Has Human Decency Been Forgotten in Modern Teamwork and Leadership?

Psychological safety is often talked about—but rarely felt. Is basic human decency in leadership and teamwork the missing ingredient?

Despite its popularity as a leadership buzzword, genuine psychological safety doesn’t come from trite LinkedIn posts, training sessions, or slogans. It comes from something far more fundamental: basic human decency.

What do we mean by decency in this context?  Decency in a team or leadership context means consistently choosing respectful, fair, and honest behaviours within the team—even when under pressure. Choosing the hard right over the easy wrong. It’s about treating others with dignity, valuing different contributions, and creating space for diverse voices without judgment or fear. Leaders set the tone here, and organisations will get the leadership behaviours that they select, reward and train for. Decency should always be a factor in selecting, rewarding and training leaders if genuine psychological safety is being aspired to.

Bringing leader egos under control is essential for building trust; when leaders stop trying to appear infallible and start inviting honest input, they can help to set the tone for psychological safety to thrive. Knowing our real strengths and weaknesses, and being able to talk about them in a workplace context is key.

Teams thrive when people treat each other with basic respect, empathy, and integrity—not just when it’s easy, but especially when it’s hard and the pressure is on. When leaders and team members consistently act towards one another with decency, they create the trust needed for people to speak up, take risks, admit mistakes openly, and challenge ideas without fear.

It’s not about being soft or nice all the time—it’s about being real, open, and accountable. True psychological safety is built on the consistent actions and behaviours that show others they’re valued and safe to be themselves in the team. In a business world full of surface-level engagement, a more grounded, human approach can help transform good teams into great ones.  It is of course harder to find and assemble the preconditions for this in more contrived cultures.

Google’s extensive Project Aristotle is an interesting case study, it set out to uncover what makes teams effective—and the top factor wasn’t intelligence, skill, or experience. It was psychological safety. Meredith Belbin in his research for the now widely used Belbin Model made the same point in his first book 'Management Teams - Why They Succeed or Fail'.

Psychological safety means team members feel safe to speak up, admit their mistakes, ask questions, or challenge ideas—without fear of embarrassment or retribution. It’s not a new concept, but it’s a vital one that’s often overlooked in modern workplaces.

Research shows that when psychological safety is present, collective intelligence rises. When it's absent, even the most talented teams underperform. People naturally want to avoid looking incompetent, so they stay silent—even in situations where speaking up could prevent disasters, like in aviation or medicine.

This behaviour, called impression management, starts early in life as a self-preservation strategy. In the workplace, it becomes a barrier to openness, collaboration, and innovation.

Effective leaders create environments where people can speak truthfully—where saying “can’t do” is more valued than pretending everything is fine. It takes courage and humility from leaders to admit they don’t have all the answers, to invite diverse views, and to normalise learning from mistakes.

An interesting example are elite military aviation teams like the Red Arrows or Blue Angels who conduct debriefs where rank takes a back seat to learning. Civilian pilots talk about cockpit gradient—how steep power differences can suppress speaking up and increase risk. A low gradient means a safer, more open exchange of critical feedback.

Psychological safety encourages honest conversations, accountability without blame, and room for well-intentioned mistakes. It enables creativity, improves decision-making, and drives better results.

Tools like the Belbin Model and its reports help teams understand behavioural strengths and what it calls allowable weaknesses—the natural flipsides of those strengths. Awareness of these traits promotes tolerance, deeper working relationships, and improved collaboration.

No, teams don’t need to be all sunshine and group hugs. But a culture of decency, curiosity, and managed authenticity helps people bring their best selves to work—and speak up when it matters most.

We like using Belbin as a tool to help people talk openly about strength and weakness within teams as a strong foundation for real psychological safety.

Belbin put it best: “Nobody is perfect, but a good team can be.”