What Happens When Psychological Safety is Misunderstood?

I’ve worked with leaders who are eager to foster psychologically healthy and safe workplaces, but they sometimes hesitate. This is because they worry that their well-intentioned efforts might be misinterpreted or even used against them.

For example, a leader I was coaching wanted to create a more inclusive team environment. During a meeting, they relayed that they had made a conscious effort to check in with quieter team members and invited their input. Later, one employee expressed that being called on made them feel psychologically unsafe.

It’s a delicate moment. On one hand, psychological safety means we shouldn't feel shamed, silenced, or punished for speaking up (or staying quiet).
On the other hand, it doesn’t mean we’re exempt from being engaged, challenged, or invited into conversation, especially when it’s seemingly done with respect and positive intent. And of course, nuance matters. Every team, every conversation, and every person brings unique context and it’s up to the individuals involved in that dialogue to appropriately discern.

Generally, there's a difference between upholding psychological safety and misunderstanding it in ways that can unintentionally undermine healthy workplace norms.

In moments like this we can maintain balance by starting with curiosity over judgment, looking more closely at intent and impact, and having conversations that clarify rather than assume.

Here are a few open-ended questions we might ask leaders to better understand their approach (with reference to the above example):

“I noticed you called on me in the meeting, can you share what your intention was behind that?”

“Can you tell me more about how you’re trying to create space for different voices on the team?”

“Would you be open to hearing what helps me feel more comfortable contributing?”

Psychological health and safety is a shared responsibility. It’s upheld by the organization, the team, and the individual. If one is missing, the foundation becomes unstable.

As we build more humanized, connected workplaces, let’s give one another the benefit of the doubt, stay open to feedback, and keep showing up respectfully and responsibly, for our roles and for each other.

When Values Collide: Understanding Moral Injury

Have you ever felt like your job asked you to go against your values?
That knot in your stomach, that deep discomfort, it’s more than just stress or burnout; it’s an occupational phenomenon called moral injury.

Moral injury is the distress we feel when we’re part of, witness, or are unable to stop something that goes against our deepest sense of what’s right. It's when the system, the situation, or the pressure from others forces you to act against your moral compass.

Examples of moral injury:

-A nurse forced to decide who gets the last available ventilator during covid.
-A bylaw officer clearing a homeless encampment, knowing there’s nowhere else for people to go.
-A chef asked to serve food that isn’t quite fresh just to save money.

These aren’t just hard days at work, they’re moments where personal integrity clashes with professional responsibility.

So what can organizations do to address the problem?

1. Create Psychological Safety
Make it safe for people to express their concerns openly without fear of blame. Normalize tough conversations.

2. Acknowledge the Conflict
Moral tension isn’t just part of the job. Recognize when people are being put in impossible situations and do what you can in your power to help, even if that means lending an ear and listening, it matters.

3. Clarify Ethical Support
Provide clear guidelines and support structures. One hospital I worked at held regular ethics rounds, where staff could process difficult decisions with peers and an ethics team. They also had EAPs and critical incident debriefings to help staff cope after distressing events.

4. Fix Broken Systems
If flawed policies or under-resourcing are the root of the issue and it’s in your power to do so, address them. Be transparent about progress, even when you don’t have updates. It builds trust.

5. Support Self-Care and Systemic Change
Yoga classes are nice. But they don’t fix systemic overload. One team I worked with saw rising burnout, and in response, management not only offered wellness resources but they also reviewed workloads and hired more staff. Real change requires both individual and organizational care.

Failing Forward: What Our Mistakes Teach Us

"Fall down seven times, get up eight" - Japanese proverb

We hear about failure all the time and how it’s necessary to ‘fail forward’ in order to achieve success. Social media is full of stories about exceptional scholars, athletes, and artists who recount the many trials and setbacks they faced before achieving greatness.

And although we seem to be glorifying failure as a society, deeming it integral to success, it seems the mere thought of messing up still triggers fear, shame, and self-doubt.

Amy Edmondson takes a deep dive into the science of failure in her new book The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science Failing Well, breaking down failure into three categories:

1) Basic Failure: Preventable mistakes in well-understood contexts (e.g., sending a confidential email to the wrong person).

2) Complex Failure: Arising from unpredictable interactions in dynamic systems (e.g., a patient experiencing complications due to overlapping factors like staff handovers and drug interactions).

3) Intelligent Failure: Thoughtful experimentation in uncertain situations where outcomes can’t be known in advance (e.g., a city testing a new traffic design that fails but yields valuable insights).

While basic and complex failures offer learning opportunities, intelligent failures are what drive innovation, progress, and growth.

In Stephen Dubner's latest Freakonomics podcast series, How to Succeed at Failing, he draws upon numerous cases, from medical failures to rocket launch disasters. Through interviews with subject matter experts, including Edmondson, Dubner offers a comprehensive picture of how and why we fail. What underscores the conversation is whether our society should disassociate shame from failure or if it’s indeed important for failures to be painful and “to burn” as one of his guests described.

I’m sharing this to highlight the critical role that organizational culture plays in shaping how we experience and respond to failure, and ultimately, how we build successful teams and businesses. Each of us brings different strengths and perspectives, but the real magic is in how we foster environments that uphold psychological safety to allow for them to be expressed , whether it’s how we delegate tasks, provide feedback to our peers, or show up for each other in times of challenge. Let's create workplaces where people feel comfortable and excited about taking chances, making mistakes, and getting messy!

Wellness VS. Psychological Health & Safety: What’s the Difference?

What’s the difference between Wellness and Psychological Health & Safety?

I often see these two terms used interchangeably in workplace conversations, but while wellness and psychological health and safety are closely related, they aren't the same thing. Understanding their distinctions is integral to building healthier, more productive workplaces.

Wellness refers to a holistic approach to an individual's overall health, inside and outside of work. It includes multiple dimensions: physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual, occupational, financial, and environmental.

An individual’s wellness is shaped by both personal habits and external influences, including (but not limited to) their work environment.

Psychological Health and Safety, on the other hand, is more workplace-specific. According to the CSA Group's National Standard of Canada, PH&S is about creating an environment where employees feel safe to speak up with questions/ideas, voice concerns, and acknowledge mistakes without fear of judgment, retaliation, or negative consequences.

In summary…

Wellness is individual-focused and PH&S is organizationally driven. A psychologically healthy and safe workplace forms a foundation that supports wellness.

Within a psychologically healthy and safe culture, employees can make mistakes and take the time to closely evaluate and learn from them, contribute ideas, and challenge the status quo respectfully. This in turn allows more opportunity for innovation, and maximizes productivity by encouraging employees to build services, solutions, and gadgets that are new and novel.

A few resources to learn more:

In British Columbia:

Check out WorkSafeBC's Psychological Health and Safety: A Framework for Success. This document highlights the most common psychosocial hazards and suggests helpful controls to put in place.

Across Canada:

Explore the CSA Group's National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. A fantastic document, which includes 13 psychosocial factors for organizations to uphold in order to foster PH&S.