The Fifth Stage: Why the Best Teams Need More Than Safety
Psychological safety gets teams to functional. It does not get them to extraordinary. Drawing on a Tour de France role reversal, Beethoven's late quartets, and three decades of leadership work, Bernhard Kerres argues that the best teams add a fifth stage: the collective capacity to hold discomfort together.
Published 2026-07-19 by Bernhard Kerres
On July 19, 2023, on the Queen Stage of the Tour de France, Ben O'Connor of AG2R Citroen destroyed himself on the Col de la Loze. Not for his own glory. For his teammate Felix Gall.
O'Connor had started the Tour as team leader. But two difficult weeks in, the team faced an uncomfortable truth: the designated captain was not the strongest rider. Gall was. So they reversed roles. O'Connor buried himself at the front to set up Gall, who attacked solo with 13 kilometers to go and rode to the biggest win of his career.
Every team in the Tour had a plan. What AG2R had was rarer: the collective capacity to hold discomfort together, to name a failure, reverse a hierarchy, and sacrifice individual ambition under extreme pressure. That is not what we usually mean by psychological safety. And it is what separates high-performing teams from the rest.
Comfort is not safety
Over the past decade, psychological safety has become the defining concept in team performance. Amy Edmondson showed that the best teams let members take interpersonal risks without fear. Timothy Clark built this into four stages: inclusion, learner, contributor, and challenger safety.
The work is correct. But in practice it has been misread. Psychological safety has quietly become synonymous with comfort: pleasant offices, predictable agendas, conflict-avoidance norms. A team can sit in a well-appointed boardroom, everyone polite, and never raise the issue everyone knows exists. The room feels safe. It is not. The safety is environmental, not relational.
The four zones
Separate those two dimensions and four zones appear:
- Danger Zone (low relational, low environmental): toxic culture meets structural dysfunction.
- Pseudo Safety (low relational, high environmental): comfortable but untrusting. The environment masks the absence of real safety.
- Cruising Zone (high relational, high environmental): Clark's four stages fully realized. Right for most work.
- Growth Zone (high relational, low environmental): the props are removed, and the team holds discomfort on the strength of its bonds alone.
The fifth stage
That last zone is the fifth stage, what I call safe discomfort. It is not the permission to challenge others; that is Clark's Stage Four. It is the collective capacity to sit with unresolved tension and painful truths without fleeing into premature resolution or politeness.
Not every team needs it. For daily operations, the Cruising Zone is exactly where you want to be. But when the stakes are extraordinary, a pivot, a crisis, a fundamental strategic question, the Cruising Zone is not enough. The fifth stage is a capacity leaders activate deliberately, like a cycling team choosing the moment to attack.
Knowing when to make that shift, and how to build the relational foundation that makes it survivable, is where the real work begins.
The full essay covers the three practices leaders use to develop and activate the fifth stage, the one valid path into the Growth Zone, and why most transformations fail when leaders skip it.