A couple of years ago my team wrote a “why” statement for our department. A short line about what we were there to do, with a handful of behaviours and values sitting underneath it.
In a team meeting, I stood up to talk it through. We were checking whether the why still fit, and whether those values still described how we actually worked.
I had a plan for how the session would go. It did not go that way.
Someone in the room made a comment that shifted everything. Their point was simple. We probably lived those values really well in the way we looked after our patients. But did we live them the same way in how we treated each other?
That was not on my agenda. For a second I could have steered us back to the slides. That was the easy move. Keep it tidy, stay on time, get back to the comfortable stuff.
But it felt too important to walk past. Someone had effectively put their hand up and said, “Actually, something isn't quite right here.”
So I got curious instead. I can't give you my exact words, but it was something like asking whether other people felt the same, and inviting anyone who was comfortable to say more.
Then I waited.
Psychological safety isn't everyone saying they're fine
Psychological safety does not mean avoiding hard conversations. It means people can raise a concern, ask a question or admit a mistake without expecting to be humiliated or punished for it.
For a long time I think a lot of us had this backwards. We treated a calm, quiet team as a safe team. No complaints, no friction, everyone getting on with it.
But silence isn't the same as safety. Sometimes a quiet team is just a team that has learned it isn't worth speaking up.
Real psychological safety didn't look like everyone in that room saying, “Everything's fine.”
It looked more like one person being willing to say, “Something isn't fine. Can we talk about it?”
That's the whole thing, really. If you take one idea from this, take that one.
The gap between the values we say and the values we live
Here's the tension that one comment exposed. Values are easy to agree with on paper. The harder question is whether they still describe us when we're frustrated, busy, tired or disagreeing with each other.
Most teams can point to their best behaviour. The way they show up for a patient, a client or a customer on a hard day. That part is often completely genuine.
What's harder to look at is the in-between. How we speak to each other when we're stretched. The tone in a handover. The colleague we've quietly written off. The assumption we've stopped checking.
None of that makes a team a bad team. It makes them human. But if we never name the gap between what we say we value and how we sometimes behave, that gap doesn't close on its own.
What psychological safety looked like in practice
So what actually happened after that comment? Not a dramatic turnaround. Something quieter, and I think more useful.
There were about 25 people in the room. At first, nobody jumped in. There was a proper stretch of silence.
I let it sit. That part matters. The instinct is to fill silence, to rescue the moment, to move things along. But if you rush in, you take the space away from the people who need a beat to decide whether it's worth speaking.
After one or two people shared, others started to join. It was never the whole room. Maybe a third of people spoke up. We had junior staff in there too, and experience, confidence and comfort all play a part in who feels able to talk and who doesn't. That's normal. You don't need everyone to speak for it to count.
What struck me most was who set the tone. Some of the more experienced nurses started sharing their own vulnerabilities. Not “here's how you should behave.” More like, “We don't know everything. Sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes the shift is hard and we don't cope brilliantly. And sometimes there's stuff going on at home that changes how we turn up.”
That did something. When experienced people in the room admit they struggle too, it can make it easier for others to be honest.
I shared something of my own. During COVID I reached out to our Employee Assistance Program. It was a strange time. Cut off from people outside work, then walking straight into the middle of a pandemic the moment you got there.
In much blunter language than I'm using here, the message I got back was basically: this isn't normal, and of course it feels hard.
There was a bit of humour in how I told it, and people laughed. I watched a few of the more reserved people relax a little. It changed the temperature in the room. From there the conversation got a lot more practical.
Curiosity instead of accusation
Once people were talking, a clear theme came up. When something goes wrong between colleagues, lead with curiosity, not accusation.
It's one of the better ways to start a hard conversation without making it worse. Instead of deciding why someone behaved a certain way, ask.
What's going on? What happened here? Is there something I'm missing?
This is also how you deal with someone's behaviour without leaping to their intent. Start with what you actually know, not what you've assumed. Separate the behaviour from the person. Understanding someone's context doesn't excuse poor behaviour, but it does help you work out the most useful response.
We also talked about staying focused on the outcome. Not who's right and who's wrong. What are we actually trying to improve here, and how do we work through it together?
And that reaction you feel in the moment, the flash of frustration or defensiveness, is normal. It isn't the problem. The skill is noticing it and choosing what you do next, rather than letting the first reaction run the conversation.
Why we avoid the hard stuff in the first place
Most of us avoid these conversations for understandable reasons. We worry it'll make things worse. We're afraid of conflict, of damaging a relationship, of saying the wrong thing, of being judged. Staying quiet feels safer, at least in the short term.
The trouble is what silence does over time. If everyone around you looks like they're coping and you're not, it's easy to think, “Why is everyone else handling this when I'm not?”
Often the honest answer is that plenty of them aren't. They just haven't said so, because nobody has made it okay to say so.
One point that came up has stuck with me. A lot of us in healthcare have partners who don't work in healthcare. That doesn't mean they don't care or can't support us. It just means they don't always have the context. And it goes both ways. My partner could tell me about something hard in her world and I might care deeply but still not fully get what it feels like.
Sometimes talking to someone from the same field is different, because they've either lived it or seen it up close. They know the language and the context. That can make it easier to debrief, feel understood and work out what you'd do differently next time. Checking in on a colleague, listening, letting them get something off their chest, none of that is about diagnosing or fixing anyone. It's just making it normal to say the job was hard today.
When poor workplace relationships become a safety issue
This isn't only a question of whether people get along. Safe Work Australia identifies conflict or poor workplace relationships and interactions as potential psychosocial hazards. In Victoria, WorkSafe also recognises poor workplace relationships as a contributor to work-related stress. Since December 2025, Victorian employers have specific duties to identify and control psychosocial hazards and risks.
That doesn't mean every disagreement is a psychosocial hazard. Healthy teams disagree. The issue is when poor interactions, conflict or harmful behaviours are persistent, poorly managed or allowed to build. Being able to raise concerns early is one part of creating a healthier workplace.
The leadership in this story didn't start with me
I want to be honest about my part in this, because it's easy to tell a story like this and quietly make yourself the hero.
I didn't raise the concern. Someone else did. Someone in that room was willing to name the gap between what we said we valued and what it sometimes looked like between us. That was the brave bit, and it wasn't mine.
That's everyday leadership. It doesn't need a title. It's noticing something isn't right and being willing to say it out loud.
My job from there was smaller than it sounds. Don't shut it down. Get curious. Make room. Let the silence do its work. See where it went.
The conversation didn't fix the culture. Not everyone spoke. We didn't solve every problem in an hour, and it was never going to. What mattered was that someone raised something uncomfortable, we didn't bury it, people gradually got honest, and we shifted from “there are some behaviours that aren't good enough” toward “what can we actually do differently?”
People seemed to walk out a bit more willing to have those conversations. Someone even thanked the leader in the room for letting it happen. That's the bit worth chasing. Not a perfect team. A team that's a little more willing to talk.
A different way to think about it
So if you're waiting for a team to feel safe before anyone says anything hard, you might have it the wrong way round. Speaking up matters. But sometimes part of the safety is built in what happens after someone says the hard thing. Do we shut it down, get defensive and move on? Or do we get curious enough to hear it?
And you don't need to be the manager to start it. You need one person willing to say, “Something isn't quite right, can we talk about it?”, and enough people around them willing not to shut that down.
If your team knows a conversation like this is overdue but isn't sure how to open it up without it going sideways, that's exactly the sort of thing we practise together in Speak Up, Set Limits, Build Trust. And if you want the bigger picture on where this fits, this article sits alongside Psychological Safety at Work: Why We Train for First Aid but Ignore Daily Conversations, which is more about what psychological safety is and why it matters.