Safety Before Strategy: Why Psychological Safety Is the First Inclusion Practice

A case study on Microsoft and what the research says about the one thing managers must build first.

Here is a question worth sitting with. Would you use the same technology today that you were using five years ago? 

For almost every manager, the answer is no. 

Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude have changed how work gets done, and nobody thinks twice about that shift anymore.

Now here is the harder question. Are you managing people the same way you were five years ago?

Most managers realise, often for the first time when asked directly, that they are. The tools changed. The way people are led did not keep pace.

The world of work is moving fast, and what worked five years ago will not necessarily work today. The teams that are thriving through this are not the ones with the most experienced managers who always have the answer. They are the ones where people admit mistakes, raise concerns, and share ideas openly, because that kind of openness only happens where there is real psychological safety.

This is the case for why managers need to shift from being know-it-alls to learn-it-alls, told through what Microsoft did under Satya Nadella, what Amy Edmondson's research found inside hospital teams, and what Google discovered when it studied 180 of its own teams to find out what actually made them work.

What Microsoft Did

When Nadella arrived, Microsoft had a culture built around expertise and certainty. Being seen as the person who had the answer was how careers advanced. 

The internal competition was fierce, and the dominant expectation was to be right rather than curious. Teams with genuinely diverse skills and perspectives were sitting inside a system that made vulnerability feel professionally dangerous.

Nadella introduced Carol Dweck's growth mindset as the single organising principle for how Microsoft people should approach their work and each other. For managers, this meant specific behavioural shifts: asking questions rather than declaring answers, treating mistakes as data rather than character flaws, and creating deliberate space for perspectives that differed from their own. The outcomes were measurable. Revenue grew 47% between 2017 and 2020. Employee satisfaction reached 85% by 2023. Market capitalisation grew from approximately $300 billion in 2014 to over $2 trillion by 2021. A culture shift produced those numbers, not a product launch or a restructure.

What the research has been saying for a long time

The concept behind what Nadella built is not new. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson first defined psychological safety in 1999 as 'a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.' Her early research produced a result that surprised even the people studying it: the highest-performing hospital teams were not the ones that made the fewest mistakes. They were the ones that reported the most errors. Those teams felt safe enough to surface problems, talk about them honestly, and learn from them. The teams that looked cleaner on paper were often simply better at hiding what was going wrong.

For managers of diverse teams, this carries real weight. When some team members already approach the room with a sense of risk around speaking up, whether because of their background, their tenure, or their experience in similar organisations, the gap between what they know and what they are willing to contribute can be significant. A team with genuine diversity of thought can only deliver on that potential if people feel free to bring it.

Knowing the term is not enough

Here is something most managers do not say out loud: they have already heard of psychological safety. The gap is rarely awareness. It is in the space between knowing what something is and actually behaving in ways that create it day to day.

And the barriers are understandable. Many managers came up in environments where demonstrating competence meant having the answer ready. That habit does not disappear because of a workshop or a values statement. Old habits move slowly, especially when they were once rewarded.

There is also the pressure of short-term performance. When targets need to be hit and a quarter is ending, pausing to ask questions and hold space for uncertainty can feel like slowing the team down. The instinct is to push for speed, which often looks like the manager talking more and the team talking less.

And there is a quieter belief, sometimes unconscious, that a learning culture is slower than a knowing culture. What gets missed is this: teams where people are afraid to surface problems discover those problems later, and at considerably higher cost.

What it looks like in practice

Psychological safety is not built in a workshop or a retreat. It is built in the small, repeated moments that every manager already has.

Model not knowing

When you encounter something you are genuinely uncertain about, say so. Not as a performance of humility, but as a real signal to your team about what is acceptable here. 'I am not sure how to approach this one, what are you seeing?' invites contribution. It also tells your team that admitting uncertainty will not cost them anything.

This is particularly important when you manage people who have come from environments where not knowing felt professionally risky. Watching their manager sit comfortably in uncertainty shifts that assumption, slowly but meaningfully.

• In your next team meeting, name one thing you are genuinely unsure about and ask your team what they are seeing.

• When a team member raises something you had not considered, say so. It costs nothing and communicates a great deal.

• When a call you made turns out to be wrong, acknowledge it plainly and say what you would do differently next time.

Separate the mistake from the person

If your team is going long stretches without surfacing mistakes or raising concerns, that silence is worth examining. It rarely means nothing is going wrong. Edmondson's hospital research found that the best teams reported more errors because they trusted that doing so would lead to learning, not blame.

How you respond in the sixty seconds after something goes wrong shapes what the rest of the team believes about what happens when they make a mistake.

• Start with the situation. 'Walk me through what happened' opens a very different conversation than 'why did you do it that way.'

• Close the loop visibly after a concern is raised. Teams notice when speaking up leads to something, and they notice just as quickly when it quietly disappears.

Create equal access to the conversation

Google’s Project Aristotle found that in high-performing teams, all members had roughly equal opportunity to speak. In diverse teams, the people least likely to speak up unprompted are often the ones who read the room most accurately and understand the stakes best. Creating structured space for contribution is not about managing participation for its own sake. It is about making sure the team's actual thinking gets into the room.

• Before significant decisions, ask for written input first. It gives people time to formulate their thinking and means the conversation is not dominated by whoever speaks fastest.

• At the end of team discussions, ask who has not yet spoken and whether they want to add anything. Make it a consistent norm, not an occasional check-in.

The team that can change

The environment your team is navigating does not reward managers who always have the answer. It rewards managers whose teams can learn quickly, surface problems early, and adapt without waiting for permission to do so.

Satya Nadella did not turn Microsoft around by hiring different people. He changed the conditions in which the people already there were willing to contribute what they knew. That work happened in the small, repeated moments every manager controls: how they respond when someone says 'I do not know', how they handle a mistake, who they notice has not spoken yet.

Those moments compound. In a diverse team, they compound faster than you might expect.

---

If your organisation wants to build management cultures where people feel genuinely safe to contribute, 54TwentyFour supports leaders through coaching, facilitated sessions, and leadership development designed for the South African professional context.