In a highly popular Tedx video, Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business professor, talks through her research on the impact of high standards and psychological safety in teams. She discovered that when high levels of psychological safety and high standards collide it leads to high performance.
Her theory has been the genesis for these four zones of team performance based on work I have done with teams over the years. Except in my work, I found that accountability was a better term for organisations. After all, accountability includes high standards, working safely, getting work on time and to budget. These zones are unpacked in more detail in my book, TRUSTED TO THRIVE: How leaders create connected and accountable teams. (download a free chapter here).
While these two concepts are often discussed separately, they are actually co-dependent halves of a high-performance culture. Think of them as the "fuel" and the "steering wheel" of a vehicle.
Psychological safety is the fuel; it gives people the confidence to speak up, admit a mistake, or trial a risky new idea without fear of retribution. However, safety without a destination leads to the "Abatement Zone," where people are happy but stagnant. This is where accountability comes in. Accountability provides the steering and the discipline, ensuring that the team’s energy is harnessed toward hitting budgets and deadlines.
For leaders, this balance is critical because one cannot truly function without the other:
Safety without Accountability creates an environment where there are no consequences for poor performance.
Accountability without Safety creates a culture of fear (the "Anxiety Zone") where people hide mistakes to avoid being blamed.
Ultimately, both psychological safety and accountability are modelled and managed by the team leader. How a leader models and rewards behaviour creates the culture in which a team operates.
Let me step you through the model above.
This occurs when a team leader creates stretch goals and challenges direct reports to improve and strongly believes they can achieve. A lot of leaders approve small incremental improvements to goals. But a leader in this zone treats employees like athletes pushing them to continually improve – breaking their best records, not by a few degrees but through dramatic improvement.
Employees work in a supportive environment where they work together to break their records every day. This only works when the leader leads by example, works hard to ensure they are trusted by the team and encourages team members to trust one another. It's when a leader is carefully works on both:
The Cohesion Side (The Foundation): This is about Psychological Safety. It involves building deep trust, practicing active listening, and ensuring every voice is heard. Without this, a team cannot survive the pressure of high standards; they will crack under the weight of accountability.
The Performance Side (The Momentum): This is about Accountability. It involves setting clear expectations, providing honest feedback, and holding people to their promises. This drive ensures that the team’s cohesion is channeled into meaningful results rather than just "feeling good."
Teams in this zone are high-performing and can often be lauded throughout an organisation for their work ethic and focus on results. But they are psychologically damaging environments as the focus is on outputs, rather than people.
Employees are worked hard, criticised profusely and have little support from their leader or teammates. Typically, it’s a competitive environment where staff are pitted against each other due to the false belief that this will make them do better work. Stress and burnout are major issues in this zone. Employees often complain about ‘feeling bashed up’ when they present ideas at meetings. This zone is common in high pressure environments such as IT, legal, finance and medical.
Interestingly, some purpose-driven organisations can often be found here because they reward behaviours that are aligned to the purpose. However, they often confuse rewarding achieving purposeful outcomes as being a success indicator, rather than the right behaviours to achieve them. Meaning that toxic behaviours can run rampant as they run under the guise of purpose, therefore masking the real impact to staff wellbeing.
In this zone, leaders are often uncomfortable improving themselves and subsequently pulling people up for poor performance. This comfortable and mind-numbingly boring (but happy) place is when leaders create psychological safety, but don’t hold their employees accountable for excellence.
This is the confusing employee engagement result that points to high employee engagement in a team, despite poor productivity (and other teams totally frustrated with their lack of performance). In this environment, employees have no incentive to stretch themselves, be proactive or creative.
Performance here is abating. Employees believe they’re doing a good job but have no desire to improve or even think differently. Usually leaders in this zone are the ones stressed out (usually when the CEO puts pressure on them to improve), as team members will escalate problems to their boss to solve, only work 9-5pm and lack the motivation to move beyond their task list.
It would seem that working in a comfort zone is a great place. But it’s where ideas go to die, people coast, problems don’t get solved and where groupthink reigns supreme. Interestingly, trust is also low in this team because team members can’t rely on each other to do a good job (but tend to not get upset by it, unless they are young or ambitious).
When leaders create low psychological safety and low accountability, you will often find that employees are in conflict. This can be one of the riskiest teams to work in which results in employees not working too hard. Either because they are afraid of doing the wrong thing or they are too exhausted and burnt out.
This is the result of authoritative, emotionally volatile leaders that are closed off to their direct reports who unwittingly create a psychologically unsafe team culture. This zone is incredibly low in trust and team cohesion.
Getting teams into the Achievement Zone requires leaders who possess the dual skill of creating a mentally healthy, supportive environment while simultaneously pushing people out of their comfort zones. It’s a delicate balance: if you focus only on cohesion, you risk a "polite but passive" culture. If you focus only on performance, you risk burnout and turnover.
The transition isn't easy. It requires leaders to consciously evolve, prioritising their interpersonal and intrapersonal skills and allowing their own technical skills to take a backseat. By stepping back from being the "expert," a leader allows others to shine. This transition is built on a foundation of self-awareness and trust—creating a space where employees trust the leader to do the right thing and, crucially, trust each other to deliver.
In the end, great leadership isn't about choosing between being "kind" or being "tough." It’s about being clear.
I choose to focus on accountability rather than just "high standards" because standards can often feel like a static bar set by a boss. Accountability, however, is active and inclusive. It implies a shared ownership where every team member is responsible for the outcome. When you combine this collective responsibility with psychological safety, you create a culture where people don’t just "follow rules"—they take pride in their contribution.
When you are clear that you have your team’s back (Safety) and clear that everyone owns the result (Accountability), you move beyond mere management. You create a culture where high performance is no longer a demand, but a natural byproduct of a trusted, connected team.
If you want to learn more about how to get into the Achievement Zone, you'll find lots of tips in the book TRUSTED to THRIVE: How Leaders Create Accountable and Connected Teams.