A workplace where nobody ever feels uncomfortable is probably avoiding a lot of conversations that need to happen.
Feedback can sting.
Being challenged can put you on the defensive.
Having somebody point out that your behaviour affected them can be difficult to hear.
Setting a boundary can feel awkward.
Having somebody set one with you can feel even worse.
All of those feelings are real.
They just do not automatically tell us whether something psychologically unsafe happened.
This is one of the harder parts of psychological safety in the workplace.
People should be able to speak up, ask questions, raise concerns, disagree, admit mistakes and contribute without being humiliated or punished for doing so.
The trouble starts when those conversations become uncomfortable.
This is where I think we need a better question:
What created the discomfort, and how was the person treated?
Because those are not the same thing.
Feeling uncomfortable does not automatically mean something unsafe happened
Someone may leave a conversation upset because they were humiliated, shouted at, dismissed or intimidated.
Someone may also leave upset because they were given feedback they did not want to hear, challenged on a decision, asked to take responsibility for something they got wrong, or told they had crossed a boundary.
The emotional response may look very similar.
The interaction may have been completely different.
A manager still needs to be able to say, “This work is not good enough.”
A colleague still needs to be able to say, “The way you spoke to me was not okay.”
Someone still needs to be able to challenge a decision.
Someone still needs to be able to set a boundary.
And the person on the receiving end may feel embarrassed, frustrated, defensive or hurt.
Feeling bad after a conversation does not automatically mean the conversation was bad.
What created the discomfort?
If somebody walks away from a conversation feeling upset, I want to know why.
Were they spoken to disrespectfully?
Were they humiliated or intimidated?
Was power used badly?
Were they shut down when they tried to respond?
Or did the conversation touch something difficult?
Were they hearing feedback they disagreed with?
Were they being challenged?
Were they being asked to take responsibility for something?
Were they being told that their behaviour had affected somebody else?
The second part of the question is just as important:
How was the person treated?
That is where the picture starts getting clearer.
Feedback is one of the easiest places to see the difference
A manager gives somebody direct feedback about their work.
The employee leaves the conversation embarrassed and upset.
We need to know how the feedback was handled.
Did the manager explain what needed to improve?
Did they focus on the work or behaviour?
Did they allow the employee to respond?
Or did they mock them, attack their character or use their position to intimidate them?
A manager can tell somebody that their work needs to improve without humiliating them.
Direct feedback and disrespect are not the same thing.
Challenge and humiliation are not the same thing.
If managers become so worried about upsetting people that they stop giving clear feedback, a different problem starts to grow.
People stop knowing where they stand.
Performance conversations get softened until the message becomes almost meaningless.
Problems that could have been dealt with early become much harder later.
Psychological safety at work still has to leave room for honest feedback.
Accountability belongs in the conversation too
People need to be able to speak up when something is wrong.
Managers also need to be able to address poor performance or behaviour that needs to change.
Employees should be able to challenge a decision.
They should also be able to hear when somebody challenges theirs.
Someone should be able to say:
“I disagree with that.”
Someone else should be able to say:
“The way you spoke to me was not okay.”
And a manager should still be able to say:
“This needs to improve.”
A psychologically safe workplace should be able to handle all three.
Accountability does not give anyone permission to humiliate or intimidate somebody.
And discomfort does not remove the need for accountability.
Boundaries are where things can get very grey
Boundaries sound straightforward until two people have completely different ideas about where the line is.
One person may believe a boundary was obvious.
The other may genuinely have had no idea it existed.
Someone may say, “That made me uncomfortable.”
That deserves attention.
But we still need to understand what happened.
Was the boundary ever communicated?
Did the other person stop once they knew?
How did they respond when it was raised?
Did they respect it, argue with it, minimise it or retaliate?
Those details change the situation.
There is a difference between unknowingly crossing a boundary and knowingly ignoring one.
There is also a difference between someone saying, “Please don’t do that again,” and somebody being expected to know a personal boundary that was never expressed.
That does not make the impact disappear.
It helps us decide what needs to happen next.
Maybe the boundary needs to be made clear.
Maybe an apology or repair is needed.
Maybe the behaviour was serious enough to require intervention.
The answer depends on what actually happened.
There may not be an obvious villain and victim.
Two reasonable people can experience the same interaction very differently.
Someone can cause harm without meaning to.
Someone can feel hurt even when the conversation itself was handled appropriately.
And sometimes somebody genuinely has been treated badly.
That is why these situations need judgement rather than automatic conclusions.
Psychological safety has to work when the conversation gets difficult
This is where organisations often discover that knowing the definition of psychological safety and knowing how to use it are two very different things.
Managers need to know how to give feedback and address poor performance.
HR needs a way to look at what happened without jumping straight to one conclusion or dismissing somebody’s experience.
Teams need to know how to disagree without turning disagreement into a personal attack.
And people need to know how to raise concerns clearly enough for others to respond to them properly.
Psychological safety should make us better at having difficult conversations.
I can disagree with you without humiliating you.
I can tell you that your work needs to improve without attacking your character.
You can tell me that something I did affected you without assuming you know my intentions.
You can challenge my thinking without treating me like an idiot.
And one of us may still walk away uncomfortable.
That may be completely appropriate.
This is where psychological safety gets complicated
The easy part is understanding the definition.
The harder part is knowing what to do when two people experience the same interaction differently, when somebody feels hurt, when a manager needs to hold someone accountable, or when a boundary was never clearly communicated in the first place.
That is the space Psychological Safety in the Grey Areas: What to do when psychological safety gets complicated was created for.
It is a workshop for organisations that already understand the basics but keep running into situations where the neat definition stops helping.
The manager wondering how direct they can be with feedback.
The HR person trying to work out whether an interaction was uncomfortable or genuinely inappropriate.
The team dealing with a boundary that one person thought was obvious and another person never knew existed.
These are the conversations people need help navigating.
If your managers or teams are already getting stuck in them, contact me on 078 458 5338 or ann@flagacademy.co.za and I’ll send you the workshop details.
In your corner
Ann
Ann du Plessis is a human safety specialist and the founder of FLAG Academy. She works with organisations, schools and individuals to build practical skills for physical, emotional and psychological safety.
Her work in psychological safety focuses on helping leaders and teams navigate the situations that become difficult in real workplaces: speaking up, feedback, boundaries, accountability, pressure, interpersonal behaviour and the grey areas where the right response is not always obvious.
Ann’s wider work includes self-defense, GBV prevention, anti-bullying and personal safety. Across all of these areas, the same question sits underneath her work: what helps people recognise risk, respond effectively and feel safe enough to act when something is not right?
Ann holds a black belt in Goju Ryu Karate and has a background in trauma-informed coaching. Her approach combines practical safety skills, human behaviour and lived experience to help people and organisations move beyond awareness and know what to do when safety becomes complicated.