#57: 2026 Leadership Is About Psychological Safety: The Hidden Driver of Innovation in Classrooms and Boardrooms

In this episode we explore why people hold back ideas — from students in a classroom to executives in corporate meetings — and what happens when we create environments where ideas are freely shared and heard. We unpack the concept of psychological safety, the science behind it, and real-world implications for innovation, learning, and collaboration.

🎧 Key Concepts Covered

1) What Psychological Safety Is

• Psychological safety is defined as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — where people can speak up, admit mistakes, ask questions, and share ideas without fear of embarrassment or retribution. 

2) Why People Don’t Share Ideas

• Humans are socially wired — fear of judgment, rejection, or embarrassment can suppress contribution.
• In learning environments, students often hesitate to share because of social risk or unestablished trust. 
• Research on group learning shows that students may use conversational strategies (like hedging or joking) to protect themselves when sharing ideas. 

3) Psychological Safety Drives Innovation

• Harvard Business School research by Amy Edmondson highlights that psychologically safe teams are more capable of learning, experimentation, and innovation. 
• Google’s internal research, known as Project Aristotle, found that psychological safety was the strongest predictor of team success — more so than individual talent, tenure, or team composition. 
• In work environments, psychological safety enhances knowledge sharing, idea generation, and adaptive performance. 

4) Innovation + Diversity

• Creating climates where diverse voices feel safe dramatically improves innovation outcomes. Psychological safety allows a wider range of perspectives to be heard and integrated. 

5) Psychological Safety in Learning Spaces

• Students learn more when they feel safe to express ideas, engage with peers, and revise thinking. 
• Project-based learning and collaborative classrooms show that supportive psychological climates increase student creativity and engagement. 

🧠 Actionable Takeaways

For Leaders & Managers:

• Cultivate meeting norms where dissent is invited, not punished.
• Model vulnerability and admit your own mistakes to signal safety.
• Encouraging questions openly and redirecting blame from individuals to processes fosters trust.

For Educators & Parents:

• Offer multiple ways to contribute (written responses, small-group brainstorms).
• Normalize idea development — that thinking evolves, and being wrong is part of learning.

📚 References & Suggested Reading

• Edmondson, A. C., The Fearless Organization – foundational work on psychological safety and innovation. 
• Google’s Project Aristotle — long-term research into team effectiveness and psychological safety. 
• Harvard Graduate School of Education, Why Psychological Safety Matters in Class.
• Conlin & Scherr, Making Space to Sensemake — academic research on risk and idea-sharing in classroom discussions. 
• Learning Policy Institute strategies for building psychological safety in classrooms.

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Transcript

Welcome And Purpose

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Just Count Me In, a podcast designed to help you break free from your limitations and step into the life that you actually were meant to live. I'm Sari Stone and I'm a holistic coach with a background in education. For the past six years, I've been guiding people to transform their lives from the inside out. My journey, to be honest with you, was not always clear. For years, I actually felt like I was living someone else's life, checking all the right boxes, but never feeling quite truly fulfilled. That all changed when I experienced a few miracles, met some incredible teachers, and had a major wake-up call that forced me to shift my entire perspective. Wayne Dyer once said, When you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change, and that is exactly what this podcast is about. Helping you see your life in a new way so that you can start living with authenticity, purpose, and passion. Each week I'm going to bring you 30-minute episodes filled with insights, practical strategies, and inspiring interviews to help you uncover what truly lights you up and identify what's been holding you back. Eventually, this is going to ignite your motivation and create real change. Are you ready to step into the life you were meant to live? Then just count me in. Hit subscribe and join me on this journey. If this episode resonates, please share it with a friend who needs a little inspiration today. Let's do this together. A family member who had something to say that was really a breakthrough for the whole family. Somewhere there's a student sitting in a classroom. I was tutoring her, and right now she came up with a completely different way that works without using AI or anything to solve a theorem. And I've never seen anything like it, and I've been doing this for a while now. Solve the problem, she's getting correct answers all the time. I asked her, Are you gonna share it? And I know that she would like to share it, but I honestly don't think she will. And I know there's students sitting in classrooms right now who think differently and actually solved problems in unique ways, who are not raising their hands, they're not wrong and they're not confused, they're just thinking and they're thinking differently, but their hand stays down. Maybe it just isn't perfect yet. Maybe they don't want to be corrected in front of everyone. Maybe they're worried that the teacher is going to think that they're challenging authority. Maybe they've learned that being different feels really risky. Now, zoom out. There's an employee sitting in a meeting right now who I'm sure is thinking that there's a better way to solve a problem. They might notice inefficiencies, they can see patterns that leadership just hasn't seen. They bring an idea that could save time, money, or even the company itself, but they don't speak. I know my husband shared an experience where he was in a planning meeting, one of the a very large internet company, and they were talking they were planning this multiple, multiple meetings, just planning, and it was planned out at this point. Nothing was starting. Every week it was like they were having the same meeting, and finally he just blurted out, Are we ever gonna actually start this project? Well, his immediate supervisor is jaw-dropped that he had said something, but to be honest with you, the leader of the company that was in the meeting said, I agree with Stan. And actually, he said, We we are just meeting too much, and the project started the next week. So, why don't people speak up? Because speaking up is vulnerable. Research from a Harvard professor, Amy Edmondson, shows that the highest performing teams are not the ones with the highest IQ or the most experience or education. They are the ones with the highest level of psychological safety. Environments where people feel safe to take interpersonal risks. And in a large internal study that was known as, I think, Project Aristotle, that's right, Google discovered that the number one predictor of team effectiveness, and this was years ago, it wasn't talent, it wasn't funding, it was not seniority, it was whether people felt comfortable and safe enough to speak. Here's the real question: how many brilliant ideas, how many new solutions die very quietly because someone decided they didn't want to raise their hand. Today we're talking about the hidden driver of innovation in classrooms, boardrooms, could be at your dinner table, and why the future may belong to the rooms that learn how to listen. Let's start with what holds people back, why people actually stay silent. I'm always curious as to the why, and then we do with the how we can work through it. Um, actually, the first and foremost is probably fear of judgment. In social psychology, they call it evaluation apprehension, but I feel like it's just anxiety because we're afraid that we're going to be judged negatively. And this fear alone, we know what happens to our brains when we have fear like this. It shuts down idea sharing before it even starts. There's a big fear of rejection. Judgment and rejection are huge, and neuroscience always shows that social rejection actually activates the same region of the brain as physical pain. A good thing to keep in mind as you watch your likes on social media. So when someone considers speaking up in a meeting or raising their hand in class, their nervous system may actually register that as a real threat. It could even come up if you're just having conversations with your friends, if you're out with a bunch of people. There's another reason, and that is the dynamics, the power. And that happens regardless. That can happen in families because you've got this hierarchy, you've got respect, authority, your elders. It can happen to people in the classroom, college classrooms, elementary classrooms, because you assume that the teacher knows more and you could be perceived as disrespectful. It can happen if you're a newer employee or a junior executive in a meeting and you're the lowest on the totem pole. So you assume that the leadership knows more and really doesn't value what you have to say as much, even though that might be exactly why they hired you. Bottom line is you self-edit. And finally, another reason that we hold back and stay silent is perfectionism. High capacity thinkers often won't speak until their ideas are fully formed. Innovation is not born polished, it's kind of refined by having conversations about it. But people that are very committed to doing their best work and putting them their best uh thoughts forward all the time want things to be perfect, and of course, we all want things to be good, but sometimes if we wait until it's perfect, we don't ever get to share it. I do believe that there's a this is the missing link between talent and results. Now let's take a look at why this matters for innovation. Let's connect this to performance and outcomes a little bit. So I looked into the research, and McKinsey Company researched and consistently showed that organizations with greater diversity in leadership outperform their peers financially. And that means here's the nuance: diversity without psychological safety does not produce innovation, it just produces silence. And if you're on a Zoom call or a Google meet, that silence is actually two times more damaging than an in-person meeting because we can't adequately read the person's energy or their body language. It's almost as if we need to call for dissenting opinions to make it okay. There's an African proverb, and it says, a child who isn't embraced by the village will burn it down to feel the warmth. And I think that that's so sad and so true, and so such a reason for what might be going on in our society today and in some of our schools. In my work with students, especially neurodivergent learners and the gifted students that I have, I see this all the time. They solve problems creatively, they see patterns really quickly, and then they hesitate. Sometimes they don't want to be wrong publicly, and I get that. Sometimes it's because they've been corrected abruptly before. Sometimes it's because they link their idea as too different and they want to be popular. There are also times when they actually do threaten. Maybe they are more in, they're probably some of these kids are definitely more intelligent than I am, I'm sure. I just have more life experience. They're close to genius in their IQ, and they won't speak because they're going to threaten a person. Somebody's ego is going to be threatened. Maybe it's in their family, or maybe it's in their friend group, or maybe it's in the classroom. The teacher has to be the expert all the time. The boss has to know the most all the time. And the openness that needs to be created only happens when we feel safe and valued to just be ourselves. That our ideas, even if they're not perfect and even if they don't go over well, are best to be spoken. So that scales up to a company in a different way. In the classroom, what happens is the class actually, the whole everybody in the classroom loses access to that great thinking, including the teacher. And when you scale that up to a company, when employees hold on to their ideas and organizations, end up losing agility. They lose that creative kind of tension where everybody's sitting up straight and their eyes are open and they're really thinking. They lose early warnings that something may go wrong. Silence feels calm, but it's really expensive. Think about innovators who could have stopped sharing and our lives would have been different. Sarah Blakely had no fashion background when she developed Spanx. She was repeatedly dismissed by manufacturers who didn't even understand her idea. And imagine if she had decided her idea wasn't worth voicing. I mean, who doesn't know about Spanx? If you don't, you can Google it. It's very comfortable for a lot of women to wear and makes them feel better. Innovation requires not just intelligence, but resilience in the face of dismissal. And here's the deeper truth. We shouldn't require basic heroic resilience for ideas to survive. I actually just watched the movie David last night, and it's a great, I think it's a great movie. It's a really uplifting movie because he stayed connected to Source and to who he was and who he came to be. But I think that we need to design our lives, our classrooms and our workplaces and our dinner tables in ways that just support everybody's contribution to begin with. So we know this. What do we do with it? How do we apply this? Well, if you're a leader, you can create that loop. You can create a loop where you go first. You talk about a mistake that you made. We inevitably feel more comfortable if a leader goes first. And when leaders go first, it creates what they call a loop. And it gives us all permission to say something maybe that is not right or have an idea that maybe doesn't go over right away. It gives us permission to make mistakes. As a leader, that's important. And one of the things that you can do is to reward dissent, not disrespect, but dissent publicly and model that vulnerability yourself. If you're a parent, one of the things that my parents do, some of my parents do, is 15 minutes before bedtime, I tell them to make it a no-judgment zone. And that's it's a little, a little risky water you're swimming in, but I would suggest highly doing it because it really keeps things open. I wish I had been a mom that was aware of all this when my kids were little. I totally would have done it. And it would have also been hard for me to not act on what they said, but there just has to be that trust that 15 minutes before bed, you can just dump out your brain, whatever, and it's a no-judgment zone. Any ideas, any little confession, anything that you're thinking about, any anything new, that's a free zone. And plus that way your kids can go to sleep feeling clear of things if they need to. Like we often want to jump in and correct, and we don't wait for the whole idea to hatch out of somebody's mouth. So I think if we normalize developing ideas, that's really helpful. One of the things that I started doing when I was coaching was instead of brainstorming, which used to be part of the process that we used, and we were taught that in cognitive coaching, and you put all ideas on the table. And I'm all about putting all ideas on the table, but I know that when brainstorming happens, the loudest in the room usually get recognized. And if we write instead, if we took, I started with my teachers taking five minutes and having them write instead, then research bear it out. 20% more ideas come out of writing first, and 42% more original ideas than if you just go with verbal brainstorming. And plus, it takes into consideration all kinds of learners because verbal, they're still going to get to say it if they write it, and non-verbal, they're gonna get to write it, and their ideas will still be heard. So, what is the reason? What is the reason behind this and what could fail? Those are questions that we can ask and just make it normal, make it normal to talk about it. Sometimes people don't share ideas because they're worried that they're gonna sound negative, and nobody wants that negative Nancy in the room. But I'll tell you what, you've got to look at what could go wrong to be proactive very often. And I don't mean focus on it, I mean focus on, take a look at it and think what could possibly go wrong, and you can load things, front load things, so that they're very much more likely to succeed, and really explicitly say different approaches are always welcome here. When you're talking to somebody and you ask them a question, allow time. Allow time and count yourself back before you say anything else so that they can process. Psychological safety is not softness, it's not mush, it's strategic, and it's actually very disciplined, and it's a measure it's got measurable performance outcomes. Here's what I want you to consider today. If you're a leader, when was the last time you publicly rewarded somebody for disagreeing? If you're a parent, when was the last time you said tell me more instead of correcting and meant it? If you're a teacher, when was the last time you had somebody come in and track your room to see who was contributing, who wasn't, and if there were venues for all types of learners to contribute? I did use to have people come and watch me and just to make sure and correct me. Because innovation does not just come from intelligence. We've got to change our thinking about that. Innovation actually comes from safety, where we know that our ideas are valued. And I think it was the co-founder of Pixar who said this if there's more truth in the hallways than in the meeting room, you've got a problem. Someone believing that their thinking has value even before it's polished. There may be a breakthrough idea sitting right in your classroom, and there may be a breakthrough idea sitting in your conference room. There may be a breakthrough idea in your office on your job site. There may be a breakthrough idea for your family sitting right at your dinner table. The only question is, will the room be brave enough to hear it? And maybe the deeper question is, what idea are you holding back? Because someone somewhere may be waiting for the courage it takes for you to raise your hand. I'm raising my hand with this podcast. We're all in this together, and the future belongs to the places where people feel safe enough to speak. Just count me in. Here's what I want you to consider today. If you're a teacher, when was the last time you publicly rewarded someone for disagreeing? Or if you're an employer for that matter, if you're a parent, when was the last time you said tell me more instead of correcting? If you're a leader, how many times have you kept track of how many people were actually responding and contributing who hadn't raised their hand, who hadn't said something, who looked like they really wanted to say something and held back? Almost you need a coach in the room with you sometimes to notice those things. Because innovation doesn't just come from intelligence, it comes from safety, it comes from someone believing that their thinking has value even before it's polished, that they can stutter or maybe say the wrong word or maybe put their foot in their mouth, and still it doesn't mean that there's not going to be a breakthrough. There may be a breakthrough idea sitting right in your classroom. There may be a breakthrough idea sitting right at your meeting room or your conference room, and there may be a breakthrough idea sitting right at your dinner table. The only question is, are we brave enough to hear it? And maybe the deeper question is, what idea are you holding back? Because someone somewhere may be waiting for the courage it takes for you to raise your hand. We are all in this together, and the future belongs to the rooms where people feel safe enough to raise their hands and speak. Thank you so much for joining me today. If this episode spoke to you, I'd really love to hear from you. You can find me on Instagram or on my Facebook page, just count me in. And if someone came to mind while you were listening, please share this episode with them. Sometimes one conversation can change everything. Thank you for being here, for choosing growth, and for doing the inner work. I look forward to being with you again next time. Remember, we're all in this together. Hit that subscribe button. Just count me in.