[solidasparagus]

> Maybe it would be helpful to use the term other than “safety”? Is there a synonym for a psychological safety that would get cross what you’re thinking about better?

Trust. Psychological safety is (real) trust between members of the team and the people who impact the team (e.g. managers or executives or whoever). It's trusting the people around you so you feel free to be yourself, to propose off-the-wall but potentially terrible ideas without being thought less of, to be open about flaws and failures, to try to stretch yourself beyond what you think you are capable of because you trust that the people around you will support you.

It isn't having a secure job or even a happy one. I was once on a team with a shitty director and severely understaffed in a very unsexy, low-paying industry. I did not enjoy my place in the organization. But we had psychological safety on our team. In our scrum team the tech lead/manager was amazing. He protected us from above, he trusted us, he was honest about the situation, and he had a passion for building a great team and growing his people. When someone made a big mistake in prod, he taught that person how to correct the mistake as an opportunity for growth while the entire team supported them (but didn't do it for them, because we trusted that person). The job sucked and within 2 years the entire team had quit. But not a single person even thought about leaving until that team lead left and the culture of trust left with him. Psychological safety is related to happiness in that teams with it tend to also have happy employees - but it creates happiness, not the other way around.

Psychological safety is often hard to have when the job is unstable (it probably feels unstable because of a lack of trust somewhere), but a startup is a great example of where you can have both trust and an unstable job.