What Business Leaders Get Wrong About Psychological Safety

Every company I have worked at or built has had some version of an open-door policy. And at every one of those companies, people were afraid to walk through the door. Not because the leader was threatening. Because the culture had never been tested. Nobody knew what would actually happen when someone said something uncomfortable, so nobody said it.

That gap between what leaders say about safety and what employees actually experience is where most organizations fail. They invest in the language of psychological safety without building the infrastructure that makes it real. And in communities and workforces affected by gun violence and trauma, that gap is not just a culture problem. It is a performance problem, a retention problem, and a human problem that leaders cannot afford to ignore.

What Google found that most companies ignored

In 2015, Google published the results of Project Aristotle, a multi-year study of what makes teams effective. They tested every variable they could think of: team composition, individual intelligence, seniority mix, workload, management style. The single strongest predictor of team performance was psychological safety, the belief that you will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

Companies read that research and responded by putting psychological safety on their values wall. Some added it to their onboarding presentations. A few created anonymous feedback channels. And most of them stopped there. They treated psychological safety as a policy to announce rather than a practice to build. The result is an industry-wide gap between what organizations claim and what employees experience.

I have managed teams at every scale, from a 10-person crew at Penebaker Enterprises to 180 employees at Roofed Right America to four regional markets at Great Day Improvements. Psychological safety does not come from a policy. It comes from what happens the first time someone tells the leader something the leader does not want to hear. If the response is defensive, the experiment is over and the team learned the real rule: tell the boss what the boss wants to hear. If the response is curious, the door actually opens.

Why most safety initiatives miss the point

The most common mistake is confusing comfort with safety. Psychological safety does not mean everyone is comfortable all the time. It means the team can tolerate discomfort in service of better outcomes. A psychologically safe team has harder conversations, not easier ones. People challenge each other’s ideas because they trust that the pushback is about the work, not the person.

The second mistake is treating psychological safety as a universal experience. It is not. A white male executive and a Black female entry-level employee do not experience the same workplace the same way, even if the policies are identical. The history, the power dynamics, the daily micro-interactions that either build or erode trust are fundamentally different. Leaders who design psychological safety programs without accounting for those differences end up building something that works for the people who already felt safe and does nothing for the people who needed it most.

The third mistake is ignoring what employees bring to work from outside the office. People do not leave their lives at the door. They bring their financial stress, their family problems, their health concerns, and their trauma. In communities affected by gun violence, that trauma is not a rare exception. It is a daily reality for a large portion of the workforce. A psychological safety program that does not account for that reality is incomplete at best and performative at worst.

Trauma shows up at work whether you acknowledge it or not

In 2024, more than 44,000 Americans died from gunshot wounds. For every person who died, dozens more were directly affected: family members, friends, neighbors, witnesses, first responders. Many of those people go to work the next day. They sit in your meetings. They serve your customers. They manage your projects. And unless you have created a culture where they can be honest about what they are carrying, they are doing all of that while pretending everything is fine.

Trauma affects cognitive function. It impairs concentration, decision-making, and the ability to regulate emotions under stress. In a workplace, that translates to missed deadlines, interpersonal conflicts, increased errors, and disengagement. A manager who does not understand trauma might see those symptoms and conclude that the employee has a performance problem. The actual problem is that the employee is surviving a crisis while trying to meet expectations that were designed for someone who is not.

I have seen this play out in every company I have led. At Roofed Right America, we had crew members who lived in neighborhoods where shootings were regular occurrences. Some had lost family members. Others had witnessed violence firsthand. The ones who worked for managers who understood what they were going through performed better and stayed longer than the ones whose managers treated it as a personal problem to be managed quietly. That is not anecdotal. It is a pattern I have watched repeat across two decades of managing teams.

The gun violence connection leaders do not see

Gun violence does not stay in the neighborhoods where it happens. It follows people to work, to school, to the grocery store, and into every relationship they have. The Centers for Disease Control identifies gun violence as a public health crisis, and public health crises do not respect the boundary between personal life and professional life.

Consider the math. In Milwaukee alone, hundreds of people are shot every year. Each of those individuals has coworkers, and each of those coworkers is affected by what happened. Multiply that across every city in America and you begin to understand the scale of the workforce impact. This is not a niche issue that affects a small number of employees in a few industries. It is a systemic reality that touches every sector, every company size, and every geography, including rural communities where gun suicide rates are significantly higher than in urban areas.

My mother died by suicide with a gun when I was 20 months old. I have spent my entire adult life processing that loss while building businesses, managing teams, and performing at a high level. I did not have the luxury of separating those experiences. Neither do your employees. The question is not whether trauma affects your workforce. It does. The question is whether you are going to build a culture that acknowledges that reality or pretend it does not exist.

What genuine psychological safety looks like

Real psychological safety is built through consistent behavior, not through programs or policies. Here is what it looks like in practice:

Leaders go first. If you want your team to be vulnerable, you have to model it. Share your own mistakes. Admit when you do not know something. Respond to bad news with curiosity instead of blame. The first time a leader does this authentically, it gives everyone else permission to do the same.

Feedback flows in all directions. In a psychologically safe team, junior people can challenge senior people without career consequences. That does not happen naturally. It has to be built through deliberate practice and visible reinforcement. When someone pushes back on my idea and it leads to a better outcome, I say that out loud. “Your pushback improved this. Thank you.” That creates the incentive for the next person to speak up.

Support is specific, not generic. “Let me know if you need anything” is not support. It is a phrase that puts the burden on the person who is struggling to ask for help they might not know how to request. Genuine support is proactive and specific. “I noticed you have been off this week. I am not asking you to tell me what is going on, but I want you to know that if you need a flexible day or someone to cover a meeting, I can make that happen.”

Resources exist before they are needed. Employee assistance programs, mental health benefits, and manager training on trauma-informed leadership should be in place before a crisis, not scrambled together after one. The time to build the fire escape is before the fire.

Building it into your culture

At Great Day Improvements, I am building a culture where people can be honest about what they are dealing with without it becoming a liability. That does not mean every meeting turns into a therapy session. It means that when someone is struggling, the response from leadership is practical support rather than awkward silence or performative concern.

The construction and home improvement industries have some of the highest rates of suicide and substance abuse of any sector. That is not a coincidence. The physical demands, the financial pressures, the culture of toughness that discourages vulnerability, all of it creates risk factors that interact with firearm access in dangerous ways. Leaders in these industries have a particular responsibility to build psychological safety, and a particular opportunity to save lives by doing so.

I do not have this figured out. Nobody does. But I know that the companies that acknowledge the full humanity of their employees, including the parts that are messy and painful and connected to realities outside the office, will outperform the ones that pretend work exists in a vacuum. The data on psychological safety is clear. The data on trauma’s impact on performance is clear. The only question is whether leaders are willing to do the uncomfortable work of connecting those two bodies of evidence and building something real.

The leadership responsibility

If you lead a team, you are responsible for the environment your people work in. That environment either helps them perform at their best or it makes an already difficult situation worse. There is no neutral option. Silence is a choice, and it communicates that you either do not notice or do not care.

Gun violence is not going to solve itself. Neither is the workplace impact of trauma, stress, and loss that your employees carry. But you can build a team culture where people feel safe enough to be honest, supported enough to get help, and respected enough to bring their full selves to work. That is not soft leadership. That is effective leadership. And it starts with the decision to stop pretending that the world outside your office does not affect the work inside it.

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Last updated: March 9, 2026