Reflections – Part Four: A Rights-Based Approach

In part one we explored the benefits and risks in naming psychological safety. In part two, we explored power and diversity. In part three we dived into dissent, non-determinism, and the seductive danger of metrics. This week, in our fourth and final part of reflecting on our psychological safety work from the last few years, we’re getting into the big stuff – beyond psychological safety at the team level, a rights-based approach to psychological safety, and what the future may hold. 

Beyond the Team: The Organisational Fabric

Psychological safety is a group- or team-level phenomenon. However, in reality, most organisational dysfunction stems from not within teams, but between them. Therefore much of our work, especially as we build longer term partnerships with clients, is on fostering a stronger fabric of psychological safety across an organisation – exploring and improving those interactions between people in different teams and sections, and how knowledge, expectations, and responsibilities flow across interfaces. This involves many different approaches and strategies, including things like:

• Establishing interaction agreements or “Team APIs”
• Creating and sharing Team Charters
• Agreeing universal “Ways of Working” between groups
• Facilitating Communities of Practice that span functions and teams

By better articulating how teams can work together through shared agreements and contracts, we’re creating the substrate for inter-team coherence – not alignment and uniformity. We don’t want teams to be steadily and uniformly marching forward in a military fashion; we want teams that can intelligently make decisions and act quickly, while still interacting effectively and with minimal friction when they need to.

These practices and artefacts serve as enabling constraints: ever-evolving scaffolding that helps teams interact in ways that reduce friction, misunderstanding and silo effects, while still allowing for productive tension and challenge. We shouldn’t bind teams together (that would be rather counterproductive) but we can facilitate ways for teams to remain decoupled and autonomous while sharing explicit and mutually helpful communication norms and expectations.

And in addition to better defining those interactions, establishing communities and groups that span teams facilitates greater psychological safety by creating new mappings and relationships where they didn’t exist before. 

A rights-based approach

We know that psychological safety is often sold to leaders and HR teams in utilitarian terms: “If you improve psychological safety, you’ll get more innovation, better retention, fewer accidents. It’s good for the bottom line.” And while there might be truth in that, we are increasingly aware that this framing carries real risks. It reduces psychological safety to yet another distorted performance metric. Is it just another lever for maximising profits, boosting customer satisfaction or helping leaders to get better results? And if so, when do we decide we’ve done “enough” of it? 

A transactional, ROI approach like this also begs the troubling question, “psychological safety for whom?”  Who is worth the investment, who isn’t, and who gets to decide? Here lies the utilitarian trap, where the very people for whom the stakes are highest and support is most needed might end up being neglected, because someone’s decided it’s (they’re) not worth the investment.

A rights-based approach to psychological safety changes the frame entirely. It asserts that everyone has the fundamental right to psychological safety at work, not because it increases profits (although it still does), but because it’s a moral and ethical imperative. 

This shift gives us a far more compelling answer to the question who is psychological safety for? Psychological safety is for everyone – it has to be. 

It also helps us dismiss the idea that a team could ever be “too” psychologically safe. That idea presupposes, or indeed requires a utilitarian lens that demands some sort of measurable business reimbursement in return for working on psychological safety. From a rights-based perspective, where everyone has the right to speak up without fear of punishment or humiliation, the concept of “too much” is absurd. We don’t talk about having “too much” freedom, family, health, or wellbeing.

And as a side note – because this perspective of psychological safety as something to be rationed out to the “deserving” still crops up far too often, in both research and practice – it’s telling that it’s always other people who are judged to be “too” psychologically safe. I guarantee the people making that argument aren’t volunteering themselves for less psychological safety.

The Next Five Years

Over the past five years, we’ve seen the research and practice of psychological safety evolve, spread and achieve extraordinary impact. We’ve also at times seen it drift, become commodified, misused and risk being hollowed out. But when we strip back the noise, what remains is this: psychological safety is not a diagnostic, a programme, a KPI, or a leadership fad. It is an emergent property of human systems, shaped by power, behaviour, context, difference and dissent. It is fostered not by roadmaps or surveys, but by learning, curiosity, empathy and care. 

I believe the next five years will be less about spreading awareness of psychological safety and more about deepening our collective understanding of what it really means in practice. That means moving away from simple checklists and models, and embracing the complexity of human systems: attending to power gradients, embracing differences, and treating psychological safety as something that arises from lived interactions rather than a top-down initiative. 

I think we’ll also see a shift in focus from teams in isolation to the organisational fabric itself; the messy interfaces and organisational ecotones where most dysfunction, as well as most innovation, arises. We’ll need to keep recognising that systems survive and thrive not through compliance but through constant human adaptation. And above all, this means adopting a rights-based approach: understanding that psychological safety is not simply a tool to optimise human performance, but a right: a fundamental condition of human dignity at work.

Our collective task ahead is to hold that line: to keep psychological safety porous and evolving, to resist its commodification, and to build organisations where everyone, especially those with the least power, can speak up in the way that works for them, be truly heard, and know that their voice makes a difference. Because if psychological safety only serves the powerful, then it isn’t psychological safety at all. 

I’m excited to see what the next five years holds.

Introducing the Trainer Toolkit!

We’re excited to share something brand new: the Psychological Safety Trainer Toolkit!

This incredible digital resource has already had a fantastic reception from our Train the Trainer course graduates and our Psych Safety community – and now we’re opening it up to newsletter readers too!

The Trainer Toolkit is designed to make it easier for you to deliver impactful, practical psychological safety sessions, whether you’re working with your own team or with clients.

Inside, you’ll find:

• 11 exclusive training videos, walking you through the key ideas and practices
• Guidance on marketing psychological safety training to colleagues or clients
• Advice on tailoring sessions to different contexts and audiences
• Principles of good design and facilitation to support your delivery
• Templates, fresh ideas and practical resources to use with teams
• A ready-made slide deck to support your sessions

It also comes with a commercial licence, so you can use it both in-house and externally.
Get the Trainer Toolkit here 

We hope the Trainer Toolkit helps you gain more clients and deliver more value to existing clients – and we can’t wait to hear how you use it.