Five Blind Men and Psychological Safety: What Are We Not Seeing?

Psychological safety is one of the most widely discussed ideas in leadership today. Yet despite the growing attention it receives, there remains considerable confusion about what it is and what it is not.

The story of the blind men and the elephant offers a useful analogy. Each man touches a different part of the elephant and arrives at a different conclusion about what the animal is. One feels the trunk and thinks it is a snake. Another touches a leg and believes it is a tree. Another feels the side and concludes it is a wall.

Each person is partly right and entirely incomplete.

The same may be true of our understanding of psychological safety.

Before We Talk About Psychological Safety, We Should Talk About Emotional Culture

Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. The language is important. Psychological safety is, fundamentally, a perception.

Perceptions, however, are not formed in isolation. They are filtered through emotions and shaped by repeated experiences. People do not evaluate interpersonal risks in purely rational terms. They ask themselves whether they will be embarrassed, rejected, judged, excluded, or made to lose face.

This is why discussions about psychological safety should begin with emotional culture.

Emotional culture refers to the emotions that are encouraged, discouraged, and socially reinforced within a group. Every team develops norms about which emotions are acceptable and how they should be expressed. These norms influence whether people feel apprehensive, confident, respected, anxious, or comfortable when taking interpersonal risks.

Psychological safety is therefore not merely a cognitive assessment of the environment. It is also an emotional experience of the environment.

The First Blind Man: Psychological Safety Is Being Nice

Some organisations equate psychological safety with kindness and harmonious interactions. The assumption is that people feel safe when there is little disagreement and everyone gets along.

Yet teams can be polite and still be psychologically unsafe. Members may avoid difficult conversations, withhold concerns, and remain silent about emerging problems.

Harmony can coexist with hesitation.

Psychological safety is not the absence of tension. It is the ability to engage in necessary tension without fear of interpersonal consequences.

The Second Blind Man: Psychological Safety Is Trust

Others define psychological safety as trust. The concepts are related but not interchangeable.

Trust often concerns expectations about another person's intentions or behaviour.

Psychological safety concerns whether a person believes they can take interpersonal risks in a group setting.

A team may trust one another's competence and integrity and still hesitate to ask questions, admit mistakes, or challenge prevailing assumptions. Trust may be one very important part of the elephant, but it is not the entire animal.

The Third Blind Man: Psychological Safety Is Speaking Up

The most visible manifestation of psychological safety is voice. Consequently, many leaders assess safety by observing who speaks during meetings.

This interpretation can be misleading. Speaking up is an outcome, not the construct itself.

People may speak frequently because they hold positional power, because the topic carries little personal risk, or because cultural norms encourage direct expression.

Others may choose different and equally effective avenues to raise concerns.

The more important question is whether people believe they can express concerns when the stakes are high.

The Fourth Blind Man: Psychological Safety Is Leader Behaviour

Leadership behaviours matter greatly. Inviting questions, admitting mistakes, and responding constructively to dissent all contribute to psychological safety.

Yet leaders do not create psychological safety by declaration. Team members construct perceptions from accumulated experiences and observations.

A leader may repeatedly encourage candour and unintentionally undermine it by becoming defensive when challenged. Conversely, some leaders rarely use the language of psychological safety and nonetheless create environments where people feel comfortable raising difficult issues.

We are also ignoring the fact that people join companies with already strong reservations of speaking up, either because of work trauma or less positive experiences. These emotions can be contagious and over time, become learned behaviour and practice.

Practices matter because they become emotional experiences. Repeated experiences of being listened to, treated respectfully, and not penalised for mistakes gradually generate confidence. Repeated experiences of embarrassment or dismissal generate caution and silence.

Psychological safety resides not in leadership intentions or isolated behaviours but in the shared perceptions that emerge from these accumulated experiences.

The Fifth Blind Man: Psychological Safety Is a Universal Behaviour

Global organisations often assume that psychologically safe teams look the same everywhere. They expect open disagreement in meetings and direct challenges to authority.

Culture complicates this assumption.

In many Asian contexts, interpersonal risk includes not only the possibility of embarrassment or punishment but also concerns about preserving relationships, respecting hierarchy, and avoiding loss of face. The emotional costs associated with speaking up can therefore be different.

People may choose more indirect ways of expressing concerns or reserve disagreement for private conversations. These behaviours should not automatically be interpreted as an absence of psychological safety.

The principle remains unchanged. Psychological safety concerns interpersonal risk-taking. What changes is how that risk-taking is expressed and the emotional meanings attached to it.

Culture and emotional culture are therefore inseparable from psychological safety.

They shape what people perceive as risky and influence the practices through which safety can be created. If we assume a single model for what psychological safety looks like without understanding context, we might as well be banging our heads against a wall.

Seeing the Elephant

Perhaps the enduring confusion around psychological safety arises because we continue to examine only one part of the elephant. We focus on kindness, trust, speaking up, leadership behaviour, or cultural norms and mistake one dimension for the whole.

Psychological safety is both perception and practice. Practices create experiences. Experiences shape emotions. Emotions shape perceptions. Over time, these perceptions become a shared belief about whether interpersonal risk-taking is safe.

The challenge for leaders is not to decide which interpretation is correct. It is to recognise that psychological safety emerges from the interplay between behaviours, emotions, perceptions, and culture, and to ask a more difficult question:

What forms of interpersonal risk still feel unsafe in our teams, and what parts of the elephant are we still failing to see?

#emotionalculture #emotionalleadership #psychologicalsafety #strengths4lyf

(This article appeared in LinkedIn on June 26, 2026)