Psychological Safety: The Missing Competency in Security Leadership
(And Three-and-a-Half Practical Ways to Build It)
Security leaders often talk about “culture” as something abstract, a backdrop to the real work of managing risk. But culture isn’t abstract at all. It’s operational. It’s measurable. And it’s one of the strongest predictors of whether people will speak up early enough for us to intervene before harm escalates.
This is where psychological safety comes in.
Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson defines it as a belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risktaking, meaning people can raise concerns, admit mistakes, and share difficult truths without fear of embarrassment, rejection, or retaliation.
From a security standpoint, that definition translates into something much simpler:
Psychological safety is the condition that makes early reporting possible.
When it’s present, risks surface quickly.
When it’s absent, problems hide until they explode into crises, investigations, and headlinelevel failures.
This isn’t a soft HR concept. It’s a security capability.
And security leaders have far more influence on it than we often realize.
Why I Pivoted Toward HR Risk Management
I spent the last several years as Regional Manager for Western Canada for GardaWorld’s National Risk Management & Investigations Team. My role sat at the intersection of threat assessment, investigations, and organizational protection. I loved that work, genuinely. It was challenging, meaningful, and aligned with my operational DNA.
My job was to anticipate threats early, design the controls to prevent them, and then stand up the investigative and protective teams that would respond when highrisk situations emerged. It was highstakes, fastpaced, and purposedriven.
And yet, in all that work, one pattern became impossible to ignore:
By the time something reached the “investigation” stage, the harm had often already occurred.
Last year, Bob Stenhouse and the Veritas Solutions leadership team approached me with a different kind of challenge:
Could I take that same operational mindset, anticipating, preventing, protecting,
and apply it earlier in the lifecycle of organizational risk?
Not at the point of crisis, but at the point of culture design?
That question landed squarely in a part of my background I hadn’t drawn on for years. Early in my career, I studied conflict mediation, public engagement, and how people feel heard and valued in highstakes conversations. My undergraduate dissertation even explored the conditions that enable honesty, truthtelling, and fairness in peace-processes, this was a topic I was committed to long before I ever entered the security profession.
The more I sat with the opportunity, the more it felt like a return, not a departure.
There is so much brokenness in workplaces today; conflict, fear, corrosive cultures, leaders under pressure, people feeling unseen or unsafe. I realized I didn’t want to be reactive anymore. I didn’t want my work to begin only after someone had been harmed.
I want to build systems where the harm never occurs in the first place.
That’s what drew me to HR Risk Management, and it’s why I joined Veritas Solutions earlier this year: to work at the point where culture, investigations, fairness, and prevention converge.
So, here’s three and a half ideas for Security Leaders who like me want to empower psychological safety to improve their effectiveness.
1. Make reporting easier than staying silent
Most organizations say they encourage reporting. Fewer design systems that make speaking up feel safe.
Security leaders can make a measurable difference simply by identifying and reducing friction:
unclear intake steps
inconsistent responses from managers
slow followup
previous reports that “disappeared”
emotional reactions from leaders
In our work at Veritas, trust often breaks down at the moment someone considers reporting, not during the investigation that follows.
Security teams can help rebuild that trust by:
publishing clear expectations for how reports are handled
aligning security and HR so messaging is consistent
removing ambiguity that fuels fear
When people know what will happen, they stop assuming what might.
2. Train leaders not only to respond, but to not overreact
Most breakdowns in psychological safety don’t come from bad intent.
They come from untrained leaders doing their best without the tools.
Common errors include:
minimizing concerns
trying to “fix” the issue in the moment
asking leading questions
promising outcomes
oversharing
reacting emotionally
Security leaders can play a strategic role by reframing these skills as risk competencies, not HR soft skills. When leaders understand:
what to say
what not to say
what to document
when and how to escalate
…they become a stabilizing force instead of an accidental risk amplifier.
3. Build defensibility into the process, not the person
A psychologically safe culture depends on fairness.
Fairness depends on defensibility.
Defensibility depends on structure.
As my colleague Farah has articulated brilliantly in the past,“Never weigh the person, weigh the properties of the evidence.”
This is where security leaders can strengthen investigative integrity by ensuring:
transparent scope and limitations
consistent evidence logs
rationale for weighting evidence documented clearly
discrepancies treated as information, not credibility judgments
version control maintained rigorously
When structure, not instinct, anchors investigations, two things happen:
People feel safer participating, and organizations make better decisions.
3.5. Model psychological safety in micromoments
This halfstep is simple but transformative.
Security leaders influence culture by how they show up in everyday interactions:
asking more questions than they answer
showing curiosity instead of defensiveness
acknowledging uncertainty
listening without judgement
responding calmly to surprises or mistakes
Psychological safety is built most powerfully in these small moments, long before any formal process begins.
Closing Thought
Security leadership is expanding. Our profession is no longer defined only by physical risk or investigative rigor. It is increasingly defined by how well we understand the human systems that make prevention possible.
Psychological safety isn’t an HR initiative we support from the sidelines.
It is a risk mitigation framework, a trust infrastructure, and a strategic capability every modern security leader should understand.
My move into HR Risk Management was not a departure from my past work, it was the natural evolution of it. Because when we design workplaces where people feel safe enough to speak the truth early, we reduce harm, strengthen culture, and make every part of the organization more resilient.
And that, ultimately, is the most meaningful work we can do.
