In boardrooms and classrooms alike, the science of psychological safety is no longer a luxury. It is the prerequisite for everything we say we want from the people around us.
There is a small stone at the centre of this story, and a very large body of still water. Drop the stone in, and watch what happens. The ripples travel outward in perfect, widening circles — each one reaching places the stone itself could never touch. That, in essence, is what a single act of kindness does. As Dunni Audu Oladokun, an IT strategy and governance executive in financial services, put it recently: a little kindness is like the ripple from a tiny stone dropped into still water. You never really know how far the circles travel. It is always worth being kind, even when the past has given you every reason not to be.
This is not soft philosophy. This is neuroscience. And it may be the most important leadership insight that business schools are still failing to teach.
“Trauma blocks learning by signaling threat. Safety reopens the brain to growth. When we teach through compassion, we don’t just transfer knowledge — we restore capacity.”
Last week carried unusual spiritual weight. For Christians around the world, it marked the beginning of Lent — forty days of fasting, prayer, and self-examination. For Muslims, it coincided with the start of Ramadan, a sacred month of reflection, discipline, and renewal. Two traditions, separated by doctrine and practice, yet converging on the same essential invitation: pause. Look inward. Return to what matters.
What matters, it turns out, is not the label of your faith. It is the condition of your heart.
Last week, speaking at The Corporate Awards London roadshow, I offered the room a simple equation: Human plus Kind equals Humankind. The audience — executives, strategists, people fluent in the language of KPIs and P&Ls — felt it land. Because somewhere beneath the quarterly targets and the performance dashboards, they recognised something true about themselves and about the people who report to them.
Every person in your organisation is a nervous system first, and an employee second.
This is not a metaphor. When the brain perceives threat — whether a saber-toothed tiger or a humiliating performance review — it activates the same ancient survival circuitry. The prefrontal cortex goes offline. The amygdala takes over. The person in front of you is no longer capable of their best thinking. They are surviving the moment rather than growing within it.
This is what trauma does to an organisation. Not the dramatic, headline-making kind alone, but the chronic, low-grade kind: the manager who leads through humiliation, the culture that punishes failure, the meeting room where silence is safer than speaking. These environments do not simply fail to produce excellence. They actively prevent it.
Trauma-informed leadership is the antidote. But it is frequently misunderstood. Critics sometimes frame it as an excuse to lower standards, to coddle employees, to make the workplace soft. This gets the science precisely backwards. Trauma-informed leadership does not lower the bar. It removes the invisible weight that stops people from reaching it.
Psychological safety — the belief that you will not be punished for speaking up, asking questions, or admitting mistakes — is not a soft skill. It is the precondition for every hard result an organisation is chasing. Google’s Project Aristotle found it was the single most important factor in high-performing teams, more predictive than individual talent or technical skill. You cannot out-engineer a culture of fear. You can only dismantle it, one interaction at a time.
Positive psychology teaches us something equally important: flourishing is not the absence of struggle. It is the presence of meaning, connection, and the courage to keep showing up. The people we most admire are rarely those spared from adversity. They are those who found, within it, something worth reaching for. That reaching requires safety — someone, somewhere, creating the conditions in which the risk of growth felt worth taking.
As I approach my own milestone — fifty years on this earth, a golden jubilee fifty-two days away — I find myself returning again and again to a single observation: the most powerful rooms I have ever been in were not the ones with the most impressive titles at the table. They were the ones where people felt seen. Where the quiet voice in the corner was invited to speak. Where the person who had failed last quarter was still treated as someone capable of succeeding in the next one.
The stone is small. The water is still. But the circles, if you let them, will travel further than you can imagine.
So here is the question worth carrying into your Lent, your Ramadan, your own private season of reflection — whatever form it takes for you: Are the people around you learning and growing, or are they quietly surviving?
The answer lives in the culture you are building, one interaction at a time. And the culture begins, always, with a choice about what kind of leader you are willing to become.
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Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org
