At Integral, we believe the most important work happens when people feel free to be their authentic selves. So we brought together our newest directors, Laura DiBenedetto, Director of Employee Communications, and Ashley Moore, Director of Transformational Change, to talk about something that sits at the heart of both of their worlds: psychological safety. What it really means, what it costs organizations when it’s missing and why no change effort, communication strategy or culture initiative can succeed without it.
What does psychological safety mean to you?
Ashley: For me, it comes down to one question: can I speak freely? Can I be honest with my manager, with leadership, with my peers, without wearing a mask? When you can’t, everything becomes performative. You check the box. You say the right things. But you don’t actually believe in what you’re doing. And that’s where the cascade starts: disengagement, lack of trust, lack of creativity and eventually burnout. I’ve lived it personally. And that’s where the cascade starts: disengagement, lack of trust, lack of creativity and eventually burnout. It’s not just a feeling. The 2026 Integral Index measures freedom to speak up as one of five conditions shaping how workplaces actually behave, and when it’s present, supportive colleague behavior rises by 50 percentage points. When it’s absent, the whole system suffers.
Laura: That word, performative, is exactly it. And I’d take it a step further: psychological safety isn’t one ingredient among many. It’s the core kernel, the thing everything else depends on. If it’s not there, you are not going to get good-faith conversations, good-faith ideas or good-faith questions from your people. What gets lost is not just a cultural issue. It’s dollars and cents. The ideas that could make your organization more profitable, more innovative, more resilient, those only surface when people feel safe enough to share them. Not having psychological safety is a massive loss for any organization that wants to grow.
What does a culture look like when it’s missing?
Ashley: Everything feels fake. People aren’t speaking in real words. They’re hiding behind jargon, three-letter acronyms and KPIs because genuine conversation doesn’t feel safe. That’s what toxicity looks like to me. Not necessarily loud or aggressive. Just nothing seems real.
Laura: And the cost of that fakeness is exhaustion in a way that’s hard to overstate. People have to hide who they are – their identity, their communication style, the way they actually think – because they’re afraid of being judged or punished for it. I’m someone who likes to speak truthfully; when I’ve been in environments where I couldn’t, it is draining. Our 2026 Integral index surfaced data showing employees feeling emotionally drained at work, which tracks with feeling psychologically safe. In fact, 41% of engaged employees still report feeling emotionally drained, nearly identical to the 44% who aren’t engaged at all. When you’re performing a version of yourself all day, you come home with nothing left.
Middle managers seem to be carrying a disproportionate burden here. What do they actually need?
Laura: I think of them as the sandwich generation of the working world. They’re getting pressure from above to perform and achieve company goals and they’re supporting their teams who have real questions and need real answers. What we know from research, including our own Integral Index, is that an employee’s relationship with their manager is one of the most critical factors in whether they feel informed, connected and invested. So if you’re not supporting your middle managers, you are setting everyone up to fail. The Index found that Manager Activation is the single largest lever in our entire framework, raising supportive workplace behavior by 57 percentage points. And yet every form of manager support that organizations provide declined year over year.
Also, we have to be honest about what “supporting” actually means. Handing someone a double-spaced page of talking points is not supportive because it doesn’t prepare a manager for a real dialogue with their team.
Ashley: The talking points problem is real, and it indicates something bigger: we need to teach managers to lead people, not outputs. Numbers on a screen don’t need empathy. People do. And there’s a practical capacity question underneath all of this, too. These managers are absorbing the change, translating it, communicating it and still running their daily operations. Can we simplify governance during a transition? Can we have an honest conversation about shifting priorities? Do they have a feedback loop, somewhere to go when they need support themselves? If the system isn’t designed to give them an outlet, everything just gets stuck in the middle.
Is there a deeper issue that communications and change efforts alone can’t fix?
Ashley: Yes, and I think it gets missed all the time. A change initiative or a communication campaign cannot fix a toxic culture. If the operating system, the structures, the norms, the power dynamics, are broken, one effort won’t change it. You have to look at what’s keeping the environment the way it is and be willing to address that directly.
Laura: Many times, an organization wants to treat a symptom, not the system. Someone says, “We’re struggling with this, please help us,” and they want a solution that takes care of everything cleanly. But if you don’t address what’s actually driving the dysfunction, you will repeat the same patterns. People will burn out and leave. Or they’ll stay and quietly disconnect. Neither option is good for anyone.
You’ve painted a clear picture of what’s broken. What does it look like when it works?
Ashley: You feel it immediately when you walk into an organization that has it. People speak in real sentences. They disagree in meetings, and nobody flinches. Someone says, “I don’t know,” and it’s not career-ending. That’s not a small thing. That’s a culture where learning is actually possible, where change has a fighting chance because people trust that honesty won’t be used against them. The Index puts a number on it: high-trust employees feel excited or energized about change at nearly four times the rate of low-trust employees
Laura: It usually starts with a leader who models the behavior, someone who says “I got that wrong” or “I don’t have all the answers here” and means it. That kind of moment gives everyone else in the room permission to be human, too. It sounds simple, but it’s genuinely rare, and when it happens, it changes the temperature of a place. That’s what people are hungry for. Not perfection from their leaders but honesty and the sense that we’re all figuring this out together.