On my Dad, Dying and Psychological Safety
Let's flash back to a place that is very emotionally difficult for me: one year ago yesterday, October 7, 2025.
I was running a day of leadership workshops when, right before we kicked off, a message from my mom came through.
"Are you in a meeting?"
I assumed she needed help with some sort of admin task, so I replied, "I will be offline for the next few hours, reach out to Jess if you need something."
Her reply: "Your father is headed to the hospital. Robert called an ambulance as he was not comfortable with Dad's physical state."
Jessica is my older sister. Robert (not his real name) had been my dad's Personal Support Worker for several years. He knew my dad well and had quietly observed his slow decline from Huntington's Disease.
My dad didn't often go to the hospital, but I wasn't yet concerned. He regularly had episodes of weakness whenever he caught a little bug, and as soon as he recovered, his magical spark (and his appetite) would come back just as strong. With the seasons changing, I assumed this was more of the same. I said I'd come by after work to hang out with him and my mom.
By then, my dad had withered quite a bit. He was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease in October of 2011. It's often called the slow goodbye, and for us, that was both a gift and a curse.
Now, I have to pause and add something crucial. Talking about my dad's death, and him dying, often feels impossible. Important, but nearly impossible. And for anyone who has lost a family member to Huntington's Disease, it gets worse: every child of an affected parent has a 50% chance of inheriting the gene. For my sister and me, that's a 1 in 2 chance each of developing the devastatingly cruel neurodegeneration we just watched destroy our father for 14 years. For my mom, it means she could lose one or both of her daughters to this neurological nightmare.
The three of us try not to go down that path, but it's very real, and I would imagine that all affected families would carry it subconsciously through their grief.
Back to the ICU. When I arrived at the hospital later that day, I found my dad in an ICU room, small and vulnerable, wrapped in a blanket like a child. He looked like he was at death's door. He was napping peacefully, but he felt me enter the room and opened his eyes.
"Hi Rach."
My dad was never a man of few words, but that changed with the disease.
The only thing worse than processing the death of your favourite person is watching them watch you process it. That is what destroyed me.
In every way, I am my father's daughter, a fact I'm most proud of in this lifetime. I enjoy life, I cherish time with my favourite people, and from a young age I've held the perspective that I must live a life that feels good for me. Because as my dad always said, "It's your life."
That moment lives forever in my body: having to show my dad how terrified I was that he could die. I decided to be raw like him, a man who felt his feelings candidly and then moved on. I hugged him, silently sobbing in his arms, literally choking out the 3 sentences he knew all too well: "I am so glad you are my dad. I am so proud of the person you are. I love you more than the whole new world."
We always told each other how we felt. Throughout the nine years I lived across the country in British Columbia, I wrote cards professing my love for my parents at every holiday. My mom would always joke, "You had your father crying again this morning." We were never a perfect family (who is?), but we have always been close, communicative, and loving. As my dad ended up dying just one month later, that deep knowing would prove to be so beautiful.
When I was little, my dad and I watched Aladdin together. I'd snuggle into his lap in his big cozy chair and we would say, "I love you more than the whole new world." He always made me feel safe to be loved and safe to be me, a gift that extended to everyone in his orbit.
That brings me to today's focal point: you are the best version of yourself when people allow you to be yourself, fully.
When you constantly feel critiqued, your nervous system can stay on high alert. When you feel accepted for who you are, as my dad made everyone around him feel, you create the conditions for clearer thinking, better collaboration, and resilience.
So - how does this translate into business & leadership?
My dad didn't need a framework to do what he did. He accepted people as they were, he was candid about his own feelings, and he made it safe for the people around him to be the same. In my experience, that is what great leadership looks like. The KPIs and strategy come second.
And - what exactly is psychological safety in the workplace?
The concept is generally traced to Carl Rogers' 1954 work on creativity, which described it as a condition in which an individual feels unconditional worth, accepted without conditions, in an environment deliberately free of external evaluation (Rogers, 1954). (AKA, being raised by Tomm Stopard.)
Harvard Business School Professor Amy C. Edmondson took it a step further in the 90s, isolating the concept of team psychological safety. In her 1999 paper, "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams", she defined it as "a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking" (Edmondson, 1999, p. 350).
She separated this from trust, which she defined, drawing on Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) and Robinson (1996), as "the expectation that others' future actions will be favorable to one's interests, such that one is willing to be vulnerable to those actions" (as cited in Edmondson, 1999, p. 354). You might trust your manager, and still remain cautious at the idea of saying the wrong thing in front of the team.
Edmondson tested eight hypotheses (listed in the order they appear in the paper). 6 of 8 received support, including the central relationship between psychological safety and team learning behaviour:
Learning behaviour in teams is positively associated with team performance.
Team psychological safety is positively associated with learning behaviour in organizational work teams.
Team learning behaviour mediates between team psychological safety and team performance.
Team efficacy is positively associated with team learning behaviour.
Team efficacy is positively associated with team learning behaviour, controlling for the effects of team psychological safety. (Mixed support)
Team leader coaching and context support are positively associated with team psychological safety.
Team psychological safety mediates between team leader coaching and context support and team learning behaviour.
Team efficacy mediates between team leader coaching and context support and team learning behaviour. (Not supported)
The mixed result on number 5 is the one I find most interesting. It suggests a real difference between "I believe we are good at our jobs" and "I feel comfortable admitting when I'm wrong." A team can have confidence in its ability to perform and still lack the safety to question how it's performing.
Edmondson closes the paper with a warning that feels even more relevant today. As work gets faster and less certain, she argues, teams become a key source of psychological safety for individuals, and the need to "ask questions, seek help, and tolerate mistakes in the face of uncertainty" while colleagues watch is more common now than when earlier team studies were done (Edmondson, 1999, p. 380).
In layman's terms: psychological safety was consistently related to learning behaviour, team efficacy was not, and learning behaviour was related to team performance.
This is why the Foresight leadership series I developed is so interesting, and so important. It isn't enough for a team to believe they're capable. People also need to feel they can say the uncomfortable thing: question a decision, admit they're not sure, challenge someone's thinking, or say, "I think we might be getting this wrong." This is exactly what we will be practicing - with structure and support - in the program.
That's the work of surfacing things. Because nothing really changes until people feel safe enough to say what's actually happening.
I was raised in that environment, and I will do anything to teach people to lead the way my dad did. He was a natural leader in life.
References
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Rogers, C. R. (1954). Toward a theory of creativity. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 11(4), 249-260.