What Your Team Isn’t Saying May Be Costing You More Than You Think
Psychological safety consulting for leaders who want to cultivate more innovative, higher-performing teams.
Recognize any of these behaviors on your team?
The same mistakes happen over and over again. Or worse, small failures grow into big, costly ones because no one speaks up early enough.
Ideas only surface in 1:1’s, and never in the room when decisions are made or when brainstorming occurs.
The same voices dominate in team meetings, and “Any concerns?” is met with silence.
And here's the one that perhaps hurts the most: your top talent keeps leaving because they no longer feel able to do their best work on your team. (Cue another round of expensive recruiting and onboarding!)
At Fail Smarter, we've watched these patterns play out across countless teams.
We've seen the toll they take on collaboration, innovation, and performance. But we've also seen teams where none of this happens. Where people challenge ideas early, share freely, and stay engaged.
The performance difference is striking. So, what's the not-so-secret ingredient?
It's not luck or magic. It's psychological safety — the one factor that unlocks real collaboration, innovation, and sustained high performance.
Psychological safety isn’t fluff; It’s fundamental to the success of your team
We get it. As a leader, you (and your team) face enormous pressures to deliver results. And here’s the thing, psychological safety – the belief team members can speak openly about ideas, concerns, mistakes or failures without fear of punishment or blame – can help you get there.
It’s indisputable. Teams with high psychological safety innovate more (driving revenue and cost savings), collaborate better (launching stronger, battle-tested initiatives), and retain top talent (creating engaged teams that go above and beyond).
Don’t just take our word for it. In Google’s 2-year Project Aristotle study of 180 internal teams, they found that psychological safety is the #1 ingredient of a highly effective team.
Teams with high psychological safety report:
Lower turnover
Higher engagement
Higher productivity
Source: Navigating the Science of Failing Well
Interested in improving the level of psychological safety on your team?
Good news. We can help you with that…
We start by measuring the level of psychological safety on your team, as without awareness there can be no action.
Using the research-backed assessment, The Fearless Organization Scan, and/or leader and team member interviews (if they’re needed), we help you and your team see exactly where the gaps are—where trust breaks down, why voices go silent, when fear of failure is likely showing up, and more.
We then help you develop a concrete and actionable plan to address those gaps as well as the specific barriers, if any, holding your team back.
In short, we help you…
-
Uncover The Root Cause(s)
Get a concrete picture of your team's level of psychological safety and uncover the blind spots nobody's talking about.
-
Cultivate What’s Missing
Create a team culture where people feel safe to speak up, share ideas, and address failures, both large and small, without fear of fallout.
-
Lead With Confidence
Walk away with practical strategies to model vulnerability, inclusivity, and the high-performance behaviors your team is missing.
How it works…
The following is a high-level snapshot of what happens once the engagement begins.
* Note, this process is ideal for leaders (director and above) with intact teams of between 6-15 people who work together on a regular basis. It can be facilitated either in-person or remotely.
01.
Strategy, Alignment & Launch
We first talk with you, the leader, about what you’re seeing on your team and what your goals are for this process. We then meet with your team to educate and align them around what’s coming next as we launch the engagement.
02.
Diagnostic Deep-Dive
You and your team complete the Fearless Organization Scan and/or participate in 1:1 interviews conducted by Fail Smarter.
We then analyze the results and develop hypotheses about what's driving the dynamics uncovered through this deep dive.
03.
Activation & Action Plan
After a private debrief of the results with the team leader, we facilitate an experiential workshop with the team leader and the team to review and process the findings using various thought exercises.
We conclude by helping you and your team build an action plan that your team can operationalize and own.
Valuable Add-Ons
A one-time follow-up session after the Activation & Action Plan phase between Fail Smarter and the team leader to review the actions generated during the experiential workshop and ideate around how to optimally embed changes moving forward.
Ongoing leadership coaching on building psychological safety on your team.
Additional team interventions to ensure your team continues to build and maintain a high level of psychological safety.
★★★★★
“Thank you for guest speaking at our PROS meeting about psychological safety. The feedback received is that our participants really enjoyed the session! Some of our people leaders also mentioned they found it a particularly interesting opportunity to look at psychological safety for themselves in addition to providing a safe environment for their teams. We look forward to hearing from you again in June!”
– R.A., Former Associate Director of Quality & Change Management, UnitedHealthcare
FAQs
-
Some telltale signs: the same voices dominate every meeting; ideas surface in 1:1s but not in group settings; 'any concerns?' is met with silence; or mistakes or failures get buried instead of discussed. If any of these sound familiar, your team may have low psychological safety.
-
Let's connect it to the metrics your leadership already cares about. Teams with high psychological safety report 27% lower turnover, 76% higher engagement, and 50% higher productivity. Those are measurable performance outcomes, not soft benefits. If you need help building the internal case, I'm happy to walk you through it on a discovery call.
-
That’s a fair concern, but psychological safety isn't a nice-to-have. Research (including Google's famous Project Aristotle) shows it's the #1 predictor of high-performing teams. We're not doing trust falls here. We're using a research-backed diagnostic to identify specific performance barriers—and building a concrete action plan to address them.
-
This is ideal for leaders (Director level and above) with teams of between 6-15 people and who are responsible for team performance and sense that something’s off with how their team communicates and collaborates. It’s NOT for leaders who just want to check a box or aren’t genuinely open to hearing what their team has to say.
-
Because the costs compound. When people don’t speak up, small issues become expensive ones, innovation slows, and top talent disengages. The longer those patterns persist, the harder — and more costly — they are to reverse.
-
The Fearless Organization Scan is a quantitative, research-backed survey that measures psychological safety across specific dimensions. It's efficient and gives you benchmark data. Discovery Interviews are qualitative deep-dives—they take longer but surface richer context and nuance. Some leaders choose both for a complete picture. We'll figure out what makes sense for your team on our discovery call.
Ready to see what’s really going on under the surface?
Let’s assess your team’s dynamics, improve trust, reduce friction, and create a culture where your people speak up early and often.