Balancing Speed and Safety: Building Trust in Expansion Mode
When an organization grows, teams are pushed to scale quickly, execute efficiently, and experiment boldly. However, rapid expansion often breeds uncertainty. Employees fear making mistakes, speaking up, or challenging the status quo, ultimately stifling innovation and collaboration. As a design leader, I see psychological safety not as a luxury but as the bedrock of successful teams.
Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor who pioneered the concept of psychological safety, defines it as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” Without it, even the most talented teams crumble under pressure. But how do we foster psychological safety when moving fast and making high-stakes decisions?
Oddly enough, some of my best lessons on this have come from parenting—not because building a team is the same as raising a child (workplaces are not families), but because both require creating an environment where people feel safe to take risks, make mistakes, and grow. Just as children need a sense of security to explore the world, teams thrive when they can experiment, challenge ideas, and contribute without fear of retribution.
You will find my five strategies for creating psychological safety in this article:
Reward Curiosity Over Perfection
Innovation thrives when teams feel safe exploring, questioning assumptions, and iterating without fear of failure. Leaders who frame projects as learning opportunities and recognize well-reasoned risks unlock creativity and bold thinking. Just as children learn best when encouraged to explore without fear of mistakes, teams grow when curiosity is prioritized over perfection.Create Guardrails, Not Roadblocks
Teams perform best when they understand what’s flexible and what’s fixed, allowing them to move quickly while staying aligned. Clear boundaries provide autonomy while preventing both chaos and micromanagement. Just as children build confidence when given structured choices, teams thrive when they have room to experiment within defined constraints.Normalize Feedback as a Two-Way Street
A culture of open, judgment-free feedback strengthens collaboration, trust, and continuous improvement. Leaders who model vulnerability and create structured feedback loops make it safe for teams to share honest insights. Just as children need encouragement and constructive feedback to grow, teams rely on balanced input to refine and improve their work.Cultivate Shared Ownership
Psychological safety is strongest when teams feel like contributors, not just executors of decisions made elsewhere. Leaders who involve teams in shaping goals, defining success, and making key decisions foster engagement, trust, and accountability. Just as children build confidence when given age-appropriate choices, teams thrive when they have a voice shaping their work and impact.
Optimizing Performance with Intentional Pauses
Sustainable innovation requires rhythm, not relentless speed—structured breaks prevent burnout and fuel long-term impact. No-meeting days, creative offsites, and reflection periods help teams recalibrate and maintain peak performance. Just as deep learning happens in cycles for children, teams need space to process, reflect, and refine their work.
Reward Curiosity Over Perfection
In high-growth environments, the pressure to deliver results quickly can create an implicit expectation that teams must "get it right the first time." However, prioritizing perfection over curiosity stifles creativity, discourages risk-taking, and limits innovation. The most forward-thinking teams aren't the ones that always succeed on the first attempt—they're the ones that embrace iterative learning, ask bold questions, and challenge their assumptions. I frame projects as experiments rather than rigid paths to execution: What are we trying to learn? What assumptions are we testing? What unexpected insights might emerge? This shift encourages exploration over rigid adherence to predetermined outcomes.
This mindset mirrors how children develop resilience and confidence in learning. When kids fear making mistakes, they stop exploring. Instead of asking my daughter, “Did you get it right?” I ask, “What did you learn?”—reframing success as the discovery process rather than just the correctness of an answer. The same principle applies to teams: when leaders celebrate well-thought-out risks and thoughtful experimentation rather than just successful outcomes, they foster an environment where people feel empowered to take creative leaps. A simple shift in feedback—saying, “I appreciate how you explored different approaches to solve this” instead of “Great job, you got it right”—reinforces the value of the process, not just the result.
However, there’s a critical watch out: if leadership only recognizes wins, teams will instinctively optimize for safety, choosing low-risk, incremental improvements over transformative ideas. Psychological safety doesn’t mean the absence of accountability—it means creating a culture where people feel safe enough to take smart risks, learn from failures, and continuously push the boundaries of what’s possible.
Create Guardrails, Not Roadblocks: Enabling Autonomy with Accountability
Psychological safety doesn’t mean the absence of structure—it means designing an environment where people have enough clarity to take risks confidently. In high-growth environments, the tension between control and creativity often determines whether a team scales successfully or collapses under uncertainty. Guardrails provide a framework for autonomy, ensuring that teams understand the boundaries within which they can innovate while aligning with strategic goals. When we reimagined the Loyalty ecosystem at Target, we didn’t prescribe every detail of execution. Instead, we aligned on a clear vision and defined outcomes, allowing teams to experiment, adapt, and own their decisions within those constraints. This approach echoes the findings of Richard Hackman, a leading researcher in team effectiveness, who emphasized that clear structure and compelling direction—rather than micromanagement—drive high-performing teams (Hackman, Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, 2002).
The same principles apply to both parenting and design leadership: telling a child to “be responsible” without defining what responsibility looks like leads to confusion, but providing structured choices—“Would you like to pack your lunch or set the table?”—creates autonomy within a safe framework. In design, this translates to providing teams with constraints that guide innovation rather than stifle it. For example, when designing a new checkout experience, defining key constraints—such as accessibility compliance, transaction speed, and mobile responsiveness—while allowing flexibility in the interaction patterns ensures that teams can explore creative solutions within clear parameters.
The key is establishing explicit decision-making principles and communicating which elements are flexible versus non-negotiable. However, there’s a delicate balance: over-prescribing processes can suffocate creativity, resulting in teams defaulting to safe, incremental changes, while leaving too much ambiguity can lead to decision paralysis and misaligned efforts. The most effective leaders act as experienced architects, shaping conditions where teams can experiment but never feel uncertain, ensuring innovation and alignment with broader business goals.
Normalize Feedback as a Two-Way Street
Psychological safety thrives when feedback is a continuous, bidirectional practice—not a once-a-quarter review or a leader-driven directive. Too often, teams operate in cultures where feedback is avoided out of fear or delivered in ways discouraging openness. As a design leader, I believe feedback is a gift, and withholding honesty is one of the biggest disservices a leader can do to their team. Not everyone will excel at everything, and the sooner we identify where someone’s strengths and energy align, the better it is for them, the team, and the work. Psychological safety isn't about making everyone comfortable all the time—it’s about ensuring that tough conversations happen in a way that fosters growth rather than fear.
I tell my teams, “If I only hear good news, I know we’re missing something.” Effective feedback isn’t about assigning blame or evaluation; it’s about learning, refining, and improving each other. When feedback is embedded into daily conversations and framed as a tool for collective progress, teams become more resilient and adaptive. I’ve introduced a simple but powerful signal in my leadership practice: Unicorn. If someone calls Unicorn in a meeting, it’s a shared cue that signals we avoid the conversation. It’s a moment of self-awareness—a reminder that discomfort often accompanies growth and that stepping into difficult discussions is what moves teams forward.
The same principles apply to parenting. If my daughter only hears criticism, she may shut down. But she won’t know how to stretch and grow if she only hears praise. High-performing teams function in the same way. A culture skewed too far toward critique creates anxiety, while an overabundance of praise without challenge fosters complacency. The right balance allows people to build confidence, take ownership of their development, and continuously improve.
Creating this culture isn’t about vague encouragement—it requires structure. At the end of every sprint, I ask my team: What worked well? What could we have done differently? What do you need from me to do your best work? These questions shift the focus from personal evaluation to shared accountability and problem-solving. However, fostering a feedback-rich culture also means going beyond surface-level reflections. If people don’t feel safe, they will say what they think leadership wants to hear rather than engage in meaningful discourse. Leaders must demonstrate—through both words and actions—that candid, constructive feedback is not just tolerated but expected and valued. A culture of learning and growth isn’t built on one-off conversations; it’s reinforced in the everyday moments where people feel safe enough to challenge, be challenged, and get better together.
Cultivate Shared Ownership
Psychological safety is strongest when team members feel like contributors, not just executors. When leaders empower teams to shape goals, define success, and influence strategy, people become more engaged, innovative, and accountable. Ownership fosters investment—when individuals see their ideas valued, they commit more deeply to outcomes rather than just completing tasks.
Just as children gain confidence when given age-appropriate choices, teams thrive when trusted to make meaningful contributions. Leaders who encourage co-creation, invite diverse perspectives, and distribute decision-making authority create an environment where people feel safe, empowered, and fully engaged in shaping their work and its impact.
However, shared ownership doesn’t mean leadership steps back entirely—it requires intentional structure and support. Without clear expectations and aligned objectives, teams can experience decision paralysis or misalignment. Leaders must balance empowerment with guidance, ensuring teams have the right information, tools, and context to make meaningful decisions. Psychological safety isn’t about removing accountability; it’s about creating a culture where teams feel confident taking responsibility, knowing they have the trust and support to succeed.
Optimizing Performance with Intentional Pauses
Growth mode is demanding—velocity, execution, and iteration often take center stage. But sustained innovation isn’t about relentless momentum; it’s about pacing. Just as elite athletes balance intense training with rest days to rebuild muscles and enhance performance, high-performing teams need structured recovery time to sustain creativity, strategic thinking, and long-term engagement. Without these intentional pauses, psychological safety erodes, decision-making suffers, and teams default to safe, incremental work instead of bold, transformative solutions. Harvard Business Review confirms this in To Build a Top-Performing Team, Ask for 85% Effort (Greg McKeown, 2023), showing that top teams work harder and recover strategically to prevent cognitive overload and sustain peak performance.
In design, breakthrough ideas don’t emerge from constant pressure but in the whitespace between sprints. Organizations that fail to integrate reflection time risk turning teams into execution machines—delivering outputs without questioning and optimizing for efficiency at the cost of innovation. I’ve seen this firsthand: teams that operate in always-on mode eventually burn out, making reactive rather than strategic decisions. The best leaders don’t just set the pace for work; they also design the pauses that sustain it. No-meeting days, creative offsites, and structured downtime before major initiatives aren’t indulgences—they are necessary tools to ensure that teams don’t just move fast but also move wisely. Throughout my career, I’ve embedded these into workflows to help teams not only sprint but also step back, analyze, refine, and reposition before pushing forward.
This principle applies to organizations. I don’t expect my daughter to master a skill overnight—deep learning happens in cycles, not in a straight line. The same is true for teams. When we allow space for decompression, reflection, and recalibration, we create an environment where people feel safe pushing boundaries without fear of exhaustion. Recovery time isn’t a luxury—it’s a strategic investment in long-term resilience. Leaders who ignore this risk run teams into a perpetual fight-or-flight state, where creativity is replaced by fear, and risk-taking gives way to safe, incremental work. True growth requires us to recognize that innovation isn’t about working harder but working smarter—designing for rhythm, not just speed.
Final Thoughts: Designing for Long-Term Impact
Psychological safety isn’t about making work “soft” or “easy.” It’s about creating an environment where people can do their best thinking, take calculated risks, and challenge ideas without fear.
When teams feel safe, they push boundaries, innovate faster, and build better products. And when leaders design for trust—just as parents do for their children—they unlock the full creative potential of their people.
As we grow, the challenge isn’t just moving fast—it’s ensuring we don’t leave trust behind because the most sustainable growth happens when people feel safe enough to bring their boldest ideas to life.
