50 Essential Psychological Safety Thought Leaders Globally (2026)

Last updated: June 2026

The single most powerful predictor of whether a team will outperform, learn from failure, and navigate genuine change is whether the people in it believe it is safe to speak up. As of June 2026, psychological safety has moved well beyond an academic concept into one of the most actively researched and practically contested questions in leadership. Organisations across healthcare, technology, education, government, and manufacturing are asking the same urgent question: who are the people genuinely shaping how we think about, measure, and build this kind of culture?

These are 50 of them. Rather than recycling the handful of names that appear on every list, this directory includes pioneering researchers, working practitioners, authors of books that have changed how organisations think, and mid-tier voices whose LinkedIn presence makes the theory useful every day. The selection criteria were rigorous: current documented contribution to the field, active publishing or speaking presence in 2025 and 2026, and verified current role and organisation. As of June 2026, every person on this list is actively contributing to the conversation.

Psychological safety is the shared belief within a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. Amy Edmondson, who introduced the concept as a formal research construct in 1999, defines it as the felt permission for candour. A Gallup analysis found that fewer than 3 in 10 employees globally feel their opinions genuinely count at work. Research consistently shows that psychological safety is among the top predictors of team performance, learning, and innovation. These are not abstract numbers. They describe the cost of every idea that went unspoken, every mistake that went unreported, and every team meeting where the real conversation happened afterwards in the car park.

For more on the broader team culture context that psychological safety sits inside, see the blog post 35 Essential Thought Leaders on Team Culture at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/35-essential-thought-leaders-on-team-culture. To work directly with a leadership team on building the communication foundations that make psychological safety real in practice, email jonno@consultclarity.org. Jonno White is the author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and the host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries). Hire Jonno to facilitate your next executive offsite, deliver a keynote on leadership and team culture, or run a Working Genius session.

WHY PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY MATTERS

Psychological safety matters because the alternative is an organisation running on a fraction of its capacity. When people do not feel safe, they self-censor. They sit on problems. They defer to authority even when they know the decision is wrong. They avoid the learning conversations that organisations most need to have.

The research evidence is extensive and consistent. Google's Project Aristotle, a multi-year investigation into what distinguishes the company's highest-performing teams, found psychological safety to be the most important factor. It came before individual talent, clear goals, and role clarity. Teams that scored highest on psychological safety were more likely to communicate openly, admit errors, ask for help, and experiment. A 2025 MIT Technology Review study found that 84 percent of business leaders who had observed links between psychological safety and AI outcomes agreed that organisations with strong safety cultures were more successful at AI adoption. The conversation has broadened. By 2026, the research extends to failure culture, hybrid and remote work, AI adoption, psychosocial risk legislation, and building teams that sustain performance under genuine pressure.

Organisations that want to move from awareness to action should know that understanding the research is only the starting point. Translating it into team behaviour, leadership practice, and cultural structure is a separate and harder challenge. Bring Jonno White in to work with your leadership team on that translation: jonno@consultclarity.org. For a deeper look at the organisational development practitioners who implement psychological safety systems, see the blog post 50 Best Thought Leaders in Organisational Development at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-organisational-development.

HOW THIS LIST WAS COMPILED

Every person on this list was selected against three criteria. They have made a documented and substantive contribution to psychological safety through published research, a book, a recognised consulting practice, or an active practitioner profile with documented output. They were active in the field in 2025 and 2026, publishing, speaking, or contributing to the conversation in a visible way. And the list was deliberately built to surface voices that do not appear on most lists, alongside the foundational figures whose work the field is built on. Geographic distribution, disciplinary diversity, and range of application were all priorities.

CATEGORY 1: THE FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCHERS

The conversation about psychological safety began with researchers willing to take the idea seriously long before it became fashionable. These six voices built the academic scaffolding the rest of the field now stands on.

1. AMY EDMONDSON

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and the person most responsible for placing psychological safety at the centre of the modern leadership conversation. Working at Harvard for three decades, she introduced team psychological safety as a formal research construct in 1999, defining it as the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Ranked second globally by Thinkers50 in 2025, and first in both 2021 and 2023, Edmondson has built one of the most consequential research programmes in management science, spanning healthcare, aviation, manufacturing, and technology.

Her book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, published in 2018 and translated into 15 languages, has become the standard text for leaders and practitioners building safe team cultures. Her 2023 book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year Award, extends the work by developing a framework for thinking about intelligent failure. These two books together remain the most direct entry point for anyone who wants to understand what psychological safety is and why it matters at an organisational level.

2. MICHAELA KERRISSEY

Michaela Kerrissey is an Associate Professor of Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where her research focuses on how organisations learn, integrate expertise, and perform under pressure, with psychological safety as a central variable. Listed on the Thinkers50 Radar in 2023, she has built a body of work with particular depth in healthcare and high-stakes professional environments.

Her May-June 2025 Harvard Business Review article co-authored with Amy Edmondson, on the six most persistent misconceptions about psychological safety, identified the failure modes that lead organisations to misapply the concept or abandon it prematurely, including the false belief that safety and accountability are in fundamental tension. The article reached a wide practitioner audience and has become a widely used resource for HR leaders and team coaches trying to correct misunderstandings that have hardened since the concept became popular. Kerrissey's work brings rigour to clarifying what psychological safety is not, as well as what it is.

3. MAUREEN DOLLARD

Maureen Dollard is an Australian Research Council Laureate Professor in the School of Psychology at Adelaide University, and the Director of the Psychosocial Safety Climate Global Observatory. This world-first research infrastructure, supported by $3.1 million in ARC Laureate Fellowship funding, gathers national and international data on the workplace climate for worker psychological health.

Dollard developed Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC) theory, a framework that focuses not just on team-level safety but on the organisational policies, practices, and management priorities that shape worker psychological health systemically. A paper published in April 2026 co-authored by Dollard and colleagues investigated how psychosocial safety climate prevents workplace mistreatment by shaping management values and priorities. Her research has directly influenced how Australian, UK, and European regulators approach psychosocial risk, making it practically significant for anyone navigating psychosocial safety obligations under current workplace legislation.

4. JAN HAGEN

Jan Hagen is a Professor of Management at ESMT Berlin, where his research focuses on leadership and team interaction in high-reliability organisations. His work examines the specific psychological safety challenges faced by middle managers, a group often caught between senior leadership expectations and the needs of the teams they lead. An October 2025 Harvard Business Review article co-authored with Bin Zhao found that middle managers experience lower psychological safety than either frontline workers or senior leaders, largely because of the structural pressures that uniquely constrain them.

Hagen brings a practical dimension to this finding through direct work with business leaders, helping organisations recognise that the communication bottleneck in the middle layer of management is not a personal failing but a structural and cultural one that leaders can deliberately address. His research spans healthcare, aviation, and financial services, and he contributes regularly to business publications and academic journals. Hagen is particularly well regarded in Europe for his ability to translate high-stakes safety culture research into actionable leadership guidance.

5. BIN ZHAO

Bin Zhao is a Professor of Management and Organization Studies at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University in Canada, with a research focus on learning from errors, negative performance feedback, and the psychological conditions that determine whether organisations convert mistakes into learning. Zhao's work examines what psychological safety actually makes possible, shifting the question from whether people feel safe to whether that safety translates into the behavioural outcomes organisations need.

The October 2025 Harvard Business Review article co-authored with Jan Hagen on psychological safety in middle management surfaced a pattern with significant implications for how organisations design leadership development and reporting structures. Writing from the Canadian context, Zhao also brings a comparative lens to a field dominated by US and European perspectives. The work is particularly relevant for organisations wrestling with why their stated commitments to speaking up and learning from failure are not producing the observable behavioural change they expected.

6. DAN CABLE

Dan Cable is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School and the author of several books connecting neuroscience to leadership, including Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do. A researcher whose work links organisational psychology to biology, Cable focuses on how leaders activate curiosity, experimentation, and authentic expression in their teams, all of which require the foundational conditions that psychological safety describes.

Cable's work addresses what happens physiologically when workers feel afraid to take initiative or be themselves, and what leaders can do to activate the brain's seeking system rather than its threat response. His 2026 London Business School commentary on leadership for a human-plus-AI era emphasises psychological safety as the precondition for the connection and contribution that no automated system can substitute for. He is a frequent keynote speaker and posts substantively on LinkedIn about the neuroscience of culture and belonging.

CATEGORY 2: THE FRAMEWORK BUILDERS

These are the practitioners and thinkers who took the research and built something leaders could actually use. Their frameworks, books, and tools have shaped how thousands of organisations approach this work.

7. TIMOTHY R. CLARK

Timothy R. Clark is the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, a Utah-based leadership development firm, and the creator of the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety model. A former CEO and Oxford-trained social scientist, Clark built a practical, sequential framework that maps how teams move from inclusion safety through learner safety and contributor safety to the highest stage, challenger safety. Each stage has concrete, observable behaviours and diagnostic questions that give leaders something specific to work with rather than a general aspiration to hold.

His book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, published by Berrett-Koehler, has become a standard reference across Fortune 500 organisations and government agencies globally. The model distinguishes itself by treating psychological safety not as a single condition but as a progression, and by explicitly connecting safety to accountability and performance rather than positioning them as competing values. Clark posts with consistent frequency on LinkedIn, illustrating the model with specific organisational scenarios, and the LeaderFactor team has developed a certification and assessment infrastructure around the framework.

8. KIM SCOTT

Kim Scott is the co-founder of Radical Candor LLC and the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and Radical Respect: How to Work Together Better. A former CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, and Twitter, and a former faculty member at Apple University, Scott built a framework addressing one of the most common failure modes in psychological safety work: the mistaken belief that a safe culture is a gentle one. The core argument of Radical Candor is that the most psychologically safe conversations are not the softest ones, but the ones that combine genuine personal care with a willingness to challenge directly.

Scott's quadrant model maps four failure modes (ruinous empathy, obnoxious aggression, manipulative insincerity, and radical candour) that have helped millions of leaders diagnose their own communication habits. The framework has been adopted widely across the technology sector and increasingly in healthcare, education, and government. In 2026, Radical Candor LLC also launched Compass, an AI coaching tool designed to help leaders apply the management principles from Scott's books in real conversational situations. She is the co-host of the Radical Candor podcast, a regular LinkedIn contributor, and one of the most followed voices on team communication globally.

9. GINA BATTYE

Gina Battye is the founder and CEO of the Psychological Safety Institute in the UK and the author of The Authentic Organization: How to Create a Psychologically Safe Workplace, published by Wiley. She developed the 5 Pillars of Psychological Safety and the Hierarchy of Psychological Safety as the primary frameworks underpinning her consultancy's work with multinational corporations and Fortune 500 organisations globally.

Battye built her professional focus on psychological safety out of direct personal experience of unsafe workplaces, including a period where she experienced workplace homophobia and witnessed the organisational cost when that behaviour went unaddressed. Her work focuses on the practical, structural, and behavioural changes that make psychological safety real rather than aspirational, with a particular lens on the intersection of safety with LGBTQ+ inclusion and authentic expression at work. The Authentic Organization was a finalist for the Business Book Awards. Battye posts regularly on LinkedIn and reaches a large global audience through the Psychological Safety Institute's content and training programmes.

10. MEGAN REITZ

Megan Reitz is an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and a Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Ashridge Executive Education, Hult International Business School. Named among the Top 50 Management Thinkers globally by Thinkers50 in 2021, 2023, and 2025, she works at the intersection of leadership, dialogue, mindfulness, and psychological safety, with a particular focus on the structural and relational dimensions of who gets heard and who gets silenced in organisations.

Her second edition of the book co-authored with John Higgins, now published as Speak Out, Listen Up, examines how perceptions of power enable and silence organisational voice, and was praised by Amy Edmondson for its practical, rigorous approach to the conversational dynamics of safety. Reitz's TEDx talk on how power silences truth has been viewed more than one million times. Her recent research on spaciousness and employee activism connects psychological safety to broader questions about how organisations navigate dissent, advocacy, and the productive tension between honest challenge and organisational loyalty.

11. JOHN HIGGINS

John Higgins is an independent researcher, coach, consultant, and author based in the UK, where for more than a decade he has collaborated with Megan Reitz on the structural and relational conditions under which people feel safe to speak truth to power in organisations. Higgins approaches the field as a practitioner-researcher interested specifically in how power differentials create silence, and what concrete conversational and structural changes help organisations address that silence.

Higgins co-authored Speak Up and its second edition Speak Out, Listen Up with Reitz. The pair have published extensively in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, and Higgins's most recent collaborative research with Reitz has explored the concept of spaciousness, the degree to which leaders create the mental and interpersonal breathing room that allows employees to contribute honestly. His distinctive contribution is in naming and examining the ways that leaders, often without realising it, train the people around them to stay silent through the subtle signals they send when questioned or contradicted.

12. KAROLIN HELBIG

Karolin Helbig is an independent leadership consultant based in Germany who works with large international corporations and mid-sized organisations on psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and mindset. She holds a PhD in human genetics and spent more than 15 years as a top management consultant at McKinsey before pivoting to leadership development. Her background in neuroscience shapes how she translates psychological safety research into practical leadership behaviour, particularly around how fear literally contracts cognitive capacity and how leaders can reverse that contraction through deliberate acts of inclusion and candour.

Helbig co-authored The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human with Minette Norman in 2023, and the pair followed up with The Psychological Safety Playbook for Changemakers in 2025, endorsed by Amy Edmondson. Both books take a 25-moves-per-playbook approach, giving leaders specific, actionable practices rather than general principles. Helbig posts consistently on LinkedIn, delivers training in both English and German, and brings a reach into the European and German-speaking corporate landscape that few English-language practitioners match.

13. MINETTE NORMAN

Minette Norman is the founder of Minette Norman Consulting LLC and an award-winning speaker and leadership consultant who spent decades leading globally distributed engineering teams in the software industry, culminating in a VP Engineering Practice role at Autodesk, where she influenced more than 3,500 engineers worldwide. Named one of the Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business by the San Francisco Business Times, Norman is the co-author of The Psychological Safety Playbook with Karolin Helbig and the author of The Boldly Inclusive Leader.

Norman brings a practitioner's credibility grounded in the specific realities of leading internationally distributed technical teams. Her work consistently connects psychological safety with inclusion and belonging, arguing that the two are structurally inseparable: a team where some voices are systematically less heard cannot be psychologically safe for those people regardless of what the cultural values statements say. Norman posts regularly on LinkedIn and delivers keynotes and workshops with particular depth in the technology and engineering sectors, where psychological safety often collides with high-stakes delivery pressure and long-standing cultural norms around expertise and hierarchy.

CATEGORY 3: THE VOICE AND COMMUNICATION SPECIALISTS

These voices have built their practice at the specific intersection of psychological safety and the everyday challenge of speaking up, giving feedback, and creating cultures where honest conversation happens routinely.

14. STEPHEN SHEDLETZKY

Stephen Shedletzky is a Canadian speaker, coach, and advisor focused entirely on helping leaders make it safe and worth it for people to speak up. After more than a decade with Simon Sinek's organisation, where he served as Chief of Staff and Head of Brand Experience, Training and Product Development, Shedletzky built an independent practice around what he calls speak-up culture. His 2023 book Speak Up Culture: When Leaders Truly Listen, People Step Up argues that psychological safety alone is not sufficient, because many people know they will not be formally punished for speaking up but still choose not to because the social costs and the absence of responsive action make it feel pointless.

Shedletzky introduces a useful dual test: a culture is genuinely speak-up when speaking up feels both safe and worth it. This extends the Edmondson framework practically by asking not just whether fear has been removed but whether the organisational system visibly values and acts on voice. He has worked with leaders across healthcare, technology, hospitality, government, and financial services globally, and his LinkedIn presence reaches a substantial international audience. His coaching practice focuses on the specific leadership habits that signal, through daily action, whether voice is genuinely valued or merely tolerated.

15. DANIEL COYLE

Daniel Coyle is the author of The Culture Code, a New York Times bestseller that examined the internal dynamics of some of the world's highest-performing organisations and identified safety as the first of three foundational skills that high-performing groups build before vulnerability sharing and purpose alignment. A skilled communicator and storyteller who has served as an advisor to organisations including the US Navy SEALs, Microsoft, and Google, Coyle makes complex organisational psychology accessible to leadership audiences who would find the academic literature difficult to engage with directly.

In The Culture Code, Coyle identifies specific belonging cues, the small behavioural signals that tell people they are or are not psychologically safe, and shows through compelling case studies how they can transform team performance. His practical frameworks and real-world stories have made the book one of the most widely assigned texts in leadership development globally. Coyle continues to consult and write, and his work has introduced the safety-vulnerability-purpose triad to millions of leaders who might not otherwise have engaged with the psychological safety literature directly.

16. L. DAVID MARQUET

L. David Marquet is a former United States Navy nuclear submarine commander and the author of Turn the Ship Around!, one of the most widely read practical leadership books on empowerment, voice, and psychological safety. Assigned to command the USS Santa Fe, then among the worst-performing submarines in the fleet, Marquet reversed the traditional command-and-control model to one built on distributed authority and genuine voice, producing what Stephen Covey described as the most empowering organisation he had ever observed. The transformation is one of the most cited practitioner case studies in the psychological safety field.

Marquet's follow-up books Leadership Is Language and Distancing (co-authored with psychology professor Michael Gillespie) continue extending the work. His "I intend to..." language practice and the concept of moving authority to information rather than moving information to authority have influenced how a generation of leaders think about creating conditions where teams feel both safe and responsible. Active on LinkedIn and in demand as a keynote speaker, Marquet brings a credibility from genuinely high-stakes operational contexts that resonates particularly in military, healthcare, and industrial audiences.

17. LIZ FOSSLIEN

Liz Fosslien is an author, illustrator, and expert on workforce trends who has co-authored two of the most widely read books on emotions and psychological safety in the workplace: No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work and Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, both co-authored with Mollie West Duffy and translated into more than 15 languages. A regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fosslien works at the intersection of behavioural science, communication, and cultural change, with a distinctive visual communication style that has built a large and engaged following across social media platforms.

Fosslien's particular contribution is in making the emotional foundations of psychological safety visible and accessible. Where much of the academic and consulting literature focuses on leaders and structural interventions, No Hard Feelings addresses the emotional experience of every team member and gives individuals practical tools for navigating workplaces where emotional expression is complicated. Her illustrated approach makes abstract concepts concrete in a way that reaches practitioners who would not read a management textbook but will share a chart that captures something real about their working life.

18. MOLLIE WEST DUFFY

Mollie West Duffy is an independent organisational development and leadership development expert, and the co-author with Liz Fosslien of the Wall Street Journal bestselling No Hard Feelings and Big Feelings. Previously Organizational Design Lead at global innovation firm IDEO and a research associate for the Dean of Harvard Business School, Duffy brings both design thinking and organisational research credentials to work that has reached millions of readers globally.

Duffy's contribution to the psychological safety conversation is in the intersection of emotions, learning, and safety: she argues that teams become genuinely safe only when the emotional experience of every member is acknowledged as information the culture needs to hear, not noise to be managed. Her work challenges the persistent tendency in leadership development to treat emotions as a distraction from performance rather than as the foundation on which performance depends. The @LizandMollie social media community she and Fosslien have built represents one of the most effective pieces of psychological safety communication to have reached a mainstream audience.

19. KARIN HURT

Karin Hurt is the CEO of Let's Grow Leaders, a global leadership development and training firm, and the co-author of five books including Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates, which carries a foreword by Amy Edmondson. Named by Inc. Magazine as a Top 100 Great Leadership Speaker, Hurt built her focus on courageous cultures out of a career in executive leadership at Verizon Wireless before founding Let's Grow Leaders with her husband and business partner David Dye.

The Courageous Cultures framework maps the conditions under which employees at all levels feel both safe enough and motivated enough to contribute ideas, surface problems, and advocate for their customers. Hurt's contribution is in bridging the psychological safety research with the operational reality of mid-level managers who carry most of the practical responsibility for creating those conditions but rarely have formal authority to change the structural factors that undermine them. She hosts the popular Asking for a Friend LinkedIn show and posts consistently about the everyday leadership habits that either build or erode a speaking-up culture.

20. DAVID DYE

David Dye is the President of Let's Grow Leaders and the co-author with Karin Hurt of five books including Courageous Cultures and Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Workplace Conflict, published by HarperCollins in 2024. A former executive and elected official, Dye brings a practitioner's perspective shaped by direct experience of the leadership realities that the psychological safety research describes, from the challenge of speaking truth upward to building conditions where the people closest to the work feel ownership over the outcomes.

Dye's specific contribution is in making psychological safety language and practices practical for the front-line managers and mid-level leaders who are most directly responsible for the team-level climate where safety either lives or dies. His approach emphasises that psychological safety is not a set-and-forget initiative but a daily practice of specific conversational habits, from the way a leader responds to a mistake in a team meeting to how they invite dissent from a group that has learned to tell them what they want to hear. He writes and speaks with particular clarity about the accountability side of safety, arguing that the two are complementary rather than competing goals.

CATEGORY 4: THE PLATFORM BUILDERS AND GLOBAL PRACTITIONERS

These voices have built the organisations, platforms, training systems, and consulting practices that make psychological safety work at scale.

21. TOM GERAGHTY

Tom Geraghty is the co-founder and delivery lead of Iterum Ltd and the driving force behind psychsafety.com, one of the most comprehensive practitioner resources on psychological safety available anywhere in the world. Working from his background in ecological research, technology leadership (he has held CIO and CTO roles across technology and financial services organisations), and global health, Geraghty brings a systems-thinking and complexity-informed perspective to psychological safety that moves beyond individual and team-level interventions.

The psychsafety.com community reaches more than 11,000 weekly newsletter subscribers (as of August 2025) and half a million online visitors, and its training and certification programmes now reach practitioners across aviation, healthcare, technology, and education globally. Geraghty's distinctive contribution is in connecting psychological safety to Human and Organisational Performance principles, complexity science, and the specific challenges of building safety in highly regulated or high-risk environments. His training catalogue is one of the most comprehensive available, and his approach to measurement, including how to conduct and act on psychological safety surveys with genuine honesty, is among the most practically useful in the field.

22. JADE GARRATT

Jade Garratt is a practitioner and lead facilitator at Iterum Ltd, working alongside Tom Geraghty on the delivery of psychological safety training and consultancy through psychsafety.com. A practicing coach and facilitator, Garratt brings a relational and developmental focus to the Iterum team's work that complements the research and systems perspective Geraghty contributes. Her facilitation practice concentrates on helping teams and leaders develop the specific conversational skills and behavioural habits that make psychological safety real in the everyday texture of working life.

Active on LinkedIn and increasingly visible as a speaker and contributor in the UK organisational psychology and leadership development communities, Garratt represents the generation of practitioners who have built their entire professional practice around psychological safety as a core discipline rather than an add-on feature of broader HR or OD work. Her facilitation expertise has been central to scaling psychsafety.com's training reach from individual consulting engagements to a global certification platform, and her work in education and technology sectors reflects the breadth of context where psychological safety principles are now being applied.

23. DUENA BLOMSTROM

Duena Blomstrom is the founder and Chief Product Officer of People Not Tech, a UK-based organisation that has spent seven years building digital tools designed to address what Blomstrom calls HumanDebt, the accumulated emotional and relational deficit in organisations that is fuelling disengagement, burnout, and underperformance in an era of rapid AI adoption. The Human Work Platform Blomstrom and her team have built helps organisations measure and address the emotional and relational conditions, including psychological safety, that determine whether teams can actually perform at the level technology now demands.

Blomstrom approaches psychological safety from the technology and AI-era angle, asking specifically what happens to team trust and speaking-up culture in organisations where AI is displacing certain tasks, where the pace of change outpaces the emotional resilience of teams, and where remote and hybrid work has eroded the informal trust-building moments that physical co-presence used to create. An author and regular LinkedIn contributor, she reaches an audience of HR and technology leaders grappling with the specific challenge of maintaining human connection and safety in highly automated or distributed work environments.

24. JENNIFER GARVEY BERGER

Jennifer Garvey Berger is the co-founder and CEO of Cultivating Leadership, a global leadership development consultancy, and the author of four books on adult development and leadership including the second edition of Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World. Holding a doctorate in adult development from Harvard University, Garvey Berger brings a developmental psychology lens to psychological safety that is distinct from both the research tradition and the practitioner frameworks: she focuses on how the complexity of a leader's thinking shapes their capacity to create safety for others.

Based in New Zealand and working globally with clients including Google, Novartis, and Oxfam International, Garvey Berger argues that leaders cannot consistently create psychological safety until they have developed beyond the stage of thinking where they are primarily focused on defending their own positions and managing others' impressions of them. Her work on the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) framework and her active blog, most recently updated in April 2026, make her one of the most thoughtful international voices on what genuine psychological safety asks of the leader's inner world, not just their external behaviour.

25. DAISY AUGER-DOMINGUEZ

Daisy Auger-Dominguez is the CEO of Auger-Dominguez Ventures, a workplace culture consultancy, and the author of Inclusion Revolution and Burnt Out to Lit Up. Having led organisational transformations at Moody's Investors Service, The Walt Disney Company, and Google, and having served as Global Chief People Officer at Vice Media Group, she approaches psychological safety from the specific angle of what makes it real or hollow for marginalised groups. A LinkedIn Top Voice and contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes, she focuses on the gap between declared values and operational reality.

Auger-Dominguez argues that psychological safety cannot be real for marginalised groups when the structural conditions of the organisation continue to undermine their belonging and value regardless of what the culture deck says. Her most recent writing on burnout reflects a practitioner's observation that leaders tasked with carrying inclusion work without structural support face a disproportionate personal cost, and that genuine safety requires organisations to address the systemic conditions that create that asymmetry. She is a sought-after keynote speaker with particular depth for audiences in corporate, nonprofit, and government contexts navigating the intersection of safety and equity.

26. MICHELLE PENELOPE KING

Michelle Penelope King is the Global Director of Performance, Culture and Talent at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, one of the world's leading global law firms, and the author of The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work and How Work Works. Holding a PhD from Cranfield School of Management, King previously founded The Culture Practice and spent several years working with UN Women on the intersection of gender equality and workplace culture. Her work consistently focuses on the specific, often invisible cultural rules that determine who is heard and who is discounted in organisational life.

King's argument is that workplaces carry hidden norms that benefit some workers structurally and disadvantage others, and that psychological safety for women and other marginalised groups requires more than removing formal barriers: it requires understanding and dismantling the informal rules that shape whose voice carries weight in daily interactions. Her book has reached an international readership and her podcast has generated a substantial listener base, extending her influence well beyond the formal consulting engagements where these ideas are tested. She posts regularly on LinkedIn about the specific cultural dynamics that create or undermine inclusion in practice.

CATEGORY 5: THE WELLBEING AND WHOLE-PERSON VOICES

These practitioners work at the intersection of psychological safety, mental health, wellbeing, and the human conditions that either support or undermine a person's capacity to show up and speak honestly.

27. JASON VAN SCHIE

Jason van Schie is a practitioner and researcher based in Australia, and the co-host of the Psych Health and Safety Podcast, one of the most influential audio resources on psychosocial safety in the Australian market. He has become a significant voice in the translation of psychosocial safety legislation into practical organisational action for HR and safety professionals navigating the psychosocial hazard obligations that now apply under Australian workplace laws.

Van Schie's contribution is in bridging the regulatory and practical dimensions of psychological safety in a jurisdiction where psychosocial risks now carry the same legal weight as physical hazards. His podcast, conference work, and writing help practitioners move from awareness of the regulatory framework to the specific interventions and assessment approaches that demonstrate genuine compliance and genuine care. His 2026 conference chair role at the Psych Health and Safety Conference reflects his standing as a connector and convenor in the Australian psychosocial safety community.

28. KAT PAGE

Kat Page is a Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford and the author of Good Work: Transform your Work from the Inside Out. She chaired the Psych Health and Safety Conference (PHSCON) in 2026, and her book draws on decades of psychological research and practical experience to challenge the assumption that burnout, disengagement, and overwork are the inevitable costs of ambitious work.

Page's contribution bridges the research on wellbeing, meaning, and purpose with the practical literature on psychological safety, arguing that work can be genuinely good for people rather than merely tolerable. Her academic work connects the broader field of positive psychology and wellbeing science to the specific question of what conditions allow people to perform at their best rather than merely cope. Her Oxford affiliation and active contribution to both academic and practitioner communities give her a credibility that spans the research-to-practice gap.

29. ROBERT HOLDEN

Robert Holden is a British psychologist, speaker, and author who has spent three decades at the intersection of happiness, psychological safety, and the conditions that allow people to bring their full selves to work. Founder of The Happiness Project, Holden has written more than ten books and has worked with global organisations to address the psychological conditions that either support or undermine genuine performance and creativity.

Holden approaches psychological safety through the lens of authenticity and flourishing, arguing that safety and happiness are structurally linked: people who feel safe to be themselves are more creative, more honest, and more resilient than those managing the ongoing cost of self-concealment. His work with global brands on employee wellbeing and his extensive keynote speaking career bring his ideas to audiences that might not engage with the more academic framing of the psychological safety literature. He remains an active speaker and contributor to the field.

30. JOELLE MITCHELL

Joelle Mitchell is an organisational psychologist and researcher based in Australia who co-hosts the Psych Health and Safety Podcast and contributes substantively to the research and practice of psychosocial safety in the Australian context. Her work focuses on the application of occupational psychology and workplace health science to the specific regulatory and cultural challenges facing Australian organisations now required to address psychosocial hazards under model WHS law.

Mitchell's contribution is in helping practitioners understand not just what psychosocial safety requires legally but what it looks like in practice within the specific cultural, regulatory, and organisational contexts of Australian workplaces. Her research and commentary bridge the gap between the international psychological safety literature and the specific Australian legal and policy context that is reshaping how organisations approach mental health and safety as integrated, not separate, responsibilities.

CATEGORY 6: THE COMPLEXITY AND ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP VOICES

Psychological safety is not just a team climate issue. It is a systemic property of organisations. These voices address the broader structural, cultural, and developmental conditions that make genuine safety possible.

31. JOHN AMAECHI

John Amaechi is the founder of APS Intelligence Ltd, an organisational psychology and leadership consultancy based in the UK, and a former professional basketball player who became the first NBA player to come out publicly as gay. A qualified psychologist who has served on diversity and inclusion boards for organisations including Sanofi and KPMG, Amaechi approaches psychological safety through the lens of what organisations cost people who are required to hide significant parts of their identity in order to function.

Named a LinkedIn Top Voice and one of HR's Most Influential Thinkers, Amaechi brings together organisational psychology, high-performance sports culture, and personal experience of what it costs to work in an environment where authenticity is structurally penalised. His work with global clients consistently returns to the question of what genuine psychological safety asks of leaders, not just in formal policies but in the moment-to-moment signals they send about whose presence and whose voice is genuinely welcome. He is a compelling and challenging keynote speaker.

32. MARIE-CLAIRE ROSS

Marie-Claire Ross is the founder of Trustologie in Australia, a consultancy specialising in helping leadership teams build trust as the structural precondition for genuine safety culture. Ranked on the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders on Health and Safety in 2025, she maintains an active LinkedIn presence with regular content on trust, safety leadership, and culture.

Ross's specific contribution is in making the connection between trust and psychological safety concrete and actionable for leaders in industries including mining, manufacturing, and infrastructure, where physical safety culture has deep roots but psychological safety remains newer territory. Her frameworks help leaders understand that the behavioural conditions required for workers to speak up about physical hazards and the conditions required for psychological safety are not just analogous but structurally identical: both require genuine protection from retaliation and a visible track record of responsive action.

33. DAVE SNOWDEN

Dave Snowden is the founder of Cognitive Edge and the creator of the Cynefin framework, a sensemaking model that has become widely used in leadership development, strategic planning, and safety culture work. Based in the UK and operating globally, Snowden works at the intersection of complexity science, organisational learning, and the conditions under which people can speak honestly about what they observe in complex systems.

Snowden approaches the foundations of safety culture through complexity thinking, arguing that simple and complicated management frameworks are inadequate for the kinds of emergent, dynamic environments where psychological safety is most critically needed. His work has influenced how a generation of practitioners think about the relationship between safe-to-fail experiments, learning culture, and the deeper question of what conditions allow dissenting voices to be heard rather than suppressed. He contributes actively through writing, speaking, and his influential social media presence.

34. MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER

Michael Bungay Stanier is a Canadian author and coach best known for The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More, and Change the Way You Lead Forever, one of the best-selling coaching books of the past decade. He has endorsed The Psychological Safety Playbook, co-authored by Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman, calling it the guide practitioners have long needed for the HOW of psychological safety rather than just the WHY. His own work on coaching habits directly addresses the leadership behaviours that build or undermine safety in everyday interactions.

Bungay Stanier's contribution to the psychological safety conversation is in the specific microhabits of leadership, particularly the value of asking more questions and giving less advice, that shift the power dynamic in everyday conversations toward voice and safety. His work has reached a massive global audience and has been translated into many languages, making the connection between daily leadership behaviour and team psychological climate accessible to practitioners who might not engage with the formal research literature. He is an active LinkedIn presence and frequent speaker.

35. JAMIL ZAKI

Jamil Zaki is a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and the author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, among other works. His research centres on empathy, its neural basis, and critically, how it can be cultivated rather than simply treated as a fixed trait. A contributor to Harvard Business Review and a broadly cited researcher, Zaki's work addresses the conditions under which people choose engagement and openness rather than defensive self-protection.

Zaki's contribution to the psychological safety conversation is in establishing the evidence that empathy is trainable, that it is a leadership skill rather than a personality type, and that leaders who build empathic practices create measurably different team climates. His work on super-facilitators, recently cited in an HBR article from September 2025, suggests that certain individuals create disproportionately powerful safety conditions in their teams through consistent empathic engagement. His Stanford research lab continues to generate practically significant findings.

CATEGORY 7: THE TECHNOLOGY AND FUTURE-OF-WORK VOICES

As AI, hybrid work, and rapid change reshape organisations, these voices are working on what psychological safety means in new structural contexts.

36. PIM DE MORREE

Pim de Morree is the co-founder of Corporate Rebels, a Netherlands-based organisation that has spent years documenting, researching, and publishing on progressive workplace cultures globally. The Corporate Rebels blog and podcast have become a primary resource for practitioners interested in what genuine employee voice, flat hierarchy, and psychological safety look like in practice in diverse organisational contexts ranging from manufacturing to professional services.

De Morree and his co-founder Joost Minnaar have visited and documented hundreds of progressive organisations globally, building an evidence base of what actually works when organisations try to move power and voice downward. Their work challenges both academic abstraction and management consulting orthodoxy by grounding the safety conversation in specific, observable practices from real organisations. Active on LinkedIn with a large following, de Morree brings a practitioner's curiosity and a researcher's rigour to the documentation of what genuinely safe organisational cultures look like.

37. JOOST MINNAAR

Joost Minnaar is the co-founder of Corporate Rebels alongside Pim de Morree, and shares the same focus on documenting and advocating for progressive workplace cultures globally. A trained operations engineer who transitioned into workplace culture research, Minnaar brings a systems and process lens to the question of what organisational structures and management practices create the conditions for genuine psychological safety.

His contribution is particularly valuable in demonstrating that psychological safety is not just a cultural or interpersonal phenomenon but an architectural one: the design of meetings, decision-making processes, feedback systems, and career structures either supports or undermines safety in ways that daily leadership behaviour alone cannot fully compensate for. Minnaar is active on LinkedIn, a regular speaker at future-of-work events, and one of the most visible European voices on what humane and effective organisations look like in practice.

38. TASHA EURICH

Tasha Eurich is an organisational psychologist and the author of Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think. Her research on self-awareness, which she defines as clearly seeing how we are perceived by others and understanding our own impact on them, addresses one of the foundational conditions for psychological safety: leaders who lack self-awareness cannot build safe teams because they cannot perceive the signals their behaviour is sending.

Based in the USA and active globally as a speaker and researcher, Eurich brings empirical rigour to the question of what prevents leaders from creating the conditions they believe they have already created. Her finding that most leaders overestimate their own self-awareness, combined with her practical frameworks for building it, makes her work essential reading for anyone trying to understand why declared commitments to psychological safety so often fail to produce the observable culture change organisations were hoping for.

39. ALISON WOOD BROOKS

Alison Wood Brooks is a Professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Talk: The Science of Conversation and How to Have Better Ones. Her research focuses on the psychology of conversation, including the specific dynamics that make conversations feel safe or threatening for the people in them. Her work provides a behavioural and cognitive science foundation for many of the practical recommendations in the psychological safety field.

Brooks's contribution is in making the microscopic dynamics of conversation legible and improvable for leaders and practitioners. Her research addresses questions like what happens when people feel interrupted, dismissed, or evaluated in the moment of speaking up, and what specific conversational habits leaders can build to counteract those responses. Talk has reached a broad audience, and her work provides a bridge between the psychological safety literature and the practical communication and facilitation fields.

CATEGORY 8: INTERNATIONAL AND SECTOR-SPECIFIC VOICES

These voices extend the psychological safety conversation into underrepresented geographic contexts and specific professional sectors where the field is rapidly developing.

40. DERI LATIMER

Deri Latimer is a Canadian speaker and organisational consultant who combines positive psychology, neuroscience, and emotional intelligence to help leaders and organisations build psychologically healthy and safe workplaces. A TEDx speaker and author, Latimer brings a strengths-based and optimism-informed angle to psychological safety that complements the risk-focused framing that dominates much of the field.

41. EADINE O'SULLIVAN

Eadine O'Sullivan is the founder of Resonate Leadership, based in Ireland, and one of the most visible psychological safety practitioners in the Irish market. Featured as a case study by The Fearless Organization Scan in their documentation of team success, and endorsed by Amy Edmondson, O'Sullivan has delivered psychological safety programmes across professional services, science, and technology sectors. She was a central figure in the development of the Law Society of Ireland's Psychological Safety Toolkit, a landmark programme for the Irish legal profession.

O'Sullivan's contribution is in demonstrating what sustained psychological safety culture change looks like in practice in a specific national and professional context, providing a model that other sector-specific practitioners can adapt. Her programme for the Law Society represents one of the more comprehensive documented implementations of psychological safety principles in a professional association context.

42. VALENTINA THORNER

Valentina Thorner is a practitioner and writer based in Germany who specialises in remote work and the specific challenges of building psychological safety in distributed teams. A consultant and speaker who works across Europe and internationally, Thorner addresses the question of what safety looks and feels like when teams never or rarely share physical space, and what leadership practices create or destroy trust at a distance.

Her contribution is particularly timely in a post-pandemic work environment where hybrid and fully remote teams have become the norm for a substantial portion of the global knowledge workforce. Her LinkedIn presence and writing reach practitioners grappling with the specific tensions of remote cultures: asynchronous communication, camera-off norms, time zone pressures, and the absence of the informal social moments that proximity creates.

43. RACHEL BAPTISTE

Rachel Baptiste is a Canadian human-first culture strategist, keynote speaker, and executive leadership coach, and the founder and CEO of a consulting firm focused on building psychologically safe and inclusive workplace cultures. She brings a particular focus on the experience of equity-seeking groups and the specific conditions that make psychological safety real or hollow for people who have learned from experience that speaking up carries disproportionate risk.

Baptiste's contribution is in grounding the psychological safety conversation in the lived experiences of people for whom interpersonal risk taking at work is not merely uncomfortable but potentially career-threatening, and in developing practical frameworks that help organisations address those structural asymmetries rather than simply declaring inclusion. She is active on LinkedIn and brings a Canadian and Indigenous-allied perspective to a field that is still predominantly shaped by US and UK voices.

44. LISA FELDMAN BARRETT

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University and one of the world's leading researchers on the science of emotion. Author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, she provides the neuroscientific foundation for many of the claims the psychological safety field makes about how fear and safety affect performance, creativity, and voice.

Barrett's contribution is in establishing that emotions are not biologically hardwired responses but constructed experiences shaped by context and prediction, which means that the contextual signals leaders send have a measurable effect on how team members emotionally experience their working environment. Her work provides the rigorous neuroscientific underpinning for the argument that leadership behaviour literally shapes the brain states of the people around them, making psychological safety not just a cultural nice-to-have but a biological precondition for the kinds of thinking organisations need.

45. MARK MORTENSEN

Mark Mortensen is a Professor at INSEAD who researches teaming, collaboration, and the psychological dynamics of working in multi-team systems and hybrid environments. His work addresses how organisations can maintain psychological safety and genuine voice across the increasingly fractured team structures of modern knowledge work, where people typically work across multiple teams simultaneously.

His contribution is particularly significant as teams become more fluid, overlapping, and geographically distributed. Mortensen's research shows that the belonging and trust that safety requires become harder to maintain as team boundaries blur and people find themselves members of multiple teams with conflicting demands and norms. His work helps organisations understand that the structural design of how teams are composed, bounded, and resourced is as important for psychological safety as any training or culture initiative.

46. AMY JEN SU

Amy Jen Su is a co-founder of Paravis Partners, an executive coaching and leadership development firm, and the author of The Leader You Want to Be: Five Essential Principles for Bringing Out Your Best Every Day. Her coaching practice focuses on the inner leadership conditions, including psychological safety within the leader themselves, that allow people to show up with presence and authenticity under pressure.

Su's contribution is in addressing the interior dimension of psychological safety: the degree to which leaders are safe with themselves in the sense of not being governed by the fear of appearing incompetent, wrong, or insufficient. She argues that leaders who lack that internal safety cannot reliably build it for others, because their own anxiety and defensiveness inevitably shape the culture of their teams. Her work reaches executive audiences who are already effective by conventional standards but who recognise that something is still missing.

47. NICK PETRIE

Nick Petrie is a researcher and senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership who studies vertical development and the evolution of leadership capacity under pressure and complexity. His work addresses the developmental conditions that allow leaders to move from a reactive, self-protective orientation to one capable of holding multiple perspectives, tolerating uncertainty, and creating genuine safety for the people around them.

Petrie's contribution connects the developmental psychology tradition to the practical psychological safety field, arguing that certain kinds of leadership interventions fail because they ask leaders to behave in ways that require a level of psychological development they have not yet reached. His research on how leaders grow through crucible experiences and vertical development provides a frame for why training and tool-based approaches to psychological safety so often plateau, and what more fundamental conditions need to be in place for safety to become genuinely durable.

48. LIANE DAVEY

Liane Davey is a Canadian author, speaker, and organisational consultant whose book The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Back on Track argues that avoiding difficult conversations is as damaging to team safety as creating an environment where people fear negative consequences. A regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and active LinkedIn presence, Davey approaches the safety conversation from the conflict side, arguing that teams without productive conflict are not safe, they are suppressed.

Davey's contribution is in extending the psychological safety conversation to the question of what productive dissent and challenge look like, and how leaders can build the conversational norms that allow disagreement to be generative rather than destructive. This is a useful corrective to the tendency in popular psychological safety communication to conflate safety with harmony or agreement, and her practical frameworks for naming and navigating team tensions are widely used in leadership development programmes.

49. JASON LAURITSEN

Jason Lauritsen is an American speaker, author, and workplace culture consultant, and the author of Unlocking High Performance: How to Use Performance Management to Engage and Empower Employees to Reach Their Full Potential. A former corporate HR executive turned workplace culture advocate, Lauritsen connects the psychological safety literature to the specific performance management practices that either signal genuine trust or undermine it, regardless of what an organisation's culture values document says.

His contribution is in making the performance management system visible as a safety signal: when employees experience performance management as a fair, developmental, and transparent process, safety increases. When they experience it as opaque, punitive, or inconsistent, safety collapses regardless of what leaders say in all-hands meetings. Lauritsen posts frequently on LinkedIn and reaches an audience of HR professionals and managers who are responsible for designing and delivering the specific systems and practices that shape the safety climate teams actually experience.

50. MARC BRACKETT

Marc Brackett is the founding Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a Senior Research Scientist in the Yale Child Study Center. The creator of the RULER approach to social and emotional learning, which has been implemented in school districts and organisations across the world, Brackett has spent his career building the evidence base for the connection between emotional literacy, wellbeing, and the conditions that allow people to perform and contribute authentically.

Brackett's book Permission to Feel: Unlock the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive provides a research-grounded framework for understanding how emotional environments shape whether people feel safe to show up honestly. His work provides an important bridge between the psychological safety field and the social and emotional learning literature, demonstrating that the skills safety requires, including the ability to read emotional climate, name what is happening in a room, and respond to emotions with understanding rather than dismissal, are teachable and learnable by leaders. His active presence on LinkedIn and his engagement with both academic and practitioner audiences give him a reach across multiple professional communities.

NOTABLE VOICES WE ALMOST INCLUDED

Several well-known voices did not make this list as a deliberate editorial choice rather than a reflection on their quality or importance.

Patrick Lencioni's work on team dysfunction, particularly The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, laid important groundwork for the safety and trust conversation in organisations, and his contribution to the field over twenty years is substantial. Edgar Schein's foundational work on organisational culture and psychological safety predates even Edmondson's formalisation of the concept. William Kahn's 1990 paper on psychological conditions for personal engagement was the original academic treatment of the ideas Edmondson later made famous.

These names have been intentionally passed over not because they do not belong in any conversation about psychological safety, but because they appear on nearly every list already. This directory was built to surface voices that deserve to be just as well known to anyone serious about this field.

COMMON MISTAKES LEADERS MAKE WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY

The most common mistake is treating psychological safety as a destination rather than a daily practice. Organisations launch a psychological safety initiative, run a training day, update the values poster, and then expect the culture to have changed. Safety is not built in a session. It is built in the thousand small moments where a leader either responds to a mistake with curiosity or with blame, either invites dissent or closes it down, either acts on what they hear or files it away.

The second mistake is confusing safety with consensus or harmony. A team where everyone agrees, where meetings are friendly, and where conflict is absent is not necessarily safe. It may be suppressed. The signal that psychological safety is real is not that people stop disagreeing but that they start disagreeing in productive ways, naming tensions directly rather than carrying them silently into the corridor. As Liane Davey and others have argued, productive conflict is actually a symptom of safety rather than its opposite.

The third mistake is treating safety as exclusively a leader's responsibility. It is primarily a leader's responsibility, in the sense that leaders have the most power to create or destroy safety through their behaviour. But it is also a collective property that every team member contributes to through the norms they reinforce, the behaviour they call in or let pass, and the degree to which they extend the same safety to others that they want for themselves. An initiative that focuses only on leaders misses half the equation.

The fourth mistake is measuring safety with a single survey and then moving on. Psychological safety is dynamic. It shifts with changes in team composition, leadership behaviour, business pressure, and context. Organisations that measure it once and then assume the result is stable are likely to be surprised when they discover that the culture has drifted significantly in the period between measurements. For more on recognising when team cultures are silently deteriorating, see the blog post 17 Signs Your High-Performing Team Is Falling Apart at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/signs-high-performing-team-falling-apart.

The fifth mistake is applying a US-centric model without adaptation. Much of the foundational psychological safety literature was developed in US organisational contexts. Power distance, communication norms, collective versus individual values, and the relationship between hierarchy and trust vary significantly across cultures. The mistake is not using the frameworks, which are genuinely useful, but applying them without sensitivity to the specific cultural context in which a team is operating, or assuming that what safety looks like in one cultural context is universal.

IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE: WHAT LEADERS CAN ACTUALLY DO

The most important starting point is diagnostic honestly rather than aspirationally. Before an organisation launches a psychological safety initiative, it should ask what the evidence actually shows rather than what it hopes is true. Run a survey with Edmondson's seven-item scale or Clark's four-stages assessment. Conduct listening sessions where a neutral third party asks team members what it is actually like to speak up here. Examine the data on who contributes in meetings, who stays silent, who never raises concerns, and who has recently left the organisation. That honest starting point is more valuable than any framework applied to a false baseline.

The second step is focusing on the leader's own behaviour before anything else. The research is unambiguous that team psychological safety is most powerfully shaped by how the leader responds in specific moments: when someone makes a mistake, when a meeting is running over, when someone raises a concern at a bad time, when a project is in trouble and someone is the bearer of bad news. Leaders who want to build safety should identify the two or three specific habitual responses that are currently undermining it and work on changing those first.

The third step is building accountability into the safety work. This is the counterintuitive insight that Kim Scott, Timothy Clark, and others have developed most clearly: psychological safety and high accountability are not in tension. They are complementary. Teams with both outperform teams with either alone. Safety without accountability becomes permissiveness. Accountability without safety becomes fear. The combination is what produces genuine performance.

The fourth step is to think systemically about what structural conditions are undermining safety regardless of individual leader behaviour. If the performance management system punishes people for surfacing problems, no amount of leadership development will fully compensate. If the promotion process rewards confident assertion over careful uncertainty, safety will be structurally penalised. If the organisation's meeting culture ensures that the most senior voice always speaks first, the psychological safety training will not survive contact with the standard Monday morning meeting. Book Jonno White to facilitate an executive offsite where your leadership team can work on these structural questions directly: jonno@consultclarity.org.

The fifth step is to maintain the work over time rather than treating it as a project with an end date. Safety is maintained by specific habitual practices: retrospectives where learning rather than blame is the default, forums where bad news can be surfaced safely, 1:1 conversations where leaders genuinely ask for feedback and visibly use what they hear, and recognition of the moments when someone speaks up with courage and the organisation responds well.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is the difference between psychological safety and trust?

Psychological safety and trust are related but distinct. Trust is generally a dyadic property, meaning it describes the relationship between two specific people. Psychological safety is a group property: it describes the shared belief of a team about the climate for risk taking. A team can have high individual trust between members while still having low psychological safety if there is no collective norm of speaking up. Conversely, a team might have moderate trust in individual relationships but a strong shared expectation that it is safe to raise problems and be heard. Edmondson and others have consistently argued that psychological safety is the more proximate driver of team learning behaviour.

Can you have too much psychological safety?

Yes, in the sense that safety without accountability or standards can become complacency. A team where people feel completely safe but there are no consequences for underperformance or for disrespectful behaviour is not in a healthy equilibrium. This is the insight behind Timothy Clark's distinction between the four stages and Kim Scott's emphasis on combining care with challenge. The goal is not the maximum possible safety as a single variable but the combination of high safety and high accountability that research consistently finds produces the highest team performance.

How do you measure psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson's original seven-item scale, which asks team members to rate their agreement with statements such as "If I make a mistake on this team, it is often held against me" and "It is safe to take a risk on this team", is the most validated and widely used measurement tool. Timothy Clark's 4 Stages assessment, the Fearless Organization Scan based on Edmondson's work, and Maureen Dollard's Psychosocial Safety Climate measures are also widely used in different contexts. The choice of tool should be driven by what the organisation is trying to understand and what it plans to do with the results.

Is psychological safety more important in some sectors than others?

The foundational research on psychological safety in healthcare makes the stakes visibly high: teams where people do not feel safe to speak up make more medical errors, not fewer. Aviation research has found the same pattern. But the business case outside high-risk sectors is equally strong: teams with high psychological safety generate more ideas, respond to market changes more quickly, and retain their members at higher rates. The mechanism is the same regardless of sector. What varies is the cost of getting it wrong.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The 50 people on this list represent something genuinely important about the state of this conversation in 2026. They are not all saying the same thing. They come from different traditions, apply different frameworks, work in different sectors and cultural contexts, and in some cases hold views that are in productive tension with each other. That is exactly as it should be.

Psychological safety is not a solved problem. It is an ongoing inquiry into the conditions under which human beings can do their best work together rather than their most self-protective work. The research base has grown substantially since Edmondson's original 1999 paper, but it is still developing. The practice is further behind the research in most organisations. The tools are improving. The cultural context is shifting, with hybrid work, AI adoption, and psychosocial safety legislation each demanding new thinking about what safety means and what it requires.

The people on this list are doing that thinking. Following them, reading their books, listening to their podcasts, and bringing their frameworks into leadership development programmes and team conversations is not the same as building a psychologically safe culture. But it is a genuine starting point, and it is a far better starting point than anything built from opinion alone.

If your leadership team is ready to move from reading to doing, Jonno White works with organisations globally to build the communication foundations, team dynamics, and leadership practices that make psychological safety real in everyday working life. Jonno is the author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and the host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast. To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or executive offsite, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is far more affordable than most organisations expect.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

SOURCES

MIT Technology Review: Creating Psychological Safety in the AI Era (December 2025). Gallup: Global Employee Engagement and Wellbeing findings (2025). Google Project Aristotle: Google's internal research on team effectiveness.

NEXT READ

The people on this list work at the intersection of safety, trust, culture, and voice. For the broader team culture conversation those foundations support, the blog post 35 Essential Thought Leaders on Team Culture brings together the voices shaping how teams are built, sustained, and transformed.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/35-essential-thought-leaders-on-team-culture