Most projects that fail don’t fail because of poor planning, inadequate budgets or the wrong methodology. They fail because somebody in the team knew something was going wrong and didn’t say anything.
That silence is not laziness or indifference. It is a symptom of something far more damaging: a lack of psychological safety. And for Project Managers, understanding this concept isn’t optional. It is arguably the most important thing we can invest our attention in if we want to build teams that actually perform.
Psychological safety is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. The term was popularised by Professor Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School, and her research has consistently shown that the highest performing teams aren’t the ones with the most talent or the biggest budgets. They are the ones where people feel safe enough to take risks, challenge assumptions & admit when something isn’t working.
What This Looks Like on Real Projects
Think about the last project you worked on where something went wrong. Not a small hiccup; a proper, significant issue. How quickly did the team raise it? Was it flagged early, when there was still time to course correct? Or did it sit buried in someone’s inbox, growing quietly, because nobody wanted to be the one to deliver bad news? Maybe it even sat in your inbox growing quietly because you didn’t know how to deal with it…
Having managed projects for over 15 years…& now running my own business…I can tell you that the projects where things go most spectacularly wrong are not the ones with the biggest technical challenges. They were the ones where people didn’t feel they could be honest. Where junior team members stayed quiet in meetings because the culture told them their opinion didn’t count. Where concerns were raised privately behind closed doors but never made it into the room where decisions were being taken.
Google’s well-known Project Aristotle study found that psychological safety was the number 1 predictor of team effectiveness, above dependability, structure, meaning & impact. Let me say that again….psychological safety was the number 1 predictor of team effectiveness. And yet, often, we spend little time thinking about the culture that we are actually building on our projects. It’s something that every Project Manager needs to be aware of: how people feel in a team matters more than what processes we wrap around them.
Why We Get This Wrong
Part of the problem is that we have been trained to focus on the tangible. Gantt charts, risk registers, RAG statuses, new technological enhancements. These are the places where we invest our time, money & training. Nobody walks into a board meeting and says, “The team’s psychological safety score has improved by 15% this quarter”…but maybe we should.
We also underestimate the role that we, as Project Managers, play in setting the tone. Every time we react badly to a mistake, dismiss a concern or allow a senior stakeholder to shut down a conversation, we are telling our team that silence is safer than honesty. And once that message embeds into a project dynamic, it is incredibly difficult to undo.
What We Can Do Differently
So how do we build this into our projects? How do we create environments where people genuinely feel safe to contribute, challenge & flag problems early?
It starts with us as PMs, as project leaders. We have to model the behaviour we want to see. That means being open about our own mistakes, asking questions rather than giving orders & creating space in meetings for quieter voices. It means responding to bad news with curiosity rather than blame. Simply put, it means being human first and Project Manager second.
It also means paying attention to the small things. The way we open a meeting, the language we use when things go off track, whether we follow up when someone raises a concern or let it quietly disappear. These moments might seem insignificant in isolation, but they accumulate. They shape the culture of a project far more than any governance framework ever will.
Research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development suggests that teams with high psychological safety are 27% more likely to report higher performance & significantly less likely to experience burnout. For an industry that is struggling with retention & wellbeing, those numbers should be impossible to ignore.
Our ability to work with humans is our superpower as Project Managers. Psychological safety is not a soft, fluffy concept that sits outside the “real work” of delivering projects. It is the foundation that everything else is built on. Without it, we are managing tasks. With it, we are leading teams.
So, Project Managers, let’s stop treating how our teams feel as secondary to what our teams produce. The two are inseparable. And if we can get this right, we won’t just deliver better projects…we’ll build better workplaces, too.