Fear Kills Improvement. Replace it with Psychological Safety.
Leaders say they want innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement. But too often, what they actually reward is predictability — people who keep things running smoothly and don’t make waves. The trouble is, improvement requires waves. It requires people to surface problems early, speak uncomfortable truths, and take smart risks. None of that happens without psychological safety.
Psychological safety is the belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. That it’s OK to admit a mistake, ask a question, or challenge an idea without fear of embarrassment or punishment. It’s not about being nice or comfortable. It’s about being real enough to surface what’s actually happening so the team can learn and improve.
And in a Lean organization, that’s everything.
Why It Matters So Much for Lean
Continuous improvement asks a lot of people. It asks managers to trust their teams instead of handing out solutions. It asks employees to raise problems and admit when they don’t know. It asks everyone to experiment, knowing that often, an experiment will not produce a direct improvement.
That only works if the environment makes it safe to do so.
Without psychological safety, the systems of Lean become theater. When they can’t show “red” on a visual board, stop the line to question quality, or point out a disconnect between customer needs and current services, people nod, smile, and go back to hiding what’s really going on. Fear quietly replaces learning, and the organization stops improving even as it keeps “checking the boxes.”
What It Looks Like When Safety Is Missing
Picture this: a project leader calls a meeting to brainstorm improvements. “I want bold ideas!” he says. One team member suggests a creative way to reduce product returns, that is ambitious, potentially transformative, but never been done before. The leader questions how much work it will take. Another team member piles on the skepticism. The room goes quiet.
That moment doesn’t just kill one idea. It kills a dozen future ones. The team learns that “innovation” really means “whatever we’re already pretty sure works.”
Or take the HR team that jokes about “bad hires” and brushes off constructive feedback from a hiring manager. When someone suggests asking newer employees directly what the company is getting wrong about onboarding, the leader sneers. In that kind of culture, sarcasm isn’t harmless — it’s a shield against discomfort. And every time a real issue gets laughed away, the business loses another chance to learn.
Then there’s the classic fear-based spiral: an employee finds an error, brings it up to their boss, and gets chewed out for it. Next month, the same issue happens again, only now no one says a word. Fear doesn’t just stifle honesty, it multiplies mistakes.
In all three cases, the pattern is the same. Leaders think they’re maintaining standards or staying efficient, but what they’re actually doing is teaching people to keep quiet. The result: compliance without creativity, effort without engagement, action without learning.
The Learning Zone
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the term psychological safety, found that the most successful teams weren’t the ones making the fewest mistakes — they were the ones reporting the most.[1]
Why? Because catching small issues early allows for quick correction and collective learning. Fear, on the other hand, hides problems until they’re public, catastrophic, or both.
Edmondson describes the “learning zone” as the sweet spot where high psychological safety meets high accountability. Too much pressure without safety, and people retreat into anxiety. Too much comfort without accountability, and performance drifts. But when people are both supported and expected to deliver, learning thrives, and so does improvement.
What This Means for Lean Leaders
Lean leaders keep things in that learning zone. Every mechanism of Lean management, from team huddles to A3 problem-solving, assumes people will think critically, and speak up. It assumes they’ll say, “This isn’t working,” “I have an idea,” or “I don’t know.”
Those words require vulnerability. They require trust that the person with more authority won’t make them regret it.
That’s why the role of a Lean leader isn’t to have all the answers; it’s to create the conditions where the answers can emerge.
So I challenge you to try on the following behaviors:
Acknowledge your own fallibility (try saying, “I may miss something”)
Listen twice as much as you talk — especially to the ideas that sound odd or unpolished
Ask curious questions instead of giving quick solutions
Laugh at yourself, not at others
Maintain open, transparent communication, instead of hoarding information for power
Treat all ideas as equally valuable until proven otherwise
Invite input from everyone, not just the usual voices
Watch your tone and body language for cues of judgment
Each of these behaviors signals to your team: it’s safe to make waves here.
Building a Learning Organization
In a previous post, we talked about focusing less on results. Psychological safety is the missing piece that makes that possible. You can’t meaningfully improve process without surfacing what’s not working. And people won’t surface what’s not working if they’re afraid of being blamed, ignored, or laughed at.
High-performing teams don’t get there by accident. They get there because someone in authority decided to make it safe to challenge the status quo, and tell the truth.
So here’s a challenge for you: create a team where people’s first instinct is to share, not to hide or blame. Where ideas build on each other, and mistakes are treated as data.
That kind of culture doesn’t just get better results. It creates a resilient team of people who are curious, brave, and collaborative — just the kind of team you need to carry your organization forward.
[1] Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization, John Wiley & Sons, 2019.