An article in the Harvard Business Review by Jan U. Hagen, a professor of management at ESMT Berlin, Germany, and Bin Zhao, a professor of management and organisation studies at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business in Vancouver, Canada.

COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE BY STEFAAN VAN DEN HEEVER, ASSOCIATE, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP: Psychological safety is a relevant and timely topic of discussion in organisations, a topic that has gained momentum since the onset of COVID-19, as employees around the world have faced lockdowns, isolation, and uncertainty.

There was a notable pattern at a South African bank: employees during COVID sent emails at 2 or 3 am! When this was investigated, it was found that people deliberately set their emails to be sent via Outlook at these early hours, and it wasn’t because they were awake… One can imagine what people went through to go to such lengths to show their value-add, and the lack of psychological safety that existed (and still exists) in a lot of organisations worldwide.

As Legitimate Leadership, we believe that psychological safety should be evident where leadership is applied intentionally and consistently. Lots of organisations talk about leadership, but it’s often put off when there’s pressure, or when pressure is applied from the top to deliver results.

We believe a fundamental shift managers in an organisation should make is from ‘I am here to get more out of my people’ to a new intent: ‘I am here for my people, to enable excellence in my team so that they can achieve excellent results’. The practical implication of this shift is that managers realise the level of reporting to them reflects their leadership and how they care for and grow their people. Practically, this will mean they prioritise leadership: one-on-one meetings where connection happens, managers intentionally holding enabling, supportive team meetings, and managers watching the game and coaching their direct reports to embody excellence and accountability, and to be the best they can be. If applied consistently, this then has a chain reaction downwards, where people at every level in the organisation feel cared for and where there’s an intentional focus on everyone’s growth and development. All this downward focus on improvement and development throughout the line of command comes to full effect with the all-important customer being on the receiving end of this focus on care and growth.

In line with the above, Legitimate Leadership believes that trust is central to creating psychological safety. For us, there are four key ways for managers to earn trust and build psychological safety:

Build personal relationships with your direct reports:

• Get to know your people as human beings, not as human resources.
• Have due concern for their personal circumstances and prioritise the ‘moments that matter for your people’.
• Do you know what makes your people ‘tick’?

Give time and attention to your direct reports:

• Spend time with your people, as mentioned above, through one-on-one meetings, enabling team meetings and watching their game and coaching them towards improvement and excellence.
• Being ‘busy’ should not be an excuse for not spending time with your people. Nothing breaks trust like managers who keep moving one-on-one meetings, who do most or all the talking, or who make these meetings all about progressing the work and not about progressing the person.

Demonstrate your intent by being values-driven:

Being values-driven includes the following:

• The importance of the intent behind the manager’s actions and whether people perceive them as sincere.
• When managers compromise on what the right thing to do is to serve their own interests, employees conclude that management is self-serving and can’t be trusted.
• When management sacrifices its self-interest to do the right thing, its people experience it as sincere. They see management as values-driven rather than needs-driven and therefore trust them.
• A key question for managers to ask is: do I live the organisational values, or will I look the other way and compromise them if it means we will make more money?

Giving up control by extending trust:

• The key idea here is that Trust in management increases whenever managers give up control and empower their people.
• Each incremental suspension of control suggests a degree of trust and entrustment on the part of management.
• It implies management’s preparedness to assume that their people are trustworthy.
• Then, and only then, are their people able to demonstrate their trustworthiness.
• The more managers trust their people, the more management is trusted, and psychological safety can increase.

If managers are sincere and see their purpose as caring for and growing their people, there will be a clear intent for leadership and, hence, empowerment. The logical conclusion, then, is that empowerment will only happen if managers continue to hold people accountable. So, the letting go of control must be replaced by clear accountability. As Legitimate Leadership, we believe organisations should hold people accountable for their intent against a clear standard, and this is where we make a distinction between carelessness and deliberate intent, which is consistent with the ‘justified accountability’ concept in the article. Often, we see a pattern of the younger generation of employees viewing psychological safety as separate from accountability, but we firmly believe that accountability is a key part of a relationship in which all parties feel psychologically safe. There is no safety if both parties are not accountable for their side of the bargain, or if the manager fails to act in ways consistent with fairness and gratitude.

In essence, Legitimate Leadership believes that the above ideas can lead to an environment where people feel psychologically safe, including middle managers, where there is a focus on enabling excellence in people, and where that can, in turn, lead to excellent results.

OUR SUMMARY OF THIS ARTICLE: New research reveals a significant and consequential blind spot in organisational culture: middle managers feel less psychologically safe than both their senior executives and their direct reports. While “team psychological safety”—the belief that one won’t be punished or humiliated for admitting a mistake or raising a concern—has become a leadership staple, the crucial middle layer is often overlooked.

An ongoing global study of 1,160 managers found a notable gap: middle managers scored 68.0 out of 100 on psychological safety, significantly lower than the 72.7 scored by C-suite executives and 4.2 points higher than their own teams. The most vulnerable group is newly promoted middle managers (in their roles for less than 3 years), who scored nearly 5 points lower than their more seasoned peers, indicating a difficult adjustment period.

The Cost of Silence: An Organisational Linchpin Fails

This finding is critical because middle managers are the linchpin between strategy and execution—the organisation’s central nervous system. When they feel unsafe voicing concerns or admitting mistakes, the vital feedback loop breaks. Problems go undiagnosed, and critical information never reaches the top, causing the entire organisation to falter.

Low psychological safety in the middle tier quietly undermines performance through several mechanisms:

• Error Blindness at the Top: Fearing career risk, middle managers filter bad news, creating a “good news bubble” for senior executives, muffling early warning signs.
• Fallibility Gap: When managers don’t model openness about their own mistakes, their teams follow suit, leading to a culture where problems are patched over instead of addressed.
• Innovation Slowdown: Fear of the consequences of failed experiments causes creative problem-solving to grind to a halt.
• Long-term Performance Erosion: Avoiding the hard conversations that follow mistakes stifles learning and adaptation in volatile markets.

Five Reasons the Middle Feels the Least Safe

The research points to five primary factors contributing to this low sense of safety:

1. The Promotion Paradox

When a manager steps into the middle tier, their perceived risk profile changes. With greater visibility and higher stakes, they fear damaging their reputation or jeopardising career progress. They become risk-averse, often learning that admitting mistakes can make them a scapegoat.

• Solution: Redesign accountability systems to encourage constructive risk-taking. Implement “justified accountability,” holding people responsible for repeated negligence but treating honest mistakes as learning opportunities.

2. The Modelling Gap from the Top

Senior leaders often inadvertently reinforce the silence. The more senior they are, the fewer mistakes they tend to hear or see, and the more they expect flawless execution. Middle managers may assume that portraying perfection is the price of survival when C-suite executives don’t regularly model fallibility.

• Solution: Senior leaders should openly share their own mistakes and what they learned. They should use probing, non-judgmental language with middle managers, asking, “What’s not going as expected?” instead of “Why is this going wrong?”

3. The Illusion of Perfection

Most organisational systems lack mechanisms, such as “open failure platforms,” to enable learning across departments and to destigmatise errors and failures. Without these structures, middle managers assume perfection is expected and avoid discussing adverse events.

• Solution: Promote platforms for sharing near misses, as well as errors and failures. Systematic training, as seen in aviation, can normalise open error reporting, where the neutral response to an error notification is “Thank you.”

4. Structural Isolation

While frontline employees have teams and senior executives have leadership forums, middle managers often work in isolation, squeezed by pressure from both above and below, without a strong peer support outlet. This isolation is magnified by global volatility and hybrid work.

• Solution: Create dedicated communities of practice or peer coaching for middle managers to exchange ideas, share challenges, and seek advice. Peer support is a safeguard against burnout and silence.

5. Transition Shock

New middle managers face a steep leap, moving from leading frontline staff to leading other leaders, which demands new skills. They are also suddenly accountable for broader results, visible to senior leaders, and expected to deliver fast. This combination of high scrutiny and low certainty makes early missteps feel career-ending, leading to silence.

• Solution: Treat the transition as a developmental phase. Pair new managers with experienced mentors who model openness, build “failure literacy” into onboarding, and create early opportunities, like a “first 100 days” learning review, to surface challenges without penalty.

A Blind Spot Leaders Must Address

Empowerment is meaningless without psychological safety. If middle managers cannot admit when something is going wrong, the organisation will learn too slowly. Instead of focusing solely on selection processes, organisations must create the right conditions: modelling vulnerability from the top, designing systems that reward learning, and providing genuine support networks.

When the middle layer can transmit signals without fear, the entire enterprise gains agility. Strengthening the psychological safety of middle management isn’t optional—it’s the line between an organisation that adapts and one that quietly slips behind.

Read the full article on HBR by clicking here