The Safety Advantage
Creating the Conditions for Joy, Creativity, and Innovation at Work
How good does it feel to have a full belly laugh? The kind where you lose control, the tears stream, and you even risk peeing a little.
What about belting out your favourite songs in the car? Experimenting with a new hobby?
It’s fun. It’s joyful. It’s the safety advantage – and it’s all about conditions and relationships.
The uncontrolled laughing – you’re with friends, you have tissues nearby, and you have spare knickers if you need them. The belting out the tunes – the car windows are rolled up, and you’ll take a pause when you pull up at the lights.
In these situations, you’ve set the conditions around you to feel psychologically safe.
You’ve asked, ‘What happens to me if I show up as myself here?’.
Psychological safety
In a work context pyschologically safe conditions look like this:
You can speak up or disagree
You can admit you made a mistake or don’t know something
You can raise a concern without being punished or humiliated
You can offer an unconventional idea
You have access to the required policies, procedures, training, and resources
Relational safety
These are the friends who laugh with you, tears streaming, who sit beside you in the car and belt out mismatched harmonies.
The healthy relationship that tells you, ‘I can be vulnerable here, because I believe you will handle that vulnerability with care'.
In a work context relational safety is created through thousands of relational signals like:
Listening
Demonstrating that they do what they say
Keeping confidences
Treating people fairly and having your back
What they DON’T look like is this. (I’ve been on the receiving end of the following over the years).
Being told ‘Brainstorming doesn't belong in the workplace’
Cautiously sharing concern for a colleague with your manager and having them blurt it out at a staff meeting.
Being told ‘No one is allowed to use the word BUSY anymore’
Taking unplanned carer’s leave for a parent’s major surgery and coming back the following day to a berating over an unfinished report and no enquiry about my parent’s health or how I’m doing.
Asking my manager for a regular one-on-one meeting with an agenda to be set up and being told ‘No, there’s no need.’
Going back to the full belly laugh. Could you laugh that hard in the middle of the supermarket? Could you belt out tunes in a traffic jam with all the car windows down? If I said you had to submit your very first painting to an art exhibition, how would you feel? I know I would hold back, temper my responses, and I’d struggle to make that first brushstroke.
And the cost in the workplace – disengagement, crumbling culture, reduced impact, and staff turnover.
Now let’s flip it.
The Safety Advantage
Imagine a purpose-driven organisation where the systems are aligned to the impact you’re working towards. The conditions that tell you what the organisation values, and that you can show up as yourself. An incident reporting system that looks for patterns and system failures over blame. That’s psychological safety.
And where the leadership behaviours align with organisational values. The relationships that tell you how you are valued and that your vulnerability will be handled with care. A performance conversation built on the back of clarity and trust, enables open discussion around role fit and potential adjustments. That’s relational safety.
What conditions or systems in your organisation or leadership could use an audit? Here are a few prompts.
Do meeting agendas allow for open discussion?
How do people give and receive feedback?
How do people know if they’re doing well or not?
What are the leadership behaviours signaling?
Where do you see joy? Is it the quick laugh in the hallway, the sharing of good news or perhaps the team karaoke outing?
A safe environment that encourages workshopping ideas, learning from the near wins and not-quite’s, is the space where creativity thrives. Dr Sarah Lewis, in her book The Rise, shares that the almost-there moment teaches more than the clean success ever could. But a near win only becomes fuel if you're safe enough to stay in it, to look at the gap, name what didn't work, and try again in front of people who won't hold it against you.
That's what psychological and relational safety buy you: not comfort, but the room to be visibly, survivably not-there-yet.
Joy, creativity, innovation don't just show up because someone says this is a "safe space." They show up because the conditions and the relationships made it safe to fail on the way to getting it right.
When they do show up, team performance improves, more ideas are generated, task conflict becomes productive, and positive emotions like joy expand cognitive range, improving adaptability and problem-solving.
That is the safety advantage.