Psychological safety has many benefits for our well-being. We feel better, have reduced stress levels, a lower risk of burnout, and enjoy our jobs more when we experience a high degree of psychological safety.

But primarily, psychological safety isn’t about health and well-being; it’s about performing together and succeeding with our mission. Psychological safety isn’t the final goal but rather a means and a prerequisite to get to where we want to be.

Therefore, a constant challenge in the workplace is to find that desirable state where we do both what is good for the organization and for its employees, and where we perform for both today and tomorrow.

To succeed with this, we need to focus on creating a climate where we welcome and appreciate it when someone brings up ideas, questions, challenges, concerns, and mistakes. A place where we see it as an opportunity to understand different perspectives, ensure we take smart risks, try new ideas, and learn from what didn’t go as we hoped. But we also need to articulate and follow up on the demands that come with the job. Demands in the form of deliverables, deadlines, quality requirements, and keeping our promises. Holding each other accountable is not in contrast to psychological safety. On the contrary!

One way to describe this relationship between psychological safety and performance is through a model that Amy Edmondson first described in the Harvard Business Review in 2008, and which is sometimes called the Learning Zone. Even though it actually contains four zones: The Comfort Zone, The Anxiety Zone, The Apathy Zone, and The Learning and Performance Zone.

Here, we describe the zones with the hope that it will deepen the understanding of what makes safety and performance go hand in hand. And what the consequences can be when one is prioritized over the other.

The Comfort Zone

In the Comfort Zone, we prioritize harmony and safety. The attitude toward one another is characterized by politeness and pleasantness, without challenging each other. In the Comfort Zone, we are content with things as they are right now. We do what we’ve always done because it feels a bit difficult to have to do things differently.

In the Comfort Zone, psychological safety may feel good, but the performance demands and drive are conspicuously absent. This means that, unfortunately, not much new happens in this zone. We might lower the standard. We might choose not to accept feedback from, for example, customers or other units. We don’t accept it because “this is how we’ve always done it.” It feels threatening to receive feedback if it’s negative. If something isn’t quite at the level we desire, we might still try to preserve this comfortable and pleasant state. We might not say things outright. In fact, there’s a risk that psychological safety drops here. We don’t actually put words to everything we want in the Comfort Zone. So we stay in this zone instead of asking ourselves if there’s another way we could do this.

So, in the choice between good relationships and harmony or truly “being all we can be,” we in the Comfort Zone choose to try and maintain harmony. It might be nice for a while, but there can also be a lot of risks in doing so. In the long run, we can’t meet the performance demands or we are not relevant or current enough. Maybe we haven’t learned enough to keep up. But what happens if it’s the other way around? High performance demands and low psychological safety?

The Anxiety Zone

In the Anxiety Zone, we have high performance demands and high drive, but psychological safety is low. It could be that a group has been in the Comfort Zone and a leader is brought in with the motivation that we need someone who can get things in order, or a coach on a team who creates a very high drive with high demands. They demand accountability. At its core, that’s a positive thing. But if there is low psychological safety in combination with high demands, we land in the Anxiety Zone.

What can we experience here? It can be anything from lying awake at night to feeling alone with my problems. The strong fear of failure returns again and again. I am alone with what I’m facing. High demands, but low support. Maybe I just have to grit my teeth. I think I just have to manage this even if I feel a lot of hesitation. To complete the task, I should really talk to my colleague about this. But I don’t know how to do that. Maybe I’m sitting with an email I’ve written and changed, added to and removed. Maybe I’ve done it so many times that I don’t land it, and it becomes a dead end. That’s a sign that psychological safety isn’t high enough. When you try to formulate something and then back off, only to try again. Maybe you recognize this? That you’ve sat there, preferably with an email, because it’s too uncomfortable to call.

Another thing that happens in the Anxiety Zone is that we can feel drained of energy. This isn’t positive stress; it’s the opposite. It involves a high degree of stress with a feeling that probably lingers. Even after we have finished, there’s an “unspoken conversation” in the relationship with others. There’s a concept called emotional residue. You could call it a “emotional aftertaste” in Swedish, which means you’re sitting with something you want to bring up. And then you do it, and it falls apart without resolution. Maybe you try to bring something up, but then you leave the conversation, the situation, the project, or the meeting with unfinished business.

The Anxiety Zone can also be about uncomfortable silence in a group. That we feel zero comfort bringing up an issue. I just want to get it over with and out of the way. Now let’s focus on the next thing. Finished! So when we say the Anxiety Zone involves high drive, it doesn’t necessarily mean the pace of the dialogues is high. I hold back from saying something, and if I’m expected to learn something and evaluate how something went, it becomes a challenge.

Another aspect of the Anxiety Zone is the perceived powerlessness. You feel like you’ve tried. You’ve gotten signals that it’s not worth bringing something up. That you’ve been punished or that there’s just been an uncomfortable silence when you do bring something up. You ask for help or something goes wrong, and you are met with a very harsh response. “You should have solved this! How hard can it be? You have to meet this deadline!” Both open and passive-aggressiveness can emerge in various ways.

What happens then is that you become very alone with your thoughts. You are awake at night and your thoughts are swirling; how do I say this so it lands? How do I solve this myself? In my mind, I might know deep down that we need to do this together, but it doesn’t feel right to bring it up. Then it really becomes Sunday dread, where I’m worried about how things will land. Imagine then if the next day you have something very important on your plate. For example, an operation or a project that a lot depends on. No wonder this zone is called the Anxiety Zone.

Finally, there is a lot to say about the Anxiety Zone related to how we handle failures together. In the Anxiety Zone, it means you blame each other, point fingers, and look for scapegoats. Then it’s “better” if I just handle things myself. I might still think a lot about what others are doing, but we don’t have many conversations about it, and I just focus on my task. The downside is that I then miss the bigger picture – our shared task together. And we miss the opportunity to learn from mistakes, help each other, and sometimes even rescue situations together.

The Apathy Zone

Being in the Anxiety Zone is draining for people. And being in the Comfort Zone can be too, if we feel understimulated. One strategy to deal with it is to mentally check out – to give up because there’s no point in trying anyway – and let go of both the demands and the relationships. We are then in the Apathy Zone, which involves both low psychological safety and low demands. Here, a feeling arises that there is no point in continuing, and we let go of both ambitions and relationships.

In the Anxiety Zone, we often experienced being on high alert and tried to hide problems at the slightest misstep. The Apathy Zone is therefore usually a consequence of having been in the Anxiety Zone for too long. It becomes a natural escape when the pressure becomes too great without enough support. We sit on the sidelines and think that others can take over. We’ve done our part!

In practice, the Apathy Zone functions as a defense mechanism or a coping strategy. It is deeply human to check out when it feels so vulnerable and draining to be in the Anxiety Zone – where you try to perform but feel alone and not safe enough to bring up challenges. In the worst case, you stay in the workplace but stop being involved. You complain, don’t contribute, and literally sit on the sidelines while others work. Another common reaction is to start looking for something new.

The path to the Apathy Zone can have two different starting points. It doesn’t have to be that we only come from the Anxiety Zone. Many get there from the Comfort Zone where they feel understimulated. Development has stagnated, and even though the group gets along well, challenges are missing. It goes on for too long without anything new, and the work becomes too routine. People can thus end up in the Apathy Zone from both situations with high demands but low psychological safety (Anxiety Zone), and from situations with low demands and high safety (Comfort Zone). Therefore, it’s not about people quitting because they had too much psychological safety. On the contrary, it’s often because they had too few performance demands and challenges.

It’s easy in hindsight to blame safety as the culprit when thinking about groups where you felt understimulated. But in reality, it’s more likely the goals or the ways of working that were the problem. This confusion leads us back to the persistent myth that psychological safety would somehow stand in the way of performance when in fact, it’s the exact opposite.

The Learning and Performance Zone

The Learning and Performance Zone represents the optimal balance between psychological safety and high demands. The zone is characterized by a work environment with both challenging goals and a climate where people feel safe to take risks and learn from mistakes. This is where teams and organizations achieve their greatest potential – when a high level of ambition meets a safe climate for learning and development.

What is distinctive about this zone? A high standard creates positive energy in this zone, free from negative stress. In the Learning and Performance Zone, people are simply safely leaning forward. There is a sense of being able to try without fear of failure, and the team takes on new things and dares to experiment.

Furthermore, feedback becomes a valuable resource rather than a threat. When feedback comes, it is received constructively without us becoming defensive. People challenge themselves, dare to learn, and try new methods. Failures do not lead to blame but become lessons for the future, both concerning today’s deliverables and future improvements.

This leads to work satisfaction replacing anxiety. There is significantly less of the “Sunday dread” that characterizes the Anxiety Zone. Instead, people can feel “TGIM” – Thank God It’s Monday – a desire to take on tasks together with colleagues.

Another important difference from the Anxiety Zone is that worry about the task replaces worry about social consequences. It is important to note that high demands and challenging tasks in a demanding world can naturally create worry about the task itself. It could be a difficult operation, a challenging project, or a truly ambitious goal. It could even be a military task that involves actual risks. But in the Learning and Performance Zone, there is no worry about how colleagues will meet our attempts to do a good job.

To manage these actual challenges, trust between team members becomes crucial. In the Learning and Performance Zone, team members know where they stand with each other, even in the face of great challenges. Instead of thinking “if only I had a sensible manager or colleagues, we would make it,” the thought arises, “I could never have done this alone, but in this team, I have the courage.” At the same time, it is important to realize that learning requires a certain degree of discomfort. This zone is not always comfortable. As Brené Brown puts it: “If you’re comfortable, you ain’t learning.” It is always a little uncomfortable to learn new things and try new methods.

Despite the discomfort, or perhaps precisely because of it – the feeling of competence paradoxically arises in challenging environments. It is precisely in this challenging environment that people feel most competent. Because after trying something difficult and succeeding, a genuine feeling of competence arises. In the Comfort Zone, where people only do what they have done before, this feeling of development is absent. Then there is a risk that employees become understimulated and that the company or operation becomes irrelevant.

Another success factor in the Learning and Performance Zone is that team performance is built on an understanding of individual challenges. What is perceived as challenging in a team is individual. When team members can support each other without belittling each other’s attempts or efforts, a pride is created in talking about successes or in having caught mistakes early. As a result of this, decision-making also accelerates in effective teams. It becomes “short bench” instead of “long bench.” Instead of dragging out processes, an attitude arises of “Should we try this? Yes, we should. What can we learn from it?”

What does recovery look like in the Learning and Performance Zone? Can it happen without compromising ambitions? There are sometimes questions about whether you can always be in the Learning and Performance Zone, if recovery and comfort are not also needed. But recovery can happen within the framework of this zone – through breaks, focusing on activities that are fun for the moment, and by investing time in relationships. It’s about not having to let go of ambitions and goals, either in the short or long term.

This perspective also shows that sustainable performance requires balance within the zone. It can become a “slippery slope” if the bar is lowered for the sake of recovery. Even when people challenge themselves in the Learning and Performance Zone, it doesn’t mean they are constantly at the limit of their ability. On the contrary, it’s about making the work sustainable through recovery, without compromising quality or service levels.

All of this is based on psychological safety forming the foundation for this balance. Safety means having the courage to put words to both what is working and what doesn’t feel right. Feelings are data, and gut feelings about collaborations, workload, or plans need to be given space in the conversation. There is room for differences through inclusion, room for intelligent risks and experimentation, room for open conversations about challenges and mistakes, and room to ask for help. When people can be brilliant at what they are good at, but also express a need for support, it becomes easier to stay in the Learning and Performance Zone.