I Almost Put This Stat on My Slide Deck

What the psychological safety research really says, and who the popular advice misses

TL;DR

• A viral LinkedIn stat says teams with high psychological safety beat sales targets by 17%. Google's actual finding was about effective teams overall, and it was never peer reviewed.
• Peer-reviewed research still backs psychological safety. It's linked to learning and performance, and it fades when it's not intentionally fostered.
• Most "speak up in the meeting" advice is built for brains that think fast and out loud. Give people more than one way to contribute.
• Try this: pick one teammate and ask how they like to share ideas.

The stat that started it

There's a compelling statistic making the rounds on LinkedIn: according to Google's Project Aristotle, teams with high psychological safety beat their sales targets by 17%. Hey, I want to add that to my slide deck!

Then the researcher in me kicked in. Was it peer reviewed? Has anyone replicated it? Research tends to get exaggerated on its way to the headlines (John Oliver has a whole segment about this). And the need for accuracy isn't just my autism coming out to play. The neuroinformed workplace message is powerful because it's true, and sloppy evidence is how good movements lose their power.

So I went to the source. Google's own guide says sales teams that were effective overall beat their targets by about 17%. That's a finding about team effectiveness as a whole, and psychological safety was the most important of five dynamics behind it. Okay. I know, I know. Small difference in wording. Add that it was one company studying its own staff, with no peer review and no public data. So yeah... no. That number is staying off my slide deck. (Still giving Google free press, though. Hi Google! Call me!)

What psychological safety actually means

When I asked a couple of colleagues, they described being kind, avoiding conflict, and keeping heated emotions private.

Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who pioneered the research on psychological safety in workplace teams, defines it as "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking." Translation: you can ask the "obvious" question, admit the mistake, or disagree with the boss without paying for it later.

So psychological safety actually invites discomfort. The goal is to create a welcoming culture in which people feel safe enough to have uncomfortable conversations. Indeed, in my private interviews with staff during the assessment phase of my neuroinformed workplace consultations, I have discovered that the people who stay quiet in meetings often have the most valuable insights. And even if that weren't the case, it would still matter that they feel heard and included, regardless of how anyone judges the quality of their input.

The research that does hold up

Three findings I'd happily put on a slide:

• Safety is linked to learning, and learning is linked to performance. Edmondson's original study of 51 teams found this chain, and a 2017 review of 136 samples (over 22,000 people) backed up the link. What this might look like: a new coordinator notices the intake form confuses families. On a safe team, she mentions it, the form gets fixed, and everyone's work improves. On an unsafe team, she decides it isn't her place, and that confusing form lives on for years.
• It fades fast. A Harvard study of more than 10,000 employees found new hires start out feeling safe to speak up, then lose it quickly. Teams that already had strong safety softened the drop. Think of it like this: remember your first month at a new job? You asked every question, because nobody expected you to know anything yet. Six months in, those same questions felt embarrassing, so you stopped asking. Now multiply that by every new hire you've ever onboarded.
• Who talks matters. Groups that share airtime evenly tend to solve problems better than groups dominated by a few voices. Have you ever had the experience of sitting through a meeting where the same two people did all the talking, and then a colleague caught you in the hallway afterward to say, "I had a concern about that"? That concern never made it into the decision. Share the airtime and you get the whole team's brain, not just its loudest part.

The part the viral posts skip

Most advice on building psychological safety boils down to "invite challenge in the meeting" and "make respectful disagreement normal." I like the part about normalizing conflict. However, it's advice written for a particular kind of brain: one that processes in real time, finds a gap in fast conversation, reads the unwritten social rules, and speaks up on the spot. (Two out of four, in my case.) For many neurodivergent folks, introverts, and people who think best in writing or after a night's sleep, "speak up in the meeting" is an invitation to self-loathing and inner torment.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. For many people, an explicit "I want you to challenge this" is a game changer. It just isn't enough on its own. Give your team more than one door:

• Send it ahead. Share proposals before the meeting, and take written input as seriously as spoken input. Then tell your team you're doing it. When team members know their written comments carry equal weight, they feel freer to share the fullness of their insights. And the team members who feel confident speaking up in a fast-paced meeting will know that the point of view that seemed so prominent in the room won't automatically prevail.
• Give processing time. "Send me your concerns by Thursday" surfaces what the live meeting misses. It's tempting to worry that this will slow everything down. But ultimately, the team will operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness, because fewer mistakes get made and fewer miscommunication messes need untangling!
• Say the rules out loud. Spell out how disagreement works here, so nobody has to decode it. This can be surprisingly hard to do well, because so many social expectations go unsaid. Some of us see them as givens because they come naturally. (Well, to you. Not so much to me, but I've been studying human ways for a long time now.) If you've worked on international teams, you already know how cultural differences can cause confusion and misunderstanding. Many neurodivergent people describe feeling like aliens trying to figure out human culture. In fact, if you state the rules the way you'd explain them to an intergalactic traveler, that would be really helpful for some of us.
• Get curious before you get judgy. The tone you heard might not be the one they sent. And the tone they heard might not be the one you sent. We can end up trying to fix an interpersonal conflict that never even existed, simply because someone misread what another person meant. (That topic deserves its own article.) One strategy that works for me is training myself to notice the difference between my interpretation and the observable facts of a situation. It's a great first step toward coming from curiosity and asking questions, instead of deciding what someone meant and reacting as if my interpretation were hard fact.

These strategies don't only help neurodivergent team members. Done intentionally, fostering a neuroinformed workplace lifts all ships, and everybody feels safer.

What it looks like when it's real

Psychological safety stops being a buzzword the moment an organization decides it's part of the mission.

I got to watch that happen at Whatcom Center for Early Learning, a Bellingham nonprofit providing early intervention for young children with disabilities and developmental delays. It started small: a curious concern about issues a few specific employees had raised. Plenty of organizations would have handled that as a one-off. Calm things down, maybe schedule a feel-good workshop, move on.

WCEL did the opposite. They got curious. I began my assessment with individual interviews so every voice had a private, low-pressure way in. Then came training, then small groups taking ownership of what they'd learned, then leadership planning, then an all-staff session. Along the way the team built tools they own: a Needs and Preferences Tool, a Communication Plan, onboarding materials so new hires start inside the culture instead of guessing at it.

One conversation didn't fix it. The whole culture's default shifted, from "who's the problem here?" to curiosity and awareness, with concrete plans to keep the good results going. Don't get me wrong! A good-feeling, fun, and humorous workshop can be a great part of the process. But a workshop is an event. A commitment is a practice, and it has to be revisited.

An invitation (with grading, because I'm like that)

I invite you to think about your teammates. Put yourself in their shoes as best you can. Feel into how heard and understood each person on your team actually is.

It's not an easy exercise. But now I've planted it in the back of your mind, so you're going to do it subconsciously whether you actively do it or not.

Here's the grading rubric:

• A: You consider it in the back of your mind. That counts. I'm a generous grader.
• A+: You actually take a minute, intentionally, during your work week, and give it five minutes of thought. Maybe pick one team member in your mind. Watch them interact. Take a deep breath and ask yourself how comfortable they are expressing themselves. Are they open with their thoughts, opinions, and feelings? Or is there gold in them thar hills, just waiting until they feel safe enough to share it?
• Extra credit (we all like bonus points, except for some of us who don't care, and you know who you are): Come up with one action step for how you can experiment and get curious. Ask a colleague a real question about how they like to share ideas, or what makes it easier for them to disagree with you. Give them some time to process the question, if needed. Then listen to the answer as though you are a curious explorer, or an alien exploring the people of Earth (which is how I have felt for much of my life).

And then I want to know what you realize. Seriously. Comment, message me, or reach out here. Every time someone does this exercise, I learn something new about how teams work. Which is kind of the whole point, isn't it?

A note on imperfection: I checked these sources as carefully as my detail-loving, yet habitually skimming, brain allows, and I'm always open to the possibility that I got something wrong, worded something clumsily, or used a term someone has outgrown. If you catch it, tell me. Kindly correcting me in public is psychological safety in action, and I'd rather learn than be right. (Okay, I'd like both. But learning wins.)

References

1. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
2. Frazier, M. L., et al. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113-165.
3. Bransby, D. P., Kerrissey, M. J., & Edmondson, A. C. (2024). Paradise lost (and restored?): A study of psychological safety over time. Academy of Management Discoveries. Harvard summary.
4. Woolley, A. W., et al. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330, 686-688. Summary.
5. Google re:Work. Understand team effectiveness.
6. Edmondson, A. C., & Kerrissey, M. (2025). What people get wrong about psychological safety. Harvard Business Review.

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Heather Flanagan, MBA, is the founder of Flanagan Leadership Group, LLC in Bellingham, WA, helping organizations build neuroinformed workplaces where every voice is heard. Learn more at flanaganleadership.com.