When teams are under pressure, budgets tighten, and leaders are asked to do more with less, one of the first “soft” initiatives that gets cut is psychological safety. There is a belief that team members can speak up, ask questions, and admit mistakes without fear of negative consequences.
But there’s a leadership paradox most organizations miss that is extremely important. In the toughest times, psychological safety doesn’t become less important. It actually becomes essential.
What Psychological Safety Really Is
At its core, psychological safety means that people feel secure enough to contribute their thoughts, raise concerns, and offer ideas — even when those ideas push back against the status quo. It’s not about being “nice.” It’s about creating an environment where candor, risk taking, and authentic dialogue are normalized.
Why Many Leaders Treat It as a Luxury
When resources are strained, organizations often shift focus to tactical training programs or performance metrics, assuming that psychological safety can wait. But research from faculty including Harvard Business Review scholars shows that this perspective is flawed.
During times of stress, uncertainty, or transformation, the ability to speak up safely becomes one of the strongest protective forces against burnout, dysfunction, and turnover. In fact, employees who reported feeling safe speaking up before the crisis hit were more resilient during the crisis.
What’s at Stake When Safety Is Ignored
When psychological safety is absent, teams don’t just experience surface-level discomfort. Their nervous systems switch into protection mode. People hold back ideas, withhold feedback, and default to compliance instead of collaboration. The results include:
burnout climbs
trust erodes
innovation stalls
turnover spikes
These outcomes aren’t abstract HR metrics. They directly impact organizational performance, sustainability, and resilience.
Psychological Safety as a Social Resource
One of the most powerful findings from recent research: psychological safety functions like a social resource. When people feel safe to speak up, even in small ways, it creates a ripple effect of support, shared problem-solving, and mutual trust that helps teams endure turbulence.
This means:
People don’t just survive tough times. They navigate them with agency and confidence.
Leaders get real, actionable information before problems become crises.
Organizations cultivate resilience, retention, and strategic adaptability.
What Great Leaders Do Differently
High-performing, future-ready leaders don’t treat psychological safety as a checkbox. They treat it as an operating system woven into how teams communicate, respond to failure, and make decisions. They model vulnerability and learning. They invite and value dissenting views. They normalize candid conversations, protect time and focus for meaningful dialogue. This isn’t about comfort. This is about performance under pressure.
The Leadership Imperative in 2026 and Beyond
In today’s complex work environment where economic uncertainty, talent shortages, and rapid change are the norm, psychological safety isn’t optional. It’s a fundamental leadership requirement for building trust, supporting wellness, and unlocking organizational potential. Simply put: If your organization isn’t intentionally cultivating psychological safety, you are managing symptoms for the potential of deeper dysfunction. And that’s not leadership. That’s maintenance.
Burnout isn’t new. It’s persistent, growing, and now deeply entrenched in our workforce reality.
Yet, despite billions spent on wellness programs, too many organizations are still spinning the same wheel: meditation apps, lunchroom snacks, and workplace “perk” checkboxes. The results? Minimal impact on burnout, engagement, or true workplace well-being. It’s time to think differently.
We’ve treated wellness as an optional feature. It’s a line item in HR’s budget rather than the structural foundation of work itself. And that’s exactly why it’s time to bring a healthcare mindset into workplace strategy.
The Wellness Investment Disconnect
Today’s wellness investments outpace ever before. Nearly 85% of large U.S. employers offer wellness programs, and global spending on workplace wellness is projected to exceed $94 billion by 2026. Yet burnout and declining mental health metrics tell a stark story: we’re not solving the real problem.
Why? Because we’ve been treating wellness like:
an individual responsibility
an isolated benefit
a program outside the core workflow
This is exactly the flaw many healthcare systems stopped repeating decades ago. They realized that health outcomes aren’t driven by pills or check-ups alone — they are shaped by systems, environments, and daily context.
The Healthcare Mindset Shift
Healthcare doesn’t look at patient wellness as a “nice-to-have” — it treats the environment, systems, and social context as integral parts of care. We need that same approach in the workplace.
Workplace wellness must be:
Embedded in workflows and spaces
Integral to leadership decisions and design choices
Wellness can no longer be delegated to a room you walk past, an app you seldom open, or a lunchtime seminar you forget weeks later.
What Real Wellness Looks Like
In healthcare, we understand that healing and prevention happen because of the systems around people and not in spite of them. Workplaces must adopt this perspective:
Wellness isn’t a perk. It’s infrastructure. Every design choice, from lighting and acoustic comfort to movement flow and social spaces, affects human physiology, cognition, and emotional resilience.
Why This Matters Now
As organizations compete for talent and wrestle with engagement, turnover, and productivity, the companies that think systemically and not superficially, will win:
Innovation thrives where stress is reduced
Performance increases when environments reduce friction
This isn’t soft language. It has a strategic impact. Just as healthcare environments are designed to promote healing, rest, and recovery, workplaces must be designed to promote thriving, clarity, and human sustainability.
Bringing Human-Centered Empathy to Work
True workplace design asks:
Does this space support focus, comfort, movement, connection, or autonomy?
How does this workflow affect nervous systems, not just KPI dashboards?
Are environments responding to human needs holistically — not just in fragmented pockets?
This is a healthcare mindset.
This is a human-first approach to organizational wellness. And this is what the future of work demands. Once leaders embrace wellness as an operating system. It is not an accessory. We unlock spaces and systems that actually sustain people, teams, and performance.
The workplace is no longer just a site of labor. It is a shared ecosystem that must support human well-being in real, measurable ways.
“New Year, New Me” is a phrase I’ve heard at the start of every year for as many years as I can remember. ‘ve even said it a time or two myself. We make all kinds of resolutions for our businesses and our lives, usually with very good intentions. What usually happens is after a month or two, we abandon them. Why? They’re often too vague or not rooted in reality. Not only that, but we’re operating from a lens of needing to be brand new. I invite you to consider not striving to be a new you, but rather, a more self-aware, elevated version of the you that currently exists.
You may be thinking, that’s what I mean when I say ‘new me’, but I challenge you to consider the language. What you say speaks volumes. Let’s change the language a bit so that work-life harmony has a fighting chance to exist and be maintained.
Reverse engineer your thinking. I listen to Myron Golden a lot. One of the things he often speaks on is the need to ask better questions so that you receive better answers. Acknowledge that you desire to lose weight or secure more contracts for your business by writing it all down. Next, write down how you will feel once you achieve your goals. Take moment now to think about it. How good will it feel when you land your next contract? What dress/suit will I buy when I shed a few pounds? Where will I go on vacation when the contractual deposit lands in my account? Go ahead. Think about it. See how much better you feel when you think about what happens as the end result? You’ll find yourself feeling a lot more inspired to do what comes next.
Write out everything you need to achieve. Now that you know how you’ll feel and what you’ll do once you’ve accomplished your goals, you’ll want to write down each step of the process necessary to achieve them. Write down every single step. What do you have? What do you need? Who do you need? What is my capacity? What do I need to say yes/no to in order to be successful? Do I have an accountability partner? How will I measure my success? How will I celebrate myself?
Be clear and graceful. You set yourself up for failure when you’re not clear about your goals and don’t allow yourself any grace if/when you fall a bit short. There is nothing wrong with you. It may be your habits, your perspective, or your expectations. The ‘new’ should be more about refinement and redirection than about creating a whole new you. Again, new me may be implied that you mean changing up what you eat or how you pursue business opportunities, but you have to clearly state it that way, be consistent, and exercise discipline.
It’s all about choice. In this new year, I’ve chosen to elevate (my word for 2026). Instead of new year, new me, I’ve chosen to say ‘new year, better me’, and I’m paying attention to my language. For the women reading (or the men who work with women/women’s organizations), let’s take this conversation a step further by checking out this workshop experience: https://www.joycekyles.com/create-yourself/
Most leadership conversations focus on performance, productivity, and results. But there’s a quieter leadership question we rarely ask:
What is driving the leader beneath the role?
A recent article in the Financial Times highlighted something critical: leaders don’t just respond to current challenges—they often react through patterns shaped long before they ever stepped into authority.
In my work around restorative leadership and workplace wellness, I’ve seen the following often: micromanagement, indecision, people-pleasing, emotional detachment, and chronic overwork which causes internal triggering. When leaders are unaware of their internal triggers, stress rolls downhill. Psychological safety weakens. Wellness initiatives lose credibility. Trust erodes quietly.
This is why leadership wellness matters. Spa days are great, along with some surface-level programs. What’s even more impactful and sustaining are emotional regulation, clarity, and responsibility.
Restorative leadership asks leaders to take a pause and distinguish between what is happening now and what is being activated from the past. When leaders are doing the work with this in mind, decision-making improves, communication stabilizes, burnout decreases, and teams feel safer and more engaged.
Leader wellness directly shapes organizational wellness. In high-pressure environments such as healthcare, nonprofits, corporate leadership, self-aware leadership is no longer optional. It is strategic.
The future of leadership belongs to those willing to look inward. Because leadership doesn’t just require authority. It requires awareness.
