As organizations scale, communication overload, loss of shared context, and trust gaps emerge, Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg mentioned at Dev Summit Munich. Trust must be built team by team; it can’t be replicated. Trust is interpersonal, while psychological safety is among people and fuels learning. Leaders must deliberately design structures, rituals, and metrics that reward transparency and cohesion at scale.
With scaling organizations come a lot of challenges, De Jong Schouwenburg said. We get communication overload, there’s a loss of shared context, and trust is a problem, she explained:
You communicate well with 12 people. You know each other. It doesn’t happen with 500. Humans have cognitive limits; you can’t really scale humans like you scale systems.
Trust doesn’t replicate automatically. Just because you have high trust in your existing teams, when you build another team just like it, it won’t automatically have high trust and high psychological safety, De Jong Schouwenburg said:
As teams scale, you can’t copy-paste trust from one group to another. Each new team has to rebuild it; it has to grow.
Although trust and psychological safety are closely linked, they are not the same; and understanding the distinction helps teams scale more effectively, De Jong Schouwenburg explained:
- Trust is between people; psychological safety is among people.
- Trust is earned; psychological safety is enabled.
- Trust supports individuals; psychological safety supports innovation, learning, and collaboration across groups.
We want people to have trust and psychological safety, and need them to feel free and comfortable and be rewarded for being honest and transparent, De Jong Schouwenburg said. She suggested fostering a system that rewards transparency and reliability instead of heroics and secrecy.
Building trust and psychological safety at scale isn’t accidental, but it’s architectural. You can architect environments that create psychological safety from day one, De Jong Schouwenburg said. It requires consistent behaviors, deliberate systems, and environments where people feel both connected and coherent across teams.
Companies can benefit from having a strong sense of connection and a shared purpose across teams. The cohesion that we normally find in one team, we want to get across teams, distribute it, De Jong Schouwenburg explained:
Things you can do are retrospectives, or virtual coffees if it’s hard to get together physically. Global all-hands with shared storytelling. Rotating meeting facilitators across regions, and cross-site pair programming or demos.
Leadership really is very important in this, De Jong Schouwenburg said. You need to make sure that the social system is reliable when stress hits. She suggested monitoring human metrics, like how long decisions take, how often teams speak openly in retrospectives, and how much cultural drift there is between sites or functions, she concluded.
InfoQ interviewed Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg about trust and psychological safety.
InfoQ: How do trust and psychological safety differ?
Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg: Trust is personal and directional. It’s my belief about you. I trust that you will follow through, communicate honestly, or support me when things get tough.
Psychological safety is collective and environmental. It’s our belief about this group. Psychological safety means the team climate supports speaking up, asking questions, sharing ideas, and acknowledging mistakes without fear of humiliation or retaliation. It’s about the social norms of the system, not any single relationship.
Trust builds through repeated interactions like shared experiences, reliability, and consistency. In small teams that work together longer, this develops more naturally because people have time to form individual relationships. Face-to-face time and focusing on strengthening the relationships before talking about work helps to increase this.
InfoQ: How can organizations increase trust and psychological safety?
De Jong Schouwenburg: If people believe they need to hide uncertainty, overwork silently, or rescue projects through last-minute heroics, trust erodes.
Instead, reinforce:
- Asking early questions
- Making asking for help and providing help normal rather than a nuisance
- Sharing unknowns
- Predictable follow-through
- Discussing risks before they become fires
A system that rewards honesty creates both trust and collective intelligence.
You can build fast psychological safety through norms, not familiarity. You can’t scale personal trust quickly, but you can scale psychological safety by setting clear expectations:
- “It’s okay to ask for help.”
- “We critique ideas, not people.”
- “Mistakes are data.”
- “Everyone contributes, especially the quiet voices.”
You can also use meeting strategies to encourage equal sharing of speaking time (for example, everyone gets one minute speaking time to express their ideas or opinions while the others listen in silence). These norms create immediate safety even before relationships fully form.
