Project leaders are often expected to create accountability, maintain momentum, and resolve problems quickly. Yet psychological safety may be one of the most important conditions for accomplishing all three. When team members can challenge assumptions, admit mistakes, raise risks, and disagree with senior stakeholders without fear of retaliation, project leaders gain access to information that might otherwise remain hidden.
That matters because project problems rarely become serious the moment they appear. They become serious when people hesitate to discuss them.
The Leadership Problem Behind Silent Teams
Google’s research into more than 180 teams found that how team members interacted mattered more than who was on the team. Its researchers identified five characteristics of effective teams, with psychological safety ranked first, followed by dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact.
The implication for PPMO leaders is significant: adding highly experienced people to a struggling project team may not solve the underlying problem. The team’s operating environment may be the real constraint.
McKinsey’s research reinforces the point. Its 2021 study found that only 26% of leaders frequently demonstrated behaviors that foster psychological safety. The research identified consultative, supportive, and challenging leadership behaviors as important ways leaders establish that environment.
What Psychological Safety Looks Like in a Project
Psychological safety does not mean lowering standards or avoiding difficult conversations. Effective project leaders can demand accountability while making it safe to surface bad news.
Consider the difference between these two questions:
- “Why didn’t you catch this earlier?”
- “What prevented us from seeing this earlier?”
The first can encourage defensiveness. The second creates an opportunity to improve the system.
For project and portfolio leaders, practical behaviors include:
Ask for dissent. Before approving a major decision, deliberately ask who sees a different risk or interpretation.
Reward early escalation. Treat the person who raises a problem early as an asset, not an obstacle.
Separate mistakes from negligence. A failed assumption can provide valuable learning; repeatedly ignoring known risks is an accountability issue.
Make uncertainty visible. Project managers should be able to say, “We don’t know yet,” without feeling pressure to manufacture certainty.
Let executives hear inconvenient information. A PPMO that filters uncomfortable information before it reaches leadership can unintentionally create portfolio blind spots.
Turn Team Safety Into Better Project Governance
Psychological safety becomes particularly valuable when incorporated into governance rather than treated as a cultural initiative.
A steering committee can ask:
- What are we most uncertain about?
- What risks are we underestimating?
- What would cause this project to miss its intended outcome?
- What information would change our current decision?
- What are team members reluctant to say?
These questions create a structured mechanism for surfacing information that traditional status reporting can miss.
PMI’s research also points toward the importance of human capabilities. Its 2023 Pulse of the Profession identified communication, problem-solving, collaborative leadership, and strategic thinking among the most critical power skills for project professionals.
That is an important distinction for PPMO leaders: governance should not simply measure whether teams are delivering. It should help create the conditions that allow teams to identify and solve problems before delivery deteriorates.
The Executive Test
Senior leaders can assess the health of a project team with one deceptively simple question:
“What are people afraid to tell me?”
If the answer is “nothing,” that may be encouraging—or it may indicate that leaders are not hearing the whole story.
A stronger approach is to create recurring opportunities for disagreement, uncertainty, and bad news to surface safely. The objective isn’t comfortable meetings. It is better decisions.
Conclusion
High-performing project teams are not created solely through methodology, technology, experience, or stronger controls. They also depend on the environment leaders create around the work.
Psychological safety gives project professionals permission to surface risks, challenge assumptions, admit uncertainty, and learn from failure while maintaining accountability for results. For PPMOs and executives, that makes psychological safety more than a people-management concept. It is a practical component of project governance and organizational performance.
When leaders make it safe to tell the truth early, projects have a better chance of responding while problems are still manageable—and stakeholders have a better chance of receiving the outcomes they expected.
Reference
Rozovsky, Julia. The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team. Google People Operations, November 17, 2015.
De Smet, Aaron; Rubenstein, Kim; Schrah, Gunnar; Vierow, Mike; and Edmondson, Amy. Psychological Safety and the Critical Role of Leadership Development. McKinsey & Company, February 11, 2021.
Project Management Institute. Pulse of the Profession 2023: Power Skills—Redefining Project Success. Project Management Institute, 2023.
Project Management Institute. Pulse of the Profession 2024: The Future of Project Work. Project Management Institute, February 2024.
