Why “Fake It Till You Make It” Doesn’t Work for Psychological Safety

I remember early in a new job – one I was excited about and keen to make my mark in – I made a decision to be honest with my new team. I was out of my depth – I’d been asked to design workshops I didn’t have the expertise for, and my worry around messing them up was keeping me awake at night. Rather than bluff my way through it, I admitted I was struggling and asked for help.

The response in the team meeting was tumbleweed; no one spoke initially, then something closer to disdain emerged. What do you mean you don’t know enough? I understood pretty quickly that this wasn’t the kind of team where you did that.

I’d been brave. It hadn’t helped.

Every time we consider speaking up – raising a concern, asking a question, admitting a mistake or sharing an idea – we’re running a quick mental risk assessment, which is often part instinct, part experience and part reading the room. What’s the benefit of saying something? What’s the risk? And when the perceived cost outweighs the potential gain, we tend to stay quiet.

But it’s worth remembering that our calculation isn’t always accurate. Sometimes the risk we’re imagining isn’t real. We hold back on asking what feels like an obvious question, convinced others will think us foolish, only to find, when someone else eventually raises it, that the whole room was wondering the same thing. Or we agonise over telling our manager about a mistake, then discover they’re glad we did. Now they can help us fix it, and work with us on changing the context to make sure it doesn’t happen again. When the imagined risk turns out to be worse than the real one, speaking up rewards us, and often the whole team.

This is where the “fake it till you make it” idea of psychological safety gets its appeal. The thinking goes: if we all just lean into it a little more, act a little braver, we’ll start to build the habit of openness, and safety will follow. There’s a certain attractive logic to it.

But it actually only holds in one specific circumstance: when the risks were never real in the first place. Unfortunately, only too often the risks are entirely real.

We might find we ask the question and our teammates, as we may have feared, snigger, or we admit the mistake and our manager angrily kicks off. If speaking up does carry real consequences, then encouraging people to push through their hesitation doesn’t build psychological safety. It just confirms that their instincts were right to be cautious, and ultimately makes the environment less safe, not more.

This is why anyone working to improve team culture – whether you’re a leader, coach, HR professional, or a facilitator designing a workshop – should be cautious about programmes focused on making people braver. Encouraging people to take interpersonal risks before the environment is genuinely safe is a bit like encouraging someone to abseil off a cliff before you’ve checked the ropes. The amount of courage isn’t the problem. The conditions are.

Acting “as if” it’s already safe

So where does that leave the “fake it till you make it” idea? Is there any truth in it at all?

Actually, yes – but with an important caveat about who’s doing the “faking”. If we find ourselves in a position of power in an organisation or team, we may also find ourselves in the fortunate position where the interpersonal consequences for us of speaking candidly are relatively low. 

Let’s say you’re a senior leader, a manager, or simply someone with significant standing in your team or organisation; you have the credibility and the protection that comes with your position. In that context, you going first (maybe with small, tentative first steps) is valuable. That might look like being the first to ask a basic question in a meeting, narrating your own uncertainty when making a decision, or owning a mistake openly, instead of glossing over it. These acts of modelling actively shift what feels permissible for others, demonstrating that honesty is welcome here.

That’s quite different from imploring people with less power or security to do the same. For them, the risks are real and the protection is thinner. Asking them to be braver without first ensuring the environment is genuinely safe is likely to be exposing rather than empowering.

The real work of psychological safety isn’t about adjusting people’s mindsets or building their courage. It’s about creating conditions where speaking up is genuinely low-risk: where questions are welcomed, mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, and different perspectives are consistently valued rather than punished. 

Once those conditions exist, most people don’t need much encouragement to speak up – though it’s worth remembering that speaking up doesn’t look the same for everyone. For some people, voicing a thought in a fast-moving meeting, with no think time and a table full of louder voices, isn’t really an option – not because they lack courage, but because that particular format doesn’t work for them. A team lead who pauses to say “let’s take a minute to think about this quietly first”, or who follows up after a meeting with “I know we haven’t captured everything – please share your thoughts by email”, is creating the conditions for more voices to be heard. The brave thing becomes the normal thing, once we stop assuming that speaking up only counts if it happens out loud, in the room, in the moment.

Until then, instead of focusing on bravery, it’s worth asking what we’re doing to make it safer.

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