?

Well, yes and no.

Leaders have a significant influence on psychological safety, but they’re not the only contributor, by a very long way.

Firstly, psychological safety is also influenced by the structures, systems, incentives, pressures, history, culture, neurodiversities and experiences that people have and observe.

Secondly, we all have the potential to damage psychological safety for those around us – and as a result, we all have a responsibility to help foster it, particularly if we hold the upper position in any power gradients. Simply as peers, colleagues, friends and family, we can foster greater psychological safety: we don’t need to be a leader in order to do so.

And because our own behaviour affects how people around us behave, we often end up indirectly affecting the psychological safety we personally feel in a group, through encouraging or discouraging psychologically safe behaviours in others.

Finally, at Psych Safety we’ve occasionally worked with teams who felt a great sense of psychological safety as a unit *despite* their manager who exhibited somewhat toxic and damaging behaviour. They all had each others’ backs and operated as a tight unit, sheltering each other from the behaviours of their own manager. A common enemy can be a great bond. However I wouldn’t recommend having a highly toxic, hands-off, manager as an actual strategy for team performance!

As always, the practical reality of psychological safety is highly complex 🙂