SEB Marketing Team 

You’ve built a rockstar team. They hit their numbers and they crush their goals. Congratulations! That high-performing environment is almost certainly built on a strong foundation of psychological safety—the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

But here’s the unsettling truth: psychological safety is not a one-time achievement. It’s a perishable asset. And paradoxically, the very act of being successful can be the biggest threat to its continued existence.

The Illusion of Safety: How Success Becomes a Trap

When a team is new, or when the stakes are low, it’s relatively easy to be vulnerable. But once you’re on a winning streak, the rules of the game subtly change. This is the Success Trap.

Think about it:

• The Spotlight Effect: When your team’s success is a public, celebrated thing, the cost of an error skyrockets. Suddenly, a small mistake isn’t just a learning opportunity; it’s a potential headline, a threat to the team’s prized reputation. This fear of tarnishing the shine causes people to self-censor. They only share the polished, risk-free ideas.
• Leadership Drift: High-performing leaders often get promoted or simply become busier. They might unintentionally start signalling that they’re too busy for trivial questions or that they only want to hear solutions, not problems. When the leader stops actively soliciting dissent, the team quickly gets the message: Don’t rock the boat.

The result? The safety you built slowly, silently, erodes. The successful team starts stagnating because the uncensored, risky ideas—the ones that fuel true innovation—are left unspoken.

The “Vulnerability Audit”: Introducing the Psychological Safety Re-Check

If you wouldn’t let a year go by without auditing your financials, why would you treat your most valuable asset—your team culture—any differently?

The solution is the Psychological Safety Re-Check, a periodic, structured Vulnerability Audit designed to assess and proactively re-affirm the team’s climate. This isn’t just another survey; it’s a targeted intervention.

Making the Re-Check Actionable

A successful audit focuses on specific, observable behaviors. Leaders need to hold a dedicated session and ask targeted questions, like:

• “When was the last time someone felt they had to wait until a 1:1 to share a critical concern, and what was the concern?”
• “What is one thing we currently do that makes it harder, not easier, to speak up?”
• “If you made a low-stakes mistake today, how confident are you that the team’s first reaction would be curiosity and not criticism?”

The audit must be followed by a leader-led vulnerability session. The leader needs to kick it off by genuinely sharing their own recent failure or uncertainty. This doesn’t mean being weak; it means being authentically human and demonstrating that vulnerability is the baseline, not the exception.

The Leader’s Imperative: Re-Earning Trust Daily

Psychological safety is a covenant between the leader and the team, and it must be re-earning every single day. As a leader, your role is to actively dismantle the Success Trap by committing to three core actions:

1. Normalize Mistakes: Don’t just tolerate failures; celebrate the learning that came from them. When a project goes sideways, your first question shouldn’t be “Who is responsible?” but “What did we just learn that we wouldn’t have known otherwise?”
2. Actively Solicit Dissent: Don’t just ask, “Does everyone agree?” Ask, “Who has the most significant counter-argument?” or “What critical angle are we missing right now?” Assign a Devil’s Advocate in key meetings. This forces the valuable, uncomfortable discussion into the open.
3. Close the Loop: When someone does speak up with a tough question or an idea, thank them immediately. Crucially, show them what happened next—even if the idea isn’t implemented. Ignoring input is the fastest way to shut down future contributions.

The Innovation Dividend

When you commit to the Psychological Safety Re-Check, you’re not just maintaining morale; you’re securing your competitive edge.

By removing the fear of being judged or humiliated, you free up your team’s cognitive bandwidth. Instead of wasting mental energy self-censoring or worrying about optics, their prefrontal cortex is unlocked for its true purpose: creative problem-solving and disruptive thinking.

This leads directly to the Innovation Dividend: faster identification of mistakes, more honest feedback loops, and a continuous stream of risky, breakthrough ideas that successful stagnation simply cannot produce.

Don’t let your past achievements become an anchor. Sustained high performance requires continuous cultural maintenance. Make the periodic Vulnerability Audit a core habit—a fundamental part of your operating rhythm—to ensure your rockstar team remains innovative, authentic, and genuinely, psychologically safe.