# Building psychological safety in virtual teams

- **Episode:** [167](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/167.md) (2025-01-30)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** psychological safety, virtual teams, team culture
- **Time:** 14:56–16:54 (start 896s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/167?t=896](https://truthliesandwork.com/167?t=896)

---

[14:56] Tony Jamous: First, you create a, we create a culture centered on, on the core human needs, which is you have to have psychological safety at work where people are not afraid of being who they are. And you do that by You as a leader start having non-reactions to what's happening in the work, right? So you want to develop ability to be non-reactive to bad news, to manage yourself as a leader so people are not afraid of you as you work with them. So you create this, you focus on human needs starting with psychological safety and You create an environment where people feel trusted. You know what needs to happen for these people to feel trusted? So you don't micromanage them, you don't track their hours, you give them, you tell them, you get them to realize that you trust results, not the inputs
[16:06] midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge): Yeah
[16:08] Tony Jamous: And you have to really grow as a leader to be able to let go. That actually, it pushes you to be a better leader because you have to be, you have to create a structure of management for them to be successful in it. What are their goals? Expectation from them. You need to facilitate their collaboration across the company. So this is how you do it. This is some of the things we've done at Oyster
[16:35] Al Elliott: Let's get on to the leadership thing because I think this is a big— I mean, I've heard you talk and I've read some of the stuff you've written on leadership quite a lot. Is there a particular type of leader who is better at managing remote employees? Are there certain skills they might have?