By Kylie Van Luyn | Elevated Coaching & Consulting
Most leaders who have a psychological safety problem don’t know they have one.
That’s not a criticism. It’s just how the dynamic works. Because the leaders most likely to have unsafe teams aren’t the obvious villains — the shouty, dismissive, credit-stealing managers we all recognise immediately. They’re often thoughtful, self-aware people who genuinely care about their teams. People who have explicitly invited honest feedback. Who consider themselves approachable. Who would be genuinely surprised — and hurt — to learn that their team is holding back.
The gap between what a leader believes they’re creating and what their team is actually experiencing is one of the most consequential blind spots in leadership. And it’s almost entirely invisible to the person who has it.
Here’s the number that should stop every leader in their tracks: according to McKinsey research, only 26% of leaders exhibit the workplace behaviours that actually create psychological safety at work. That means roughly three in four leaders believe they’re building something that, in practice, they aren’t. A Deloitte study found something equally striking — only 50% of workers say their manager actually creates psychological safety on their team.
Two different studies. The same uncomfortable conclusion. So the question isn’t whether your team feels psychologically safe. It’s whether you actually know.
Why Leaders Get This Wrong
There’s a structural problem at the heart of this: leaders assess the psychological safety of their environment from inside their own experience. And their experience of the team is rarely the same as the team’s experience of them.
A leader can invite dissent and genuinely mean it. But if the person sitting across the table has watched what happened to the last person who pushed back — who got quietly sidelined from a key project, or whose idea was dismissed in front of the group — they already know what speaking up costs. The invitation is sincere. The risk is real. Both of those things can be true at the same time. And in that tension, most people will quietly choose safety.
Leaders also tend to misread the signals available to them. Smooth meetings read as alignment. No complaints read as satisfaction. “Everything’s fine” reads as fine. None of these are reliable indicators of what people are actually thinking — they’re indicators of what people feel safe saying. The distinction sounds subtle. The implications are enormous.
There’s also the reality that leaders routinely receive a curated version of their team’s experience. People share more when there’s less at stake. They self-censor when they’re talking to the person who writes their performance review, shapes their next opportunity, or influences whether they’re perceived as a team player. It isn’t calculated dishonesty — it’s a rational response to power. And it means leaders are regularly making judgements about team psychological safety based on information that has already been filtered through that power dynamic before it reaches them.
The scale of that gap is larger than most leaders want to believe. Mental Health America research found that 63% of workers don’t feel safe sharing their opinions at work. That isn’t a fringe finding from a particularly toxic industry — it’s the majority experience. Which means in most workplaces, most of the time, most people are self-editing before they speak.
Three Beliefs That Keep the Blind Spot in Place
The gap between perception and reality isn’t random. It tends to be held in place by a specific set of beliefs — each one reasonable on the surface, each one worth examining closely.
| The Belief | What’s Actually Happening |
| “My door is always open.” | An open door is infrastructure, not a safety signal. What determines whether people walk through it is everything that happened before the door was opened — the meetings where concerns went nowhere, the colleague who was sidelined after speaking up, the feedback that never seemed to land anywhere. People aren’t assessing the door. They’re assessing the history on the other side of it. |
| “If something were really wrong, I’d know.” | Serious problems in low-trust environments don’t surface — they go quiet. They get managed around. They become the thing everyone knows about and nobody mentions, because the cost of naming it feels higher than the cost of tolerating it. By the time a leader finds out, the window for easy intervention has usually closed. |
| “My team knows I’m not like that.” | Individual character doesn’t override organisational culture. You might be the safest person in the building. That doesn’t mean the building feels safe. If your organisation has a history of punishing honesty or rewarding people who don’t rock the boat, your team is navigating that reality regardless of how approachable you personally are. |
The discomfort of reading that table is useful information. These beliefs feel true because they’re built from a leader’s genuine intentions — and intentions are not the same as impact.
What the Gap Actually Looks Like in Practice
If you’re genuinely curious about the distance between your perception and your team’s reality, these are the four places worth examining most closely. For each one, consider both what you’re likely seeing and what your team may actually be experiencing.
The meeting that runs too smoothly
A room where ideas flow easily, decisions land without debate, and everyone leaves aligned — it feels like good leadership. And sometimes it is. But the persistent absence of friction is worth scrutinising. When’s the last time someone genuinely changed your mind in a meeting? When did someone push back on a decision you’d already signalled you’d made? If the answer requires real effort to find, that’s worth sitting with.
The conversation that happens after the conversation
The chat in the kitchen after the meeting. The message that arrives twenty minutes after the call ends. The “hey, just between us” in the corridor. When the debrief is more candid than the meeting itself, it means people feel safer talking about the room than talking in it. That gap — between the public conversation and the private one — is where a lot of the real information lives. In teams with strong psychological safety at work, those two conversations are largely the same one.
The check-in that returns nothing
“How’s everything going?” is not a psychological safety question. It’s a social ritual that almost always returns a social answer. If your one-on-ones consistently produce surface-level responses, it’s tempting to read that as an absence of problems. It’s more accurately an absence of trust in the question. The specificity of what you ask signals how honest you actually want the answer to be.
The mistake that quietly vanishes
In high-performing teams, mistakes get named, examined, and learned from. In low-trust teams, they disappear. People cover tracks, work around the problem, and move on without discussion — because the risk of naming the mistake feels greater than the risk of letting it repeat. If errors on your team tend to surface late, or not at all, that pattern is telling you something important about what accountability feels like in practice.
The Perception Gap: What Leaders See vs. What Teams Experience
| What You’re Observing | What It Might Actually Mean |
| Agreement in meetings | People have learned that disagreement isn’t worth the energy |
| No complaints or concerns raised | The conditions for honesty haven’t been established yet |
| “Everything’s fine” in check-ins | People don’t trust the conversation enough to tell you the truth |
| Mistakes handled quietly | Naming errors feels riskier than hiding them |
| Low team turnover | People may have stopped investing their best thinking, not left |
| Positive engagement survey scores | Surveys measure what people are willing to put in writing — not the full picture |
None of these observations are definitive. Context matters. But if several of them are ringing true at once, that’s a pattern worth taking seriously.
How Psychological Safety Is Actually Built
Here’s what I want you to take from this: psychological safety in the workplace is not a fixed trait of certain lucky teams or particularly charismatic leaders. It is not something you either have or you don’t.
It’s a set of practices and signals. And it responds to deliberate, consistent attention.
That means every interaction is a data point your team is using to calibrate whether it’s safe to speak. Building trust at work — the real kind, not the poster-on-the-wall version — happens through accumulated evidence. It’s not built in a day, and it’s rarely built through grand gestures. It’s built through the small moments that stack up over time.
How Trust Builds: The Evidence Your Team Is Collecting
| Early Signal | Building Evidence | Psychological Safety Established |
| Someone pushes back | Nothing bad happens | It’s safe to disagree |
| A mistake gets named | Leader responds with curiosity, not blame | Honesty here is okay |
| A concern is raised | Something changes | Speaking up matters |
| A quiet voice is invited into the room | Their idea is taken seriously | Everyone belongs in this room |
None of these moments feel significant in isolation. But over time, they compound — and they become the culture. Equally, the reverse is true. Every time speaking up is punished, even subtly, it becomes a data point in the other direction. Your team is always collecting evidence. The question is what story that evidence is telling.
Closing the Gap
The uncomfortable truth is that you cannot close a gap you don’t believe exists. Which means the first move is simply this: genuine curiosity about what your team’s experience actually is, as opposed to what you’d like it to be.
That requires asking different questions. Not “is everything okay?” but “what’s been harder than it should be lately?” Not “do you feel comfortable raising concerns?” but watching what actually happens the next time someone does — and paying close attention to the ripple effect through the room.
It requires noticing the signals that are easy to explain away — the quiet in the room, the agreement that came a little too fast, the person who hasn’t contributed in three meetings — and treating them as information rather than coincidence.
And it requires a particular kind of humility that doesn’t come naturally to most leaders: the willingness to seriously entertain the possibility that what you’re creating and what your team is experiencing are not the same thing. That your intentions, however good, are not the whole story.
How to build psychological safety isn’t a mystery. The research is clear, and the practices are learnable. But none of it works if a leader starts from the assumption that they already have it.
The leaders who get this right aren’t the ones who assume their teams feel safe. They’re the ones who stay genuinely curious about whether they do — and who keep asking even when the answer is uncomfortable.
Ready to Find Out What Your Team Is Actually Experiencing?
If this post has prompted some honest reflection, a Psychological Safety workshop might be the right next step. We work with leadership teams across Australia and the US to close the gap between perception and reality — and to build the conditions where people can actually be honest.
Get in touch to explore what that could look like for your team.