We came across a great piece by Jon Barnes, coach and founder of Pala, explaining the difference between cultural comfort and safety. They’re not the same thing, and he argues many workplaces have actually confused the two.
The result? It’s costing them more than they realize.
Most employees, particularly those in executive and professional roles, want to feel good. That means showing up for work, where the payoff isn’t just the salary and benefits but a feeling of satisfaction and wider contribution.
But feeling good at work doesn’t necessarily mean feeling comfortable all the time.
Jon makes a simple point. It’s easy for some workplaces to quietly slip into mistaking comfort for safety. They set out to build psychological safety and end up constructing a kind of cosiness instead. The result is a culture where confrontation is avoided, feedback can lapse into something vague and meaningless, and nobody wants to be the one to make anyone else feel awkward or uncomfortable.
This pattern often sounds (and looks) like caring, but clearly it’s not.
The role of controlled amounts of stress
He points to a concept from biology called hormesis, the idea that a controlled amount of stress makes an organism stronger, not weaker. Muscles grow because they’re placed under more resistance than they’re used to. Immune systems build defences by encountering small threats, not none at all. His argument is that teams work the same way. A small amount of friction is the element that builds strength, not the thing that breaks it.
Jon lays this out as three zones. One is an unsafe space, where the system breaks under too much stress. Another is a comfortable space, where nothing happens because nothing is asked of anyone. In between the two is the richest space, and the one that can produce the highest possible contribution, where people feel safe but not entirely at ease.
That middle zone (the growth zone) is where the real work happens, and results change for the better.
Most cultures are optimized for the wrong zone
And this is an angle we keep coming back to. A lot of well-meaning culture work, including surveys, wellness perks and feedback norms, ends up optimizing for comfort by default because comfort is easier to build. Nobody complains about a comfortable team. They’re not creating any management issues or thorny challenges. On the surface, everything looks fine; tension-free in fact!
But psychological safety was never meant to mean the absence of friction. Amy Edmondson’s original research (Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams 1999), and later Google’s Project Aristotle study on what makes teams effective, both pointed to something closer to Barnes’ growth zone. The teams that performed best weren’t the ones avoiding hard conversations. Quite the opposite. They were teams where people felt secure enough to embrace difficult conversations.
What this means for leaders
If your team never disagrees, never pushes back, never has an uncomfortable conversation inside the meeting (instead of somewhere else), that’s worth closer scrutiny.
In our experience, based on working with clients globally for over 22 years, building the growth zone on purpose relies on more than a policy change or a new company value. It calls for moments where people practice the muscle of being seen, contributing something that might get pushback, and knowing they have permission to do so, without criticism.
Practice is the key here. And encouraging this behavior in lower-stakes situations means it’s embedded enough to naturally emerge when the stakes are a lot higher too.
The Connected Culture take
Comfortable teams feel good in the moment but can easily stall over time. Truly safe teams feel more exposed sometimes, but they grow because of it. If your culture work is only ever making people feel better, you’re missing a trick.
What the data shows
Google’s own research into team effectiveness, widely known as Project Aristotle, found psychological safety to be the single biggest factor separating high-performing teams from the rest, ahead of who was even on the team. Now that’s fascinating!
A question worth sitting with
Have you ever worked on a team that was too comfortable? What happened along the way?
We work with leaders whose aim is to build strong, bonded, productive, innovative teams that demonstrate the right kind of muscle, safely, deliberately, and together.
If something here resonated, we’re open to a conversation.
Thanks for your company today,
The SongDivision Team
