Psychological safety has become one of those leadership phrases that appears almost everywhere. Organisations measure it, leaders talk about it, consultants design programmes around it and staff surveys ask people whether they feel able to speak openly, admit mistakes and challenge decisions. None of that is necessarily wrong, but I sometimes wonder whether we have made something fundamentally human far more complicated than it needs to be. People rarely decide that they trust a leader because of a programme, a presentation or a statement about organisational values. They decide gradually, usually through interactions that the leader may barely remember. A different opinion offered during a meeting. A small mistake admitted before it becomes a bigger one. A concern raised tentatively at the end of a conversation. A moment of vulnerability disguised as humour. People watch what happens next, and they adjust their behaviour accordingly. If the response is curious, respectful and proportionate, they may risk a little more honesty next time. If the response is defensive, dismissive or quietly punitive, they may decide not to try again. Psychological safety is rarely established in the moments when leaders announce that people can speak openly. It is established in the much smaller moments when somebody actually does.
I remember experiencing a particularly unusual version of this during an interview process for a senior leadership position in Kazakhstan many years ago. It was a substantial process lasting two days, and at one point I was interviewed by a panel of senior leaders. During the conversation, they told me that they had received consistent feedback from colleagues I had met over the previous couple of days. Apparently, the common theme was that I did not listen, talked too much and dominated conversations. I was shocked. My immediate response was to say that I was sorry to hear that because it was certainly not how I wanted to come across, and I began reflecting on what I might have done to create that impression. There was then a long pause before they told me that none of it was true. They had invented the feedback because they wanted to see how I would react. I was considerably younger then, and I remember dropping my head onto the table in relief. I did not get the job in the end, but I have never forgotten the interview. Presumably, the panel wanted to know whether I would become defensive when challenged, reject uncomfortable feedback or demonstrate enough self awareness to consider that other people might see me differently from how I saw myself. I understand what they were trying to discover. I still think it was underhand and inappropriate. There is an irony in using deception to test whether someone can be trusted with difficult conversations, and perhaps an important reminder that psychological safety should not be confused with deliberately creating emotional discomfort to see how people respond.
In ordinary workplaces, the tests are usually far less dramatic. People rarely arrive in a leader’s office and immediately reveal their deepest concern, admit a serious mistake or openly challenge something they believe is fundamentally wrong. They start smaller. They disagree with one part of a proposal. They mention that something does not seem to be working. They admit uncertainty about a decision. They ask a question that carries more meaning than the words themselves suggest. I am certain that people have tested me in this way throughout my leadership career, although I could not identify every occasion when it happened. That is partly the point. Leaders are being evaluated far more frequently than they realise. Someone may remember a two minute conversation for years because it determined whether they trusted us with something more important later, while we may have forgotten the interaction before the end of the day. Trust develops through accumulated evidence, and so does distrust. One dismissive response does not necessarily destroy a relationship, just as one good conversation does not automatically create psychological safety. People watch for patterns. They notice whether curiosity is genuine, whether disagreement has consequences afterwards and whether the leader who claims to welcome honesty behaves differently when honesty becomes inconvenient.
Perhaps this is why I have always believed that small acts of recognition matter. When I moved into a role where I had responsibility for leading the whole team, I started manually putting every colleague’s birthday into my own calendar. I had considered doing something similar earlier in my career, but deliberately chose not to. I was conscious that introducing a highly visible personal practice when I was not leading the organisation could inadvertently reflect negatively on the person who was. Once I had responsibility for the whole team, I made it part of how I wanted to lead. Every colleague received a handwritten birthday card with a personalised message. I did not ask someone else to manage the calendar, automate the process or produce a stack of cards for me to sign. If someone’s birthday fell during a holiday, I still wrote the card and delivered it personally when I could. Every message was different, and wherever possible I referred to a conversation we had shared, something I knew about the person or something that made the card feel as though it could only have been written for them. Depending on the person and the circumstances, there might even be an audience while I sang happy birthday in Arabic. It was never particularly sophisticated leadership, but sophistication was not the point.
I knew that small personal gestures could matter because I had experienced them myself. Earlier in my career, a leader once wrote me a handwritten note that included a personal reference to me and my family. I kept it for many years. I doubt it took particularly long to write, and I suspect the person who wrote it may not even remember doing so, but I remembered receiving it. That is the imbalance leaders often fail to appreciate. A conversation, a card, a note or a few minutes of genuine attention may be one of hundreds of interactions in a leader’s week, but it can carry far greater significance for the person receiving it. Over the years, colleagues have written to thank me for birthday cards, sometimes because they were surprised that I remembered and sometimes because the personal message mattered to them. I do not think a birthday card transforms someone’s experience of work, and I would be deeply suspicious of any leadership theory suggesting that it does. But people notice effort. They notice when somebody remembers them without being reminded, when a conversation from months earlier has not been forgotten and when the person leading the organisation has taken a few minutes to recognise that they have a life and identity beyond their job title.
Some leaders may consider practices like these a poor use of senior leadership time. Perhaps, in purely operational terms, they are. There is always another report to read, another meeting to attend, another strategy to develop and another problem requiring attention. Leadership encourages efficiency because there is never enough time to do everything, but efficiency is not always the goal. Some things matter precisely because they take time. A personalised handwritten message means something different from an automatically generated email because someone had to stop, think and write it. Remembering a previous conversation matters because it shows that the conversation registered. Asking after a family member and remembering the answer later communicates something that an employee engagement initiative never can. If leaders choose to do these things in their own time because they genuinely want to, I struggle to see why anyone would criticise them. The greater danger is turning every human interaction into a leadership technique and then evaluating whether it produced sufficient organisational return.
This is where I think some discussions about psychological safety become uncomfortable. If I write birthday cards because I have read that employee recognition increases engagement, I am not sure the gesture means the same thing. If I ask someone about their family because I have been taught that personal connection improves retention, the conversation risks becoming transactional. If I listen carefully to a concern because I want the person to rate leadership more positively in the next staff survey, I may be performing the behaviour without understanding the principle underneath it. People are remarkably good at detecting when care is conditional, strategic or designed to produce something in return. Psychological safety cannot be manufactured by leaders who have decided that they need people to feel psychologically safe. It develops when people repeatedly experience leaders behaving with decency, curiosity and consistency, particularly when there is no obvious benefit to the leader for doing so. I never wrote birthday cards because I expected people to trust me more, work harder or become more loyal afterwards. I wrote them because I wanted to acknowledge people properly, and because I believed it was a decent thing to do.
That does not mean small gestures compensate for poor leadership elsewhere. A handwritten birthday card is meaningless if the same leader humiliates people in meetings, ignores concerns, behaves unpredictably or punishes disagreement. Remembering someone’s family does not create psychological safety if they are frightened to tell you that a decision is wrong. Leaders sometimes make the mistake of collecting visible examples of kindness while avoiding the much harder work of examining how they behave when challenged, frustrated or under pressure. Culture is not created by isolated gestures. It is created by the consistency between them. The leader who remembers birthdays must also be able to receive difficult feedback. The leader who asks after someone’s family must still listen when that person disagrees. The leader who tells people that their door is always open must pay attention to what happens to those who actually walk through it. People are not looking for perfection, but they are constantly looking for evidence that the person they see in the pleasant moments is the same person they will encounter when something becomes difficult.
Perhaps the greatest mistake leaders make is assuming that psychological safety begins with people speaking openly. It begins much earlier than that. Before someone raises a serious concern, they have probably watched what happened when another colleague questioned a minor decision. Before someone admits a significant mistake, they have probably noticed how the leader responded when somebody else made a smaller one. Before someone shares something personally difficult, they have probably accumulated months or years of evidence about whether the people around them can be trusted with vulnerability. Leaders may never know which interactions mattered most. I certainly do not know how many conversations I handled well enough for someone to return later, or how many I handled poorly enough for someone to decide that they would not. That uncertainty should create humility. We are influencing people’s willingness to speak long before they tell us that they are deciding whether it is safe.
The paradox is that the harder leaders deliberately try to create psychological safety, the more artificial their behaviour can become. I am not suggesting that organisations should stop measuring culture, developing leaders or creating proper systems for raising concerns. Those things matter. But there is a limit to what can be engineered. Trust is built through accumulated experiences that are difficult to place on a dashboard. Being remembered. Being listened to without interruption. Watching someone admit a mistake without being humiliated. Disagreeing and discovering that the relationship remains intact afterwards. Receiving a handwritten card that contains something only you and the person who wrote it would understand. None of these moments proves that a workplace is psychologically safe, but together they create evidence about the kind of place it is becoming.
I still remember the interview in Kazakhstan because a panel deliberately tested how I would react to criticism. I still remember the handwritten note I received because somebody took the time to make it personal. Colleagues remember birthday cards that probably took me only a few minutes to write. None of these moments would appear in a strategic plan, and perhaps that is what makes them important. Leadership happens in the spaces between the things we formally measure. People decide whether they trust us through interactions we may barely notice, and the culture we eventually create is often the accumulated result of moments that seemed insignificant at the time. Psychological safety does not begin when someone finally tells us the truth. It begins much earlier, when they are quietly deciding whether we are the kind of person they might one day trust enough to tell.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.