When Google launched Project Aristotle to discover what makes teams truly effective, they expected technical skills or individual talent to top the list. Instead, they found something surprising: psychological safety was the single most important factor in team success. Claude Silver, author of “Be Yourself at Work” and Chief Heart Officer at VaynerX, has spent her career proving this truth—that the safest teams are often the strongest teams.
What Is Psychological Safety?
Psychological safety, as defined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It’s the foundation that allows teams to take risks, innovate, and perform at their highest levels.
In “Be Yourself at Work,” Silver emphasizes that psychological safety isn’t about being nice or avoiding difficult conversations. It’s about creating an environment where people feel safe to be honest, vulnerable, and fully themselves without fear of negative consequences to their career, status, or self-image.
This concept aligns with fundamental human needs. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs places safety as a basic requirement, just above physiological needs like food and shelter. Without safety—physical or psychological—humans cannot progress to higher levels of achievement, creativity, and self-actualization.
The Business Impact of Psychological Safety
Organizations often view psychological safety as a soft benefit, something nice to have but not essential to the bottom line. This perspective couldn’t be more wrong. Companies with high psychological safety consistently outperform those without it across multiple metrics.
At VaynerX, where Silver works alongside Gary Vaynerchuk, they’ve seen firsthand how psychological safety drives retention. While the advertising industry averages a two-year employee tenure, VaynerX boasts dozens of employees who have stayed for nine, ten, or eleven years. This retention saves enormous costs in recruiting, training, and lost productivity while building institutional knowledge that drives competitive advantage.
Teams with strong psychological safety also demonstrate higher innovation rates. When people feel safe to share half-formed ideas without judgment, they’re more likely to propose the breakthrough concepts that transform businesses. Fear of looking foolish or being shut down kills innovation before it can begin.
Additionally, psychological safety reduces costly mistakes. In environments where people fear admitting errors, small problems fester into major crises. When team members feel safe raising concerns early, issues get addressed before they become catastrophic.
The Neuroscience of Safety
Understanding why psychological safety matters requires examining how our brains work. Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman’s research, cited in Silver’s book, shows that social pain—like exclusion, rejection, or humiliation—activates the same brain regions as physical pain.
When we feel psychologically unsafe at work, our brains perceive threat. This triggers our fight, flight, or freeze response, flooding our system with stress hormones and shutting down the prefrontal cortex—the part of our brain responsible for complex thinking, creativity, and problem-solving.
In contrast, when we feel safe, our brains can engage in the higher-order thinking that drives innovation and excellent work. We can take risks, think creatively, collaborate effectively, and bring our full cognitive capacity to challenges.
This isn’t just theory—it’s biology. Leaders who dismiss psychological safety as touchy-feely are literally making their teams dumber by keeping them in a constant state of low-level threat response.
Signs Your Workplace Lacks Psychological Safety
Silver’s book helps readers identify whether their workplace fosters psychological safety or undermines it. Warning signs include:
Silence in meetings: When people consistently stay quiet, it’s often not because they have nothing to say. It’s because they don’t feel safe speaking up.
Back-channel communication: If important conversations happen in hallway whispers and Slack DMs rather than open forums, people don’t trust the formal channels.
Lack of questions: In psychologically safe environments, people ask questions without fear of looking stupid. When questions disappear, so has safety.
High turnover: People vote with their feet. Consistent departures, especially of talented employees, often signal a culture where people don’t feel safe or valued.
Blame culture: When mistakes lead to finger-pointing rather than learning, people learn to hide problems rather than solve them.
All-star individuals but underperforming teams: If you have talented people who achieve little collectively, lack of psychological safety may be preventing effective collaboration.
Creating Psychological Safety as a Leader
Building psychological safety requires intentional leadership. Silver outlines several practices that leaders must embrace:
Model vulnerability: Share your own mistakes, uncertainties, and learning edges. When leaders show their humanity, it gives permission for others to do the same. This doesn’t mean oversharing or being inappropriate—it means being real about challenges and growth areas.
Respond to mistakes with curiosity: When someone makes an error, your response sets the tone for your entire culture. Ask “What can we learn from this?” instead of “Who screwed up?” Frame mistakes as data points that inform better decisions rather than character flaws requiring punishment.
Invite dissent: Actively encourage people to challenge ideas, including your own. Make it clear that respectful disagreement isn’t just tolerated—it’s valued. Use phrases like “What am I missing?” or “Who sees this differently?” to signal openness.
Listen with presence: As Silver emphasizes, attention is the purest form of generosity. When people speak, give them your full presence. Put away your phone, maintain eye contact, and listen to understand rather than to respond.
Address violations swiftly: Psychological safety requires boundaries. When someone ridicules, dismisses, or punishes another for speaking up, address it immediately. Protecting safety means being willing to have difficult conversations with violators.
Celebrate contributions: Recognize not just results but the courage it takes to speak up, try new things, and be vulnerable. Make heroes out of people who admit mistakes early or ask hard questions.
The Timeline of Safety
Amy Edmondson’s research reveals that psychological safety operates on a timeline. Violations of safety create lasting damage that takes significant time to repair. One harsh dismissal can undo months of trust-building.
This reality makes prevention crucial. It’s far easier to maintain psychological safety than to rebuild it once broken. Leaders must view safety as an ongoing practice, not a one-time initiative.
At the same time, building psychological safety is a gradual process. People who’ve worked in toxic environments carry wounds that don’t heal overnight. Patience and consistency are essential. Keep showing up, keep modeling the right behaviors, and slowly, people will begin to trust.
Psychological Safety Across Different Team Types
Different teams face unique psychological safety challenges. Silver’s work at VaynerX spans diverse functions, and she’s learned how context shapes safety needs.
Creative teams: These groups need especially strong psychological safety because creativity requires risk-taking. Ideas that eventually become brilliant often start out sounding ridiculous. If creatives fear ridicule, they’ll only share safe, conventional concepts.
Technical teams: Engineers and developers need safety to admit when they don’t know something or when code isn’t working. The complexity of technical work means mistakes are inevitable—safety determines whether those mistakes get caught and fixed or hidden and compounded.
Client-facing teams: These professionals need safety to be honest about client challenges without fear that struggling with a difficult client reflects poorly on them. They need to seek help without seeming incompetent.
Leadership teams: Executives often face the greatest psychological safety challenges because they’re expected to have all the answers. Creating safety at the top is crucial because it cascades throughout the organization.
Psychological Safety and Accountability
A common misconception is that psychological safety means lowering standards or avoiding accountability. This fundamentally misunderstands the concept. Psychological safety and high standards go hand-in-hand.
In “Be Yourself at Work,” Silver makes clear that creating safety doesn’t mean accepting poor performance or avoiding difficult conversations. It means having those conversations in ways that preserve dignity and focus on growth rather than punishment.
High-performing teams embrace both support and challenge. They maintain rigorous standards while creating safety to fail, learn, and improve. The goal isn’t to protect people from consequences but to ensure the consequences support growth rather than fear.
Measuring Psychological Safety
To improve psychological safety, you need to measure it. Consider these assessment methods:
Anonymous surveys: Regular pulse checks asking specific questions about safety can reveal issues. Questions might include: “Do you feel comfortable sharing ideas even if they challenge the status quo?” or “Can you admit mistakes without fear of negative consequences?”
Exit interviews: Departing employees often provide honest feedback they wouldn’t share while employed. Look for patterns around why people leave.
Meeting participation rates: Track who speaks in meetings and who doesn’t. Are certain voices consistently absent? That’s data.
Innovation metrics: How many new ideas are being generated? How many calculated risks are teams taking? These behaviors require safety.
Conflict resolution: How are disagreements handled? Do conflicts get aired and resolved constructively, or do they simmer underground?
Psychological Safety for Remote and Hybrid Teams
The rise of remote work adds complexity to psychological safety. Virtual environments can amplify existing dynamics—for better or worse.
In remote settings, leaders must work harder to create the informal moments where psychological safety develops. Schedule virtual coffee chats, create channels for non-work conversation, and be intentional about building connection.
Video fatigue is real, but so is the importance of seeing faces. Encourage cameras on when possible while recognizing that sometimes people need a break. Balance is key.
Written communication lacks the nuance of in-person conversation, making misunderstandings more likely. Be explicit about tone, use emoji or gifs to convey warmth, and give people the benefit of the doubt when messages feel terse.
The Ripple Effect of Psychological Safety
When leaders create psychological safety, the impact extends far beyond immediate team dynamics. Safe workplaces produce:
Better mental health: Employees experience less stress, anxiety, and burnout when they don’t have to constantly guard themselves.
Stronger relationships: Safety allows authentic connection, turning coworkers into genuine friends and support systems.
Family benefits: People who feel safe at work bring less stress home, improving their family relationships and overall life satisfaction.
Community impact: Organizations built on psychological safety often extend that ethic into their communities, becoming forces for positive social change.
Conclusion
Claude Silver’s “Be Yourself at Work” presents psychological safety not as a nice-to-have perk but as an essential foundation for high performance. As she demonstrates through her pioneering work at VaynerX, creating environments where people feel safe to be themselves isn’t just ethically right—it’s strategically necessary.
The research is clear: psychologically safe teams outperform their peers across every meaningful metric. They innovate more, retain talent longer, and achieve better results. In a competitive landscape where human creativity and collaboration drive success, psychological safety isn’t optional.
Building this safety requires courage from leaders willing to model vulnerability, respond to mistakes with curiosity, and prioritize people even when it’s difficult. But the payoff—in performance, retention, innovation, and human flourishing—makes every bit of effort worthwhile.