Psychological Safety – The Unsung Hero of Success

A Foundation for Collaboration

Think of your kitchen during a dinner party rush. Everyone: you, your significant other, and kids, is moving fast, trying to deliver the best dinner possible under pressure. If people feel comfortable enough to shout “There is a hot pan moving!” or “I need help with the sauce”, the kitchen thrives. But if they stay silent out of fear of being blamed, someone eventually gets burned. 

Salesforce projects work the same way. Or all projects do, to be fair.

Behind every successful Go-Live, there is something you don’t see on dashboards or kanban boards: a team that feels safe enough to speak up, take risks, and admit uncertainty. That’s psychological safety, and it is the quiet difference between a team that survives and one that succeeds. 

As defined by Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson, who originated the concept, psychological safety is “the belief that one can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation,” and it is essential for a learning organization. It empowers teams to voice concerns, embrace risks, and acknowledge uncertainties.

Why It Matters More Than We Think

A 2022 Google study (Project Aristotle) found that psychological safety was the #1 factor distinguishing high-performing teams — above skills, tools, or experience. Salesforce implementations are rarely straightforward. They combine business transformation, data migration, process redesign, and stakeholder change management — often under tight deadlines and with distributed teams.

Delivery teams often work across countries, time zones, business units, and even clouds. You have developers dealing with metadata, admins managing profiles and permission sets, and BAs connecting business and tech. It is like trying to coordinate a group of musicians who just met. Of course, everyone is talented, but if no one feels safe enough to actually play out loud, the music falls flat. 

In psychologically safe teams:

• People voice doubts about complex automation before it breaks production.
• Business users ask “naïve” questions that uncover major gaps.
• PMs can challenge unrealistic deadlines without fearing backlash.

In unsafe teams:

• Issues are hidden under “all good” in standups.
• Developers burn out fixing things they never felt safe flagging.
• Clients smile in meetings but feel unheard behind the scenes.

Just like in personal relationships, silence rarely means harmony. On the contrary, it usually means tension.

Signs you are lacking Psychological Safety

Have you ever been in a group chat where everyone hesitates to be the first person to say something? That’s how low psychological safety feels like in a project.

Some common symptoms in Salesforce teams are:

• Lack of critical inquiry: No one feels comfortable questioning ongoing processes, even when they observe problems, such as a Flow looping endlessly.
  
• Prioritization of speed over validation: The urgency of “Let’s just do it this sprint” overrides the crucial step of “Let’s validate the requirement.”
  
• Ineffective retrospectives: Retrospectives become mere formalities rather than opportunities for genuine and honest reflection.
  
• Stifled innovation: Individuals gravitate towards “safe” solutions, avoiding the risks associated with creative problem-solving.

Imagine driving a car where everyone defers to someone else to point out a missed exit. By the time the error is noticed, you’ve gone ten miles in the wrong direction. That’s exactly what this feels like. 

How to Build Psychological Safety

It doesn’t require therapy sessions or trust fall-like activities. Psychological Safety is built with simple and consistent actions, like healthy relationships. It isn’t a soft skill — it’s a delivery enabler. Here’s how to cultivate it across your team:

1. Model curiosity and vulnerability: Leaders who openly admit mistakes, or ask for clarification, create a space for others to do the same. As explained in Edmondson’s research, “Leaders set the tone by acknowledging their own fallibility.”
   • When a Solution Architect says, “Let’s revisit that requirement. I might be missing something,” they signal that questioning is valued, not punished.
     
2. Redesign meetings for honest input: Sprint planning and retrospectives should invite reflection instead of punishment or finger pointing.
   • Always start retros with phrases like “what did we learn” instead of “what went wrong?”
     
3. Track psychological safety like a performance metric: According to research from MIT Sloan (2021), teams that periodically measure their sense of safety are 27% more likely to meet project goals.
   • You can adapt this by adding a simple “Team Pulse” metric in sprint reviews. For example: ask them to choose which one better describes their feeling at that time: a. Need support, b. Some friction, or c. Feeling confident).

Its Impact in Real Projects

Imagine in one project, a junior developer quietly flagged a recursive trigger issue that would’ve caused data corruption. She was new and hesitant, but her tech lead had once said, “If you see something weird, say it out loud.” That small moment saved the team days of troubleshooting and the client thousands of dollars.

Or even the client can be impacted by this safety. Since they felt comfortable, they admitted not understanding in a meeting, allowing the consultant to explain everything visually. That clarity helped everyone involved understand and reshape the whole integration strategy. 

In both cases, success wasn’t about tools or timelines, it was about permission to speak. Research consistently supports this: Google’s Project Aristotle, Edmondson’s Harvard studies, and McKinsey’s 2021 Team Resilience Report all found direct links between psychological safety and performance, adaptability, and retention.

Conclusion: Psychological Safety is the Real MVP

In Salesforce projects, we track so many KPIs: velocity, user adoption, ROI. However, none of them matter if your team is afraid to tell the truth.

Psychological safety isn’t a “soft” skill; it’s a scalability skill. It’s what turns a group of experts into a high-performing team. It’s what allows a project to adapt instead of crumble when things change.

As Amy Edmondson reminds us, “A fearless organization is not one where people are unafraid, but where they feel safe enough to be themselves.” Because in the end, trust is the one dependency you can’t deploy. You have to build it, sprint by sprint.