The Psychological Safety Trap - Balancing with Accountability

The Psychological Safety Trap

An engineer told me he basically just read a book in his garden all afternoon.

Part of me was proud. He felt safe enough to tell me his "unproductive" truth. That's the high-trust culture we want, right?

But the part of me responsible for outcomes was alarmed - by not reacting, did I signal that this was okay? I'm trying to build a high-performance team, not a bookclub. The delay is now making the follow-up 10x harder.

Psychological safety without accountability is just "being nice."

And "nice" doesn't deliver value to users.

This article was originally published on https://craftengineer.com/. It was written by a human and polished using grammar tools for clarity.
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