Maya Gazzard
A manager has legitimate feedback to give. They know what needs to be said, but start editing before the conversation even begins. Maybe it should be softened. Maybe now isn’t the right time. Maybe saying it too directly could make the person feel unsafe.
By the time the conversation happens, the message has been diluted so thoroughly that the employee leaves without understanding there was a problem at all.
Have we started confusing psychological safety with psychological comfort?
Safety isn’t the same as comfort
Psychological safety isn’t about removing discomfort. It exists to make difficult things safer to do: disagreeing with someone senior, admitting a mistake, saying you don’t understand, challenging a decision, raising a concern, giving or receiving honest feedback. The goal was never to make those things comfortable. It was to make them safe enough to happen anyway.
It’s an understandable drift. Discomfort is visible. Someone becomes upset, defensive or frustrated, and the instinct can be to conclude that the interaction itself has caused harm. Comfort is also easier to aim for: soften the message, avoid the disagreement, postpone the conversation. Yet an uncomfortable response doesn’t necessarily mean an unreasonable interaction has occurred. Sometimes discomfort signals that something is wrong. Sometimes it’s simply a reasonable response to hearing something difficult.
Focus on what creates the risk
That distinction matters as organisations increasingly focus on psychosocial risk. Genuine psychosocial hazards need to be identified and controlled: harmful behaviour, unreasonable workload, poor role clarity, or risks arising from the way a job is designed, managed or experienced. However, discomfort alone doesn’t establish harm.
A manager telling someone their work fell short of what was needed is not the same thing as a manager humiliating them in front of the team for it. Both managers might be delivering essentially the same message. One does it privately, specifically and respectfully, giving the employee an opportunity to respond and improve. The other does it publicly, personally and in a way that creates a risk of harm.
The distinction isn’t necessarily in the message. It can be in how the message is delivered. You don’t have to remove the accountability to remove the harm.
The question isn’t simply whether something was uncomfortable. It’s what actually created the risk.
Avoidance can make a workplace quieter
Treating discomfort itself as the problem creates a different risk: avoidance. Managers soften feedback until it means very little. Employees hesitate to challenge decisions. Difficult conversations happen later, or not at all. Performance issues drift, unaddressed, because naming them feels risky. People stop saying, “I think we’ve got this wrong.”
The workplace becomes quieter, and mistakes it for safety.
Still, a workplace with less conflict isn’t necessarily a workplace with more psychological safety. It may simply be one where people have become more careful about what they say.
In fact, a genuinely psychologically safe workplace may occasionally look less comfortable from the outside. People disagree. They challenge decisions. They admit mistakes. Managers give clear feedback. Employees push back. The difference is that those interactions can happen without humiliation, retaliation or unreasonable consequences.
In trying to remove discomfort, an organisation can end up suppressing the very behaviours psychological safety was meant to enable.
Candour and respect, together
None of this is an argument for brutal honesty, for toughening people up, or for using accountability as cover for poor management. Avoiding necessary conversations isn’t care either.
The standard is candour and respect together: not toughness dressed up as honesty, and not niceness standing in for care. Say the true thing. Say it clearly. Allow disagreement. Listen to the response. Respect the person hearing it.
Sometimes respect means making sure someone hears what they need to hear while they still have an opportunity to do something about it.
There isn’t always a clean line between discomfort and harm. Context matters. But a few questions can help find it:
What is actually creating the risk here?
Is the concern about how something is being done, or simply that the message itself is difficult to hear?
If we remove the discomfort, what necessary workplace behaviour might we remove with it?
Sometimes the answers will expose behaviour that genuinely needs to change. Sometimes they’ll expose a difficult conversation that still needs to happen.
If psychological safety starts preventing the very behaviours it was supposed to make possible, we’ve misunderstood the assignment.
Maya Gazzard is the Head of People & Systems at Trescon. She leads People, Safety and Systems in construction. She believes a control, a process or a person only holds up if it’s true in practice, not just true on paper. That belief shapes how she works: directly, sometimes uncomfortably, but always in service of getting it right rather than getting it signed off.
