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Hey there, innovation champions!

One of the great things about consulting for an enormous enterprise like Meta is that you can get passed around from team to team.

Which is exactly what happened to me after my first job with a research team there went really well: the manager raved about the results to all her colleagues, and pretty soon, I was working with several teams at the same time.

This led to an interesting situation, where I got to compare how different managers interacted with their teams, and what impact that had on psychological safety and, call it “innovation confidence.”

In Team A, the manager was very explicit about not wanting to participate in the activities. He very much wanted to hold himself apart from his team.

In Team B, the manager dove right in, played right alongside her teammates.

So take a guess what the energy in those two rooms was like?

For Team A, things felt sort of guarded, like everyone was waiting for permission.

In Team B, even though it was as much a group of introverts as Team A, there was a lot more playfulness, energy, and a sense of true collaboration.

The Invisible Force Behind Innovation

What I was witnessing firsthand was the profound impact of psychological safety on a team’s capacity for innovation. When Google conducted its famous Project Aristotle research to determine what makes teams effective, psychological safety emerged as the #1 factor – more important than individual brilliance, resources, or even clear goals.

But here’s what fascinated me: psychological safety isn’t just about feeling comfortable sharing ideas. It’s about creating what I call an “innovation confidence” – the collective belief that the team can create something new and valuable together.

And it turns out, leaders play an outsized role in creating this environment.

The Leader’s Shadow

I began to notice a pattern across all the teams I worked with: the team’s behavior almost always mirrored the leader’s approach.

When a leader was playful and willing to appear imperfect, the team followed suit. When a leader held back, maintained a professional distance, and projected constant competence – the team did exactly the same.

I call this “the leader’s shadow” – the way a leader’s behavior casts a long shadow across the team’s culture, often without them even realizing it.

Let me break this down using my Create the Impossible™ framework:

Play Hard: The Leader’s Permission to Explore

The first element of my framework is “Play Hard” – embracing a spirit of curiosity and exploration. But here’s the catch: teams rarely play harder than their leader.

In Team B, where the manager was the first to volunteer for activities, team members quickly followed her lead. There was an implicit permission to explore, to try new approaches, to be playful with ideas.

In Team A, with the manager sitting apart as an observer, team members were much more cautious. Without seeing their leader engage in playful exploration, they weren’t sure if it was truly safe to do so themselves.

This isn’t about forcing introverted leaders to become extroverts. It’s about leaders demonstrating through their actions that exploration and idea play are valued and expected.

Make Crap: Modeling Imperfection

The second element of my framework is “Make Crap” – giving ourselves permission to create imperfect first attempts. And once again, teams take their cues from leaders.

One of the most powerful moments I witnessed was when a senior leader at a major tech company openly shared a half-baked idea during a brainstorming session. The energy in the room transformed instantly. If the executive was comfortable sharing something imperfect, others felt they could do the same.

Contrast this with leaders who only present polished thinking, who never reveal their process or struggles. Their teams inevitably develop a culture where work is held back until it’s “perfect” – which means innovation slows to a crawl.

Learn Fast: Creating Safety Around Failure

The third element of my framework is “Learn Fast” – extracting insights from every experience, especially the challenging ones. This requires leaders to create psychological safety specifically around failure.

I once worked with a team whose leader had a brilliant practice: at the start of each meeting, she would share her “favorite failure” from the past week – something that didn’t go as planned but taught her something valuable.

This simple ritual sent a powerful message: in this team, we learn from failures rather than hide them. The result was a much more experimental culture where risks were taken and learning happened rapidly.

Measuring the Invisible: How to Assess Your Team’s Innovation Confidence

So if psychological safety and innovation confidence are so important, how do we measure them? Here are three approaches I’ve found effective:

1. The Speak-Up Test

One simple but revealing metric is the “speak-up percentage” – what percentage of people in a meeting actually contribute ideas? In teams with high psychological safety, participation is widespread. In teams where safety is low, you’ll typically see the same few people dominating while others remain silent.

Try tracking this over time. If you’re seeing under 70% participation in ideation sessions, there’s likely a psychological safety issue to address.

2. The Terrible Ideas Game

Another approach is to directly measure comfort with imperfection. One technique I use in workshops is to explicitly ask for “terrible ideas” to solve a challenge. In teams with high innovation confidence, this generates enthusiasm and often surprisingly innovative thinking. In teams where confidence is low, people struggle to deliberately generate “bad” ideas – they’re too afraid of judgment.

You can measure both the quantity of ideas and the energy level during this exercise as indicators of psychological safety.

3. The Failure Conversation

Perhaps the most telling measure is how openly failures are discussed. In teams with strong safety nets, failures are brought up proactively, examined for learning, and treated as valuable data points. In teams lacking safety, failures are hidden, blamed on external factors, or mentioned only in vague terms.

Try asking: “What percentage of failures in your team are openly discussed and used as learning opportunities?” The answer reveals a lot about your team’s innovation readiness.

Building Your Team’s Creative Safety Net

So how do you strengthen psychological safety and innovation confidence in your team? Here are three practical strategies based on my Create the Impossible™ framework:

1. Start with leadership behavior

Remember the leader’s shadow. If you want your team to embrace play, imperfection, and learning from failure, you must model these behaviors first. Make it a practice to:

• Share your own half-formed ideas
• Participate fully in creative exercises
• Talk openly about your failures and what you learned

2. Create structured safety

Don’t rely on general encouragement – create specific structures that normalize creative risk-taking. For example:

• Designate certain meetings as “experimental zones” where standard judgment criteria are suspended
• Create explicit rituals around learning from failure
• Use techniques like “reverse thinking” or “terrible ideas” that give permission to think differently

3. Measure and celebrate progress

What gets measured gets managed. Start tracking the indicators of psychological safety discussed above, and celebrate improvements:

• “I noticed everyone contributed ideas in today’s session – that’s fantastic!”
• “I love how we’re getting more comfortable sharing early-stage thinking!”
• “The way we handled that setback and extracted learning was really impressive.”

The Innovation Paradox

There’s a fascinating paradox in innovation: the teams that accomplish the most extraordinary breakthroughs often appear to be having the most fun. They’re playful, they laugh at their own missteps, they share half-baked ideas without embarrassment.

This isn’t coincidental. That sense of psychological safety – the creative safety net – is precisely what allows them to take the intellectual risks that lead to breakthrough thinking.

As leaders, we often focus on providing our teams with the right tools, resources, and processes for innovation. But perhaps the most valuable thing we can provide is a strong creative safety net – the confidence that they can explore widely, fail productively, and learn continuously without fear of judgment.

Your Challenge

So here’s your challenge for this week: Take a clear-eyed look at your team’s creative safety net. Where are the holes? What signals are you sending about play, imperfection, and learning from failure? What one habit could you change to strengthen your team’s innovation confidence?

Remember, in the words of creativity researcher Teresa Amabile: “When it comes to creativity, intrinsic motivation – the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing – is essential.”

And nothing kills intrinsic motivation faster than fear.

Stay curious, stay playful, and keep creating the impossible!

I’d love to hear from you. How do you measure and build psychological safety in your team? Click here to share your story!

Senior Leaders: Ready to strengthen your team’s creative safety net? Book a complimentary Innovation Strategy Session and let’s explore how the Create the Impossible™ framework can transform your team’s psychological safety and innovation confidence.