What is Psychological Safety?

Are you aiming to build a team that feels safe enough to voice their doubts and concerns?

Are you aiming to build an inclusive culture?

Are you aiming for healthy, sustainable performance of your people where ‘wellbeing’ is not just lip service?

Psychological safety sits at the heart of all of these.

Research Foundations

The focus on Psychological Safety At Work has been building since Dr Amy Edmondson’s¹ leading work in the subject which kicked off way back in 1999. Edmondson was the first to coin the phrase ‘Psychological Safety’, Edmondson describes it as:

An environment where people believe that candour is welcome.

Amy Edmondson, 1999

Within a team, it’s a shared belief that it’s ok to challenge, show up as not knowing, be vulnerable, take risks, express ideas, voice concerns, admit mistakes, all without the fear of negative consequences. As Edmondson puts it, this needs to be framed as an environment where learning can happen; where ‘open, confronting conversations can happen.’

The Resilience Dynamic’s foremost research model, the Resilience Dynamic®, can be interpreted as a continuum build towards psychological safety. Resilience is the ability to successfully absorb change. Those at Breakthrough resilience are safe in their own skin, no matter what’s going on. They can count on their own resourcefulness to handle anything that gets thrown at them. That might mean digging in, it might mean pivoting, it might mean leaning wholly on others, it might mean accepting vulnerability. All of that and more.

By continually attending to resilience, you contribute more and more to psychological safety. This is true for individuals, teams, and whole organisations.

The Resilience Dynamic has been investigating the ‘layering’ required to build resilience in organisations. Resilience is a critical capability, especially in the BANI world in which we now operate. BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible), the successor descriptor after VUCA, illustrates the human reaction to the complexity and overload that exists today. Shifting from this requires an integrated approach to building resilience. Read more in our paper with partner LHH, Managing Burnout in a BANI world.

Building psychological safety across different organisational communities builds a web of psychological safety that in turn creates deep-rooted belonging. We use our Healthy, High Performance framework to describe the layers needed:

Why Is Psychological Safety So Important?

There are 3 fundamental reasons for investing in psychological safety.

(1) Psychological safety is the bedrock of trust.

• Trust fosters engagement. And engagement drives productivity.

(2) Psychological safety is the top factor in driving team effectiveness².

• Teams are where your work is taking place right now.

(3) Lastly, psychological safety enables an organisation to eliminate preventable business failures.

• In the middle of the very understandable focus on Wellbeing caused by the rising risk of burnout and mental health issues, this factor has been somewhat forgotten. Yet is it so critical – you need your staff to speak up before issues arise. In high-risk environments such as Health, Energy, Construction, Pharmaceuticals, Chemicals, Transportation, and many more where Health and Safety is a board level conversation, psychological safety is paramount. How else will you know if your people don’t believe in the safety or effectiveness of the product or service you are building?

Psychological Safety and Accountability

Edmondson talks of making good choices around both standards for accountability together with building real psychological safety. Her matrix including the classification of each ‘zone’ is very thought provoking:

If you only invest in making people feel safe without accountability for high standards, you don’t achieve high performance. On the other hand, if you invest in only driving performance without psychological safety, you achieve anxiety. Anxiety leads not only to poor performance in the long run, but also induces mental health issues with its long-term costs of talent drain and burnout.

The Resilience Dynamic works with many organisations who find themselves shocked that they have ended up in this Anxiety Zone. With the BANI world of complexity, many organisations feeling under pressure end up creating a busy-busy-busy or try-try-try culture. They lose sight of what they are trying to achieve, or destroy their capacity for learning about what is actually working and what is not. The result is driving for a notional performance, often not necessarily creating actual positive impact. If people do not feel safe, this drive creates a high stress, under-achieving environment which leads to both mental health and burnout issues, plus dissatisfaction. It isn’t what leaders set out to create, but they have fallen into it and now feel terribly stuck.

It’s a really tricky situation to dislodge from. Leaders need to halt the toxicity of this by being real, shifting to actively listening, and proactively rebuilding psychological safety.

Psychological Safety and Teams

Google’s Aristotle Project² of 2014 which researched how to foster team effectiveness and studied hundreds of groups through the lens of ‘group norms’, found that the ‘right’ norms could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the ‘wrong’ norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright. The group norming requirements? Psychological safety. It is the number 1 factor in driving team effectiveness.

The Resilience Dynamic research extends this. We know that the highest performing teams across the long term have resilience built in at the bricks of how they operate.

Signs of Psychological Safety

Adam Grant’s Think Again³ helpfully outlined signs to spot for when you have or don’t have psychological safety in your organisation:

If you are considering your own team or your own organisation, which column is singing out to you? If you are lacking in psychological safety, how can you and your team commit to shifting this today? If you have a mixed bag, how can you optimise more of what is working, and eliminate the barriers?

Psychological safety isn’t present automatically in teams; you need to build it. What’s more, you need to attend to it daily – whilst it may take time to build, it is so easily and quickly destroyed.

The Leadership Principles of Building Psychological Safety

Amy Edmondson talks of three leadership principles to build psychological safety:

(1) Setting the Stage

• This is about culturally setting up activity, building the future as the space of Learning. Everything that is new carries risk. To foster accelerated success, learning fast and learning openly is key.

(2) Invite Participation Proactively

• This is about creating a structure within your processes and hierarchy to enable open reflection and learning conversations as routine. Ask good questions. And do all this in your day to day, every day. It includes acknowledging your own fallibilities and role modelling curiosity.

(3) Respond Proactively

• You need to listen and respond appropriately to the concerns and ideas that rise from these learning conversations. If you ignore them or favour the ideas from certain quarters within the organisation, you undermine the learning. People will distrust and will become closed.

Build Psychological Safety through Checkin Checkout

The Resilience Dynamic has the privilege and pleasure to work with organisations worldwide on how to foster resilience. Checkin Checkout, or CICO for short, is our simplest service in unlocking that first layer towards healthy, high performance, and it is all about fostering psychological safety across employee communities.

CICO was borne out of large programme work where we work across time with clients on how to foster organisational resilience, enabling adaptability and wellbeing across all employee groups. Working with Google during 2022-2023, we realised through their measurement of the impact, how amazing Checkin Checkout is. We launched it as a separate service in 2023. The service enables psychological safety in groups and teams in 4 weeks, with the simplest of processes.

It’s one of those moments when we were able to nail something that really matters in a very simple way, through our research and experience. Google experienced a 54% rise in abilities to listen to one another, provide supportive questions, boost their own personal resilience and help boost that of others. These are the four core practices that sit behind CICO, all being fostered via the Resilience River©.

Conclusion

When employees feel unsafe, you risk both their mental health, and you increase the risk of quality and other issues not being dealt with.

When employees feel safe, you experience healthy, high performance at a collective level, delivering ongoing loyalty, engagement, and productivity.

Building psychological safety is a no brainer. Fostering it takes specific attention. But it doesn’t mean boiling the ocean; there are simple ways to achieve this, by giving time and space in the working day for people to connect in for real.

What will you do to foster psychological safety in your team?

References:

1. Amy Edmondson, Psychological Safety: https://amycedmondson.com/psychological-safety/
2. Understanding Team Effectiveness via Google re:Work: https://rework.withgoogle.com/jp/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness#introduction
3. Adam Grant, Twitter, Excerpt from ‘Think Again’ (2021): https://twitter.com/AdamMGrant/status/1360224911265058816