Essentials of Leadership: A Lesson In Psychological Safety
Our first student essay from summer 2025 is written by Nalin A., a high school student from Dallas, Texas, U.S., who studied with Wharton Global Youth in the online Essentials of Leadership program.
Before my summer experience with the Wharton Global Youth Program, I had a pretty straightforward view of leadership. Good leaders were decisive, confident, and had the best ideas. They guided their teams toward success through clear vision and strong direction.
Then I encountered something called psychological safety during my online Essentials of Leadership program in summer 2025, and honestly, it sounded like corporate fluff. The basic idea seemed obvious enough: we talked about creating an environment where people felt comfortable speaking up, especially in the online setting where students were connecting from across the globe. Isn’t making people feel comfortable just common courtesy?
What I didn’t realize was how dramatically the presence or absence of this seemingly obvious concept of psychological safety could influence a team’s performance.
Concerts and Oil Production
My first Essentials of Leadership small group project seemed to confirm my original leadership theory. Our team had to design a music festival in a country where none of us lived, but our team included students from different continents. Without really thinking about it, we dove straight into a shared Google Doc and started brain-dumping ideas. We were able to decide the location quickly; Thailand made sense because of the cheap labor costs and strong population density, and it was close to major markets like India and China. Artist selection felt natural too. We landed on Ed Sheeran as our headliner, Lisa since she is originally Thai, and Bilkinn, a popular local artist. The collaboration was seamless. Ideas flowed freely, people built on each other’s suggestions, and when we hit obstacles like scheduling conflicts due to time zones, we were quickly able to work around it. I walked away thinking we’d just gotten lucky with a good group of people.
Then, a few days later, came the program’s OPEC simulation with the exact same team, and everything changed. We were assigned to represent oil-producing countries, trying to coordinate production levels to maximize profits. The setup was deceptively simple: keep production low and prices high so everyone wins. We could send brief messages to other teams, but we couldn’t see what anyone was actually producing until the results came in each round.
We started off with confidence and good intentions. We communicated our production plans clearly, kept our output at reasonable levels, and trusted other countries to do the same. But round after round, as our profits tanked while other countries clearly overproduced, something both fascinating and disturbing began happening within our group. The exact same people who had been freely sharing strategies and ideas — suddenly became hesitant. The fear of suggesting the wrong approach, the one that might cost us millions in fake revenue, started paralyzing our decision-making. Even though we were the same four students who had worked together brilliantly a couple of days earlier, the social risk of looking foolish began to override our logical thinking. More telling was how our team chemistry completely shifted. People who had been laughing and building off each other’s ideas during the Thailand project were now sitting back, waiting for someone else to speak first, or agreeing with strategies they might have had doubts about.
Contributing Your Best Thinking
After the program ended, I dove into Dr. Amy Edmondson’s The Fearless Organization. Reading her research, I understood even better what had happened. Our team during the concert project hadn’t just gotten lucky, we’d accidentally created psychological safety from the start. People genuinely believed they could contribute ideas, ask questions, and even make mistakes without being judged or punished.
The OPEC simulation had eroded that safety with the exact same people. The competitive environment, the fear of economic consequences (even fake ones), and the inability to trust other people had created exactly the conditions where people retreat rather than engage. I realized that I’d seen these patterns in my high school, from newer club members who just sit and watch because they’re too scared to take action, and I’d read about corporate levels where employees stay silent about obvious problems rather than risk challenging their managers.
The difference between high-performing teams and struggling ones often isn’t talent, resources, or even strategy. It’s whether people feel safe enough to contribute their best thinking. This insight is now the foundation of a student leadership course I’m developing to teach at my school – carrying forward the lessons I learned during my two weeks online with Wharton Global Youth.
The principle of psychological safety I initially dismissed as corporate fluff turned out to be one of the most practically powerful ideas I encountered at Wharton. Now I just need to figure out how to help other future student leaders discover it beyond the dynamic of fake oil crises.
Hero Image: Zacqueline Baldwin, Unsplash