Why Psychological Safety is the real MVP of modern IT collaboration

Psychological safety in an IT environment means team members feel safe to speak up about ideas, questions, concerns, and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or punishment. This encourages open communication, risk-taking, and honest feedback, which are especially important for IT teams dealing with constant complexity and rapid change.

When psychological safety is present, people are comfortable sharing half-finished thoughts, constructively challenging each other, and admitting errors — trusting that their contributions will be respected rather than judged. This atmosphere supports effective problem-solving, innovation, and learning, leading to higher team performance and improved well-being.

by Petra Herbst

First, what is Psychological Safety?

Coined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

It’s not about being “nice.” It’s about the ability to speak up, make mistakes, and offer ideas without worrying about humiliation or punishment. In IT environments – where complexity, change, and pressure are constant – this can make or break a team.

What Psychological Safety might look like in practice:

How can you build psychological safety into everyday moments?

Model it. Admit mistakes. Ask for feedback. Be human. Use language like “What do you think?” and “I might be wrong…”
Ask better questions. Try “What’s one thing we could’ve done differently?” instead of “Who dropped the ball?”
Celebrate learning, not just winning. Shipped a killer feature? Great. But also celebrate the failed prototype that taught you something.
Make room for voices. Especially the quiet ones. Inclusion isn’t optional.
Don’t just talk about safety, bake it into processes. Blameless postmortems, inclusive code reviews, open retrospectives. E.g., in code reviews, focus on the code, not the coder.

Examples for psychological safety can be:

A junior dev can say “I don’t get this” without fear of being labeled “inexperienced.”
DevOPS can raise a red flag about risk, and leadership listens.
Mistakes become lessons, not blame games.
People from all backgrounds feel heard, included, and seen.

If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, check out the following case studies by Google and Etsy:

Google’s Project Aristotle where Google spent years studying what makes teams effective. Spoiler alert: It’s not tenure, intelligence, or skill, but psychological safety.
Etsy’s Blameless Culture as Etsy embraced a culture where mistakes were dissected, not punished. This helped them scale DevOps practices and reduce fear-driven behavior.

What these studies also show, is that it’s not about a one-time workshop or a bullet point on the company values page. It’s about HOW decisions are made, HOW feedback is given, HOW meetings are run, and HOW failure is treated.

Psychological safety might feel soft, but it’s the foundation that lets your team be bold, fast, and resilient. In a world where the only constant is change, it’s your competitive edge. So the real question isn’t “Can we afford to focus on this?” It’s “Can we afford not to?”