Coaching Corner: Psychological Safety
The work to dismantle and replace oppressive systems with just and equitable approaches is incredibly complicated. But there are specific skills and strategies that make it possible to transform conditions in ourselves, our organizations and our communities. That’s the insight Research in Action offers in our trainings.
In our coaching, we work with different types of organizations — from small nonprofits to large philanthropies, from government agencies to private institutions — but we often see themes that apply across sectors. With this recurring series we’ll share timely insights that we hope can support folks no matter what type of work they’re doing to advance racial justice.
In a recent coaching scenario, we worked with an organization grappling with the concept of psychological safety and how they could achieve it in their workplace. Instead of focusing solely on psychological safety, we dug into the concept, exploring the ways it can be helpful and alternative approaches that might also serve an organization seeking to empower authentic staff engagement and leadership.
Defining Psychological Safety
Psychological safety refers to a “state of reduced interpersonal risk” where people can honestly contribute their thoughts and knowledge. When someone feels a sense of psychological safety they can represent themselves authentically, ask questions, and make mistakes without incurring disproportionate or harmful consequences. This can play a critical role in supporting individual, team, and organizational success through better learning and workplace engagement.
Benefits of Psychological Safety for Teams
Feelings of psychological safety help individuals overcome defensiveness and learner anxiety when presented with learning opportunities because they are confident they will not be punished for any mistakes that accompany the learning process.
Research emphasizes that psychological safety helps people express themselves more authentically as they perform their work role rather than withdrawing and defending their personal selves. This feeling of safety allows people to directly tap into the parts of themselves that they prefer to use as they perform their role, which leads to expending personal energies into a role, deeper engagement with a role, and increased performance.
Feelings of psychological safety also help teams move effectively through conflict and challenge the status quo to foster innovation.
Leaders(hip) and Facilitating Psychological Safety
Most resources for facilitating psychological safety take a top-down approach, focusing on practices and behaviors leaders can model to foster psychological safety, like sharing examples of their own mistakes or failures; promoting dialogue through open-ended questions and active listening for both facts and feelings; and creating space for new ideas and, if challenging them, doing so in the context of support
While leaders play an essential role, facilitating psychological safety is a process that leaders and team members co-create as a group. Teams are not monolithic, and individual members may have varying beliefs about their psychological safety given their experiences. Leaders should strive to understand how these perceptions change across individuals and scenarios —and recognize that authentic relationships and trust among team members is a precursor to psychological safety.
To build high-quality relationships and trust in the workplace, leaders must begin with building shared goals, knowledge, and team respect through consistent effort and everyday interactions, like celebrating wins, acting on new ideas shared by employees, forming strong relationships with key influencers on a team and mapping out work processes that draw out connections and flow of work between employees.
The Limits of Psychological Safety
There are limitations to psychological safety frameworks, particularly for BIPOC communities. For example, existing best practices highlight the importance of constructive conflict and staff’s ability to challenge the status quo. However, these practices do not acknowledge, for example, how racial stereotypes frame Black women’s expressions of dissent as aggression or insubordination. These judgments are further compounded by dominant groups minimizing or invalidating contributions from marginalized folks and gaslighting those who call attention to unjust behaviors. Additionally, organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion work often only creates an illusion of inclusion and safety for BIPOC staff or the appearance that organizational standards are addressing race/racism while simultaneously marginalizing staff of color.
White supremacy characteristics operating within the workplace (e.g., rigid hierarchies and power hoarding) are fundamentally at odds with conditions that will produce psychological safety, but strategies for addressing white supremacy culture at work (e.g., challenging dominant perspectives, collaborative decision-making, mutually agreed upon ground rules) will benefit an organization’s overall cohesion.
Still, internal organizational practice must also contend with the outside world. Attempts to facilitate psychological safety for all may obfuscate the various barriers to interpersonal safety for those with marginalized identities while also simultaneously substantiating a right to comfort (i.e., believing someone deserves to maintain a sense of comfort even when discussing difficult topics or resisting learning when uncomfortable), particularly for white and otherwise privileged groups. Centering psychological safety as a required component for learning or disagreement may, based on facilitation, actually limit people’s ability to engage with the discomfort required for behavioral change, particularly when discussing injustice and inequitable practice.
Alternatives or Supplementary Paradigms to Psychological Safety
In 2025, in recognition of the fact that BIPOC staff and members of the global majority are not guaranteed psychological safety, Jerad Green and Andrea Perez-Maikkula proposed psychological agency as an additive framework.37 They built their framework according to their research but have not empirically investigated psychological agency as a construct. Whereas psychological safety emphasizes one’s ability to speak up without fear, psychological agency “shifts the focus inward, highlighting individuals’ autonomy over how, when, and to what extent they choose to bring their authentic selves into workplace settings.” Psychological agency has four core tenets: Awareness and Love of Self; Self-Expression and Efficacy; Flexibility and Agility; and Autonomy and Choice. The authors are clear in emphasizing that, even though psychological agency focuses further inward on the individual, staff still need access to community and “affirming spaces.”
john powell’s work on belonging resembles key elements of psychological safety but as a framework for overcoming critical divides in society at large. powell positions belonging as “the right to fully participate in and co-create the world you live in.” In true belonging, all members’ perspectives are valued and have the opportunity to participate in the actual design of structures. powell underscores that, while belonging is felt at the individual level, structures play a major role in ensuring those feelings are possible. To facilitate belonging along lines of difference, powell discusses ‘bridging’ as a way to facilitate deeper connection with one another. To bridge successfully, one must embrace complexity and explore how others are situated within a particular context, for example. Similar to top-down models of psychological safety, powell emphasizes that when bridging across power differentials, the onus of bridging falls more so on those with more social or situational power. powell’s framework explores ways to deconstruct othering and promote fellowship at a broader social level, but we think it’s reasonable to say psychological safety is an outcome of bridging and belonging strategies.
‘Safe spaces’, a term previously used to describe sites where marginalized folks could congregate for community-building, was once a popular term within education to describe environments where students are able to express themselves authentically when navigating challenging topics, posing potential social and psychological risk. However, as previously mentioned, people are often inclined to conflate safety with comfort. To address this, Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens proposed brave space as an alternative. Brave spaces, with conceptual ties to pedagogies of discomfort and courageous conversations about race, emphasize the need for courage when discussing challenging topics rather than creating an illusion of safety. In execution, brave spaces can still perpetuate the exploitation of marginalized community members’ mental and emotional labor if facilitators and attendees are not prioritizing the perspectives of those most impacted.
At Research in Action, we push back against the safe space and brave space models with intentional space. Safe space falsely presumes we can guarantee safety for all and brave space often places the burden of bravery on impacted communities. While we hope to hold space for people to show up authentically and share their truths, even when uncomfortable, we simultaneously strive to avoid coercive vulnerability or the sense that people must demonstrate vulnerability. We aim to create intentional environments and protocols for holding space, applying principles of trauma-informed care to facilitate courageous, vulnerable, and honest exploration collectively while honoring our individual identities and naming the way dominant culture assigns privilege or marginalization based on these identities.
The framing shifts between safe space, brave space, and intentional space resembles discourse surrounding “calling-out” versus “calling-in.” Call-outs draw attention to offensive language or behaviors often with the goal of sparking shame whereas call-ins are more thoughtful conversations explaining why something is offensive. While both are attempts at social regulation, call-outs are public censuring of behavior while call-ins are (often private) personal dialogues. Call-ins are often accompanied with fewer social and interpersonal risks than call-outs and are considered more likely to result in social change.
Conclusion
To support teams of any kind in exploring psychological safety, we encourage you to reflect on the following questions:
What practices and procedures are in place to elevate all our members’ perspectives and contributions?
How, if at all, have we formed collective agreements for what expectations we can hold one another accountable to?
How do we cultivate intentional space for transparent and ongoing learning?
How do we navigate inevitable mistakes? Are we prepared to receive mistakes with a growth mindset rooted in collective growth rather than shame?
What happens when our status quo is challenged? Who is listened to, whose perspectives are encouraged or discouraged?
How do we navigate differing perspectives and challenges to their beliefs or approaches?
What does psychological safety mean to our members? What does psychological safety mean within the context of our intersecting identities and access to power?
What do we envision when we think of a ‘psychologically safe’ team? What does it feel, look, and sound like?
What are the basics of radical hospitality and how can I practice these in my work?
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