A week ago, Tammie ran Building Psychologically Safe Teams for Leaders on behalf of TELUS Health. It was a solid morning, well attended, well engaged. But the moment that stayed with her afterwards wasn’t in the slides at all. It was something a participant said about himself.
He introduced himself as a leader with no one reporting to him. Then, almost as an aside, he added that he was “a cranky old bugger.”
He wasn’t being self-deprecating for laughs. He genuinely wasn’t sure the word “leader” applied to him.
Leadership isn’t issued with an org chart
Most psychological safety content, understandably, is aimed at people with direct reports. Manage your team, run your meetings, respond to your people’s mistakes a certain way. It’s useful. It’s also incomplete, because it quietly implies that psychological safety is something leaders do to a team, rather than something everyone in a room either builds or erodes.
That man had been shaping the psychological safety of every room he’d ever been in, whether or not a title said so. The way he spoke up, the way he took the mickey out of himself, the way he made space for the next person to talk. None of that requires direct reports. It requires presence, and a willingness to go first.
If psychological safety depends on someone having formal authority before they’re allowed to model it, most workplaces are in trouble, because most of the moments that make or break trust in a team happen between peers, not between a manager and their report.
There’s another layer to it too. Even with zero direct reports, that obligation to lead doesn’t disappear, it just points inward. How you manage your own reactions under pressure, how honestly you own a mistake, whether you meet a hard moment with curiosity or defensiveness, all of that is leadership before it ever touches anyone else. You can’t reliably help build psychological safety for other people if you haven’t first taken responsibility for the safety you create around your own behaviour.
The research is pointing the same way
Griffith University and Victoria Police have just launched the COMMAND-Well trial, backed by a $1.76 million grant from WorkSafe Victoria. It’s built on a specific finding: the organisational and operational stressors police personnel face, workload, role clarity, the level of support they get, can cause up to three times the psychological harm that trauma exposure alone causes.
The response wasn’t to give every officer another round of individual resilience training. It was to train mid-level leaders, the people closest to the day-to-day conditions of a team’s work, to recognise and shift the systemic drivers before they cause harm.
If policing, one of the most psychologically demanding professions there is, is moving its mental health investment upstream to leaders rather than downstream to individual coping, it’s worth asking where the rest of us are still aiming ours.
That’s the same principle sitting underneath the conversation with the man who didn’t think of himself as a leader. Whether or not he had direct reports, he was already one of the people shaping the day-to-day conditions his team worked in. Training and investment that reaches people like him, not just those with a title, is exactly the upstream move the research is pointing to.
What it costs to get this wrong
The numbers back up the urgency too. Safe Work Australia’s most recent data puts the average time off work for a psychological injury at around 33 weeks, compared with roughly seven weeks for a physical injury, with claim costs running about three times higher. A psychological injury isn’t the lesser cousin of a physical one. On the numbers, it’s typically the more disruptive and more expensive of the two.
The regulatory settings are moving in the same direction. Under the model Work Health and Safety laws that jurisdictions like the ACT draft their own legislation from, a Category 1 offence, gross negligence or recklessness that exposes someone to a risk of death or serious injury or illness, carries a maximum penalty of $10.425 million for a body corporate, or $2.085 million and up to ten years’ imprisonment for an individual officer. Psychosocial hazards sit inside that same duty of care as physical ones. Treating psychological safety as a soft skill rather than a compliance obligation is increasingly out of step with where the law is heading. If you’re not sure where your own organisation sits, the SAFE2RISE Readiness Check is a good place to start.
The facilitator’s job is to keep learning too
Tammie also walked away with a few practical notes for herself: there was more content in that deck than the morning needed, and some of it repeated itself. Nothing dramatic, just the kind of thing you only really feel once you’re in the room reading the energy of real participants. She’ll be tightening it for next time.
It felt like a useful thing to admit publicly, given the subject of the session. Psychological safety isn’t about getting it right the first time. It’s about being willing to say “that didn’t quite land, here’s what I’ll change” without treating it as a failure. Modelling that seemed more useful than pretending the morning was flawless.
The takeaway
If you’ve ever hesitated to call yourself a leader because nobody reports to you, that hesitation is worth questioning. Leadership, in the psychological safety sense, isn’t a headcount. It’s what you do with the influence you already have, in the room you’re already in.
Want this conversation in your organisation?
Tammie works with organisations to build psychological safety training that reaches leaders at every level, not just the ones with people reporting to them. If that’s a gap worth closing before it shows up in your own claims data, get in touch at rise@tammiehorton.com or 1300 PHYNIX (749 649).
