Today, many people are familiar with the concept of psychological safety, a concept first coined in 1999 by HBS professor Amy Edmondson, and something core to being an effective leader.

Her definition is worth re-quoting as a reminder: Psychological safety, she said, is “A belief that no one will be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

What really put psychological safety on the map was a study by Google, under the title of Project Aristotle, that found that psychological safety was the most important factor in the success of Google’s teams. When team members felt safe to be vulnerable amongst each other, and take risks, good things happened—and without these factors, the researchers concluded, team productivity could never be optimal. “Even the extremely smart, high-powered employees at Google,” said Edmondson, writing in her book The Fearless Organization, “needed a psychologically safe work environment to contribute the talents they had to offer.”

More than a decade on from Project Aristotle, the term psychological safety has wide currency. Indeed, it is often used by organizations as something that they either are striving to create or believe they already have, along with ubiquitous variants on "We are somewhere where everybody can bring their full self to work.” There’s an assumption with both, perhaps, that simply by using these terms, their reality can be somehow willed into existence.

Sadly, though, psychological safety, along with other aspects of what we can more broadly call “comfort at work” is often severely lacking. A recent report........

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