You Can’t Build Agility on Fear: Why Social Support may be the key to building the agile culture your organization needs to succeed in the “New Ab-Normal.”
Posted Jul 22, 2026 by Rick
In a volatile business environment, the greatest risk may not be that employees make mistakes. The greater risk may be that they are afraid to surface them. When people do not feel safe to question assumptions, share concerns, admit mistakes, or test new ideas, organizations lose the very signals they need to adapt.
Over the last few issues of this newsletter, I’ve been addressing organizational agility—the ability of an organization’s workforce to respond nimbly to uncertainty and change. In doing so, I’ve discussed AHC’s Six Traits of Agile Organizations. This month, we wrap that series by focusing on the last of the Six Traits: Social Support.
Why Social Support Matters Now
Social Support is defined as “the perceived availability of people whom the individual trusts and who make one feel cared for and valued as a person.” In practical leadership terms, Social Support is one of the cultural conditions that enables psychological safety: the shared belief that people can speak up, ask for help, challenge the status quo, and admit mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation.
If you’ve ever been part of a great team—at work, in sports, or in any high-pressure setting—you know what this feels like. You trust the people around you. You can rely on them in tough moments. You can offer a different point of view without being labeled difficult. You can say, “I may be wrong, but here is what I’m seeing.”
The Business Case: Silence Is Expensive
Research on psychological safety has consistently linked this kind of environment to learning and performance. Amy Edmondson’s foundational work defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, and found that psychological safety supports learning behavior, which in turn contributes to team performance.
Google’s Project Aristotle reached a similar conclusion: team effectiveness depends less on simply assembling talented people and more on how team members interact. Psychological safety emerged as the most important dynamic in effective teams because it creates the conditions for people to take risks, ask questions, admit errors, and offer new ideas.
Our Organizational Change Model (shown above) describes resilient organizational response to change as an equation -- organizational factors, PLUS individual traits -- create either a MORE or LESS resilient response to change. In other words -- your environment (your culture) is critically important to how folks can find opportunity in change.
For executives, this is not a “soft” issue. It is an operating issue. When employees stay silent, leaders lose visibility into customer problems, process breakdowns, ethical risks, safety concerns, and emerging opportunities. In fast-changing markets, silence is not neutral—it is costly.
Leadership Sets the Signal
Great teams win. Great leaders shape the culture that allows great teams to emerge. That culture does not reward reckless failure; it rewards disciplined experimentation, honest learning, and the courage to surface what is not working early enough to do something about it.
Organizations need a new style of leadership to survive—and thrive—in the current New Ab-Normal. Agile workplace cultures cope more effectively with uncertainty because people are not protecting the status quo out of fear. They are encouraged to challenge it in service of better outcomes.
McKinsey has noted that when employees feel comfortable asking for help, sharing suggestions, and challenging the status quo without fear of negative social consequences, organizations are more likely to innovate quickly, benefit from diverse perspectives, and adapt well to change. Gallup’s recent workplace research also reinforces the economic stakes: low employee engagement continues to carry a major productivity cost, and managers are under increasing pressure as organizations navigate change.
From Insight to Measurement
This fall, we will be piloting a new Organizational Agility Index, which will allow organizations to measure culture through the Six Traits and assess current levels of cultural agility from the C-Suite to the front line. The goal is simple: help leaders see where agility is strong, where it is constrained, and where focused action can create the greatest lift.
The next step for leaders in this New Ab-Normal is to make organizational agility measurable. AHC’s Organizational Agility Index will help leaders identify where Social Support is enabling speed, learning, and innovation—and where fear, silence, or hesitation may be slowing the organization down. If you want a more agile organization, start by finding out whether your people feel safe enough to help you build one.