A SUCCESS Magazine article has been getting the kind of attention that doesn’t happen by accident.
Amy Edmondson — the Harvard Business School professor who coined the term “psychological safety” in 1999 — called it “a truly excellent article that doesn’t merely restate research, but adds tangible value to the conversation.”
She also singled out its four-question diagnostic:
- When did someone last openly disagree with you in a meeting?
- When someone makes a mistake, do they report it or manage it?
- Do people ask clarifying questions in the room, or only in private, afterwards?
- When did a problem genuinely surprise you?
It’s a well-built piece, and Edmondson’s endorsement is not a small thing because she’s spent almost three decades producing the research this entire field stands on.
But I want to take the argument somewhere the article, by design, doesn’t go: into the leadership team itself, and into the specific kind of risk that determines whether that team can actually lead at the pace growth now demands.
The Diagnostic Most CEOs Run — On the Wrong Relationship
Read the four questions again, and notice the implicit frame: they are almost all versions of “are people safe with me?” That is the right question for a CEO to ask about their direct reports. But, it’s the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one, to ask about the team those direct reports form together.
Every leadership team I have worked with has a CEO who believes, often correctly, that people can bring them bad news. What almost none of them have checked is whether their CFO can challenge their CMO in the room without it costing something. Whether their COO will admit uncertainty in front of the peer who is quietly competing with them for the succession conversation. Whether a direct report will say “I don’t think this works” to a colleague’s proposal, in the meeting, rather than to you afterwards, privately, once it’s safer to have an opinion.
Edmondson’s original 1999 research defined psychological safety as a property of the team, not the leader — “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” The word “team” is doing more work than most leaders give it credit for. Safety with the boss and safety with the peer sitting next to you are not the same variable, and they do not move together.
A leadership team can be entirely safe upward and quietly unsafe sideways — and it is the sideways version that determines whether that team can actually govern pace, growth and innovation together.
I call this dynamic social risk: the exposure a leader feels not from their boss, but from their peers — the people they sit across from in every leadership meeting, compete against for budget and credibility, and will ultimately be judged alongside by the board.
It’s the risk of looking uncertain, underprepared or simply wrong in front of the exact group whose respect determines your influence in the room. And it is, in my experience, the least examined and most consequential form of psychological safety in any organisation trying to grow.
Why This Is a Pace Problem, Not Just a Culture Problem
Google’s Project Aristotle — the two-year study of more than 180 of its own teams that first put psychological safety on the executive agenda — found that team composition (seniority, background, individual talent) mattered far less than how members treated each other’s risk-taking. Teams high in psychological safety outperformed the rest by a wide margin, and the effect held regardless of who was actually on the team. The variable was the relationship, not the roster.
That finding applies with particular force at the leadership team level, precisely because leadership teams are where social risk is highest and least discussed. These are rooms full of capable, ambitious, senior people, each aware that every contribution is also being read as a signal about their own competence relative to their peers.
Left unaddressed, that dynamic produces a leadership team that looks aligned and moves slowly: agreement in the room, quiet resistance afterwards, decisions re-litigated in the corridor rather than tested at the table. Growth strategies do not stall because the plan was wrong. They stall because the people accountable for it were never safe enough with each other to say, honestly and in real time, what they actually thought.
The data on what this costs is no longer soft or anecdotal. The American Psychological Association’s 2024 Work in America survey of more than 2,000 employed U.S. adults found that people in low psychological safety environments were more than twice as likely to be actively job-hunting — 41%, against 19% in high-safety environments — and reported emotional exhaustion at nearly double the rate.
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report put a number on the wider cost of disengagement: a fall to 20% global engagement, the lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity.
And Boston Consulting Group’s 2024 survey of 28,000 professionals found a fourfold difference in flight risk — just 3% of employees at risk of quitting where safety is high, versus 12% where it is low.
Only 3% of employees are at risk of quitting within the year where psychological safety is high — versus 12% where it is low. — Boston Consulting Group, 2024 Global Workforce Survey
None of that data was collected at the leadership team level specifically. But every leader I have worked with who has genuinely fixed their organisation’s pace problem has done so by fixing it there first — because the leadership team is the mechanism through which every one of those downstream effects gets designed, approved or ignored.
Rigour Without Safety Is Just Silence With a Deadline
The part of the research that gets lost most often — including, to be fair, in the SUCCESS piece itself — is that psychological safety was never presented as a substitute for high standards. Project Aristotle found the opposite: teams need both.
Safety without rigour produces a comfortable team that doesn’t push itself. Rigour without safety produces a high-pressure team that withholds the very information leadership needs to make good calls, precisely because withholding is the rational response to a room where risk is punished.
This is the trap a lot of CEOs chasing innovation-led growth fall into without realising it. They raise the bar — tighter targets, faster cycles, higher accountability — and read the resulting quiet as focus. IBut, in my experience, it is often the opposite: a leadership team managing its exposure to each other rather than solving the problem in front of it. Pace built on that foundation is brittle. It looks fast until the first real test, at which point the gaps in what people actually believed — as opposed to what they said in the room — surface all at once, usually at the worst possible moment.
What CEOs Building Leadership Teams for Pace Actually Need to Check
The SUCCESS diagnostic is a strong starting point, and I’d encourage every CEO to run it on themselves. But if the goal is a leadership team that can genuinely lead at pace — not just report honestly to you, but challenge, test and sharpen each other’s thinking in real time — the questions worth adding are about the room, not about you:
- When did a member of your leadership team last challenge a peer’s proposal directly, in the meeting, rather than raising it with you afterwards?
- When your team disagrees on a decision, does that disagreement surface before the decision is made, or only once it has quietly failed?
- Could your most senior direct report admit, in front of their peers, that they got something wrong — without it costing them status in the room?
In the assessment work I do with executive teams, this is consistently the gap that separates leadership teams that can genuinely move at pace from those that simply look decisive. It is rarely a question of talent or intent, more than a question of whether the social contract between peers has ever been deliberately built, tested and reinforced — or whether it has simply been assumed, because the meetings run smoothly and nobody has raised their voice.
The Capability CEOs Are Actually Trying to Build
Innovation-led growth is not, at its core, a strategy problem. It’s the organisational capability to surface the right information, challenge the comfortable answer, and act on what is found — fast, and repeatedly. Psychological safety is the precondition for all three. But the safety that matters most for a leadership team is not the safety its members feel with the person who signs off their bonus. It’s the safety they feel with the peer sitting next to them, who they will spend the next five years being judged alongside.
Edmondson was right to call out the SUCCESS piece as more than a restatement of familiar research. It is a genuinely useful diagnostic for the relationship it was built to measure. CEOs serious about building the leadership capability to grow, differentiate and move at pace need to run a second version of it: not “are they safe with me,” but “are they safe with each other.” That’s where most leadership teams’ real ceiling on pace is quietly sitting — unexamined, undiscussed, and costing more every quarter it goes unaddressed.