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Psychological safety IPSOS Mori training covers:

• Learn a definition of psychological safety

• Identify what perceived barriers blended working may bring

• Explore ways to build psychological safety in all your interactions

• Identify the gap between the 'official culture' and the 'perceived culture'

• Understand the Trust Equation, breaking down each component so you can identify your own strengths and areas for development

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Amend this to be a manager-employee trust manual

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The Business of Learning, Episode 42: Psychological Safety in Learning (trainingindustry.com)

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The Business of Learning, Episode 42: Psychological Safety in Learning

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Renowned researcher Dr. Amy Edmondson talks about how to build psychological safety in learning programs in this episode of The Business of Learning.

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Blog by Centrepoint's PIE Lead - this one specifically about psychological safety and the role of relationships. 

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Blog by Centrepoint's PIE Lead - this one specifically about psychological safety and the role of relationships. 

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This is an amazing blog that I highly recommend following for further understanding of PIE and what it means for our work. This particular section talks about 'relational security' and how we can create that with the people we work with. I think it is relevant across all of SHP too.

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'Building psychological safety and managing risk through 'relationships' in a Psychologically...

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17.09.2021: As I write this week's PIE blog, as the lead for Psychologically Informed Environments (IE), at the national youth homeless charity; Centrepoint, I am reflecting on a slightly unusual working week where I took a few hours off mid-week to celebrate my birthday with family and friends.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pelK1ukvJWI

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The Importance Of Trust with Grahame Broadbelt

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Tell your story (ground rule that each person has the right to control how much is revealed and how deep to go)

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I have used these group activities to increase psychological safety and increase safety awareness for many years.

How can a team leader, safety professional, or GM contribute to the level of psychological safety on their team or in their facility? Much has been published on how psychological safety is important to organizational innovation, trust and collaboration, but not so much on how to create it. This article focuses on how to promote these states through the use of personal story telling and connection. The methods described to create psychological safety are simple and direct.

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. It can be defined as "being able to show and employ one's self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career" (Kahn 1990). On psychologically safe teams, team members feel acceptance, mutual respect and trust.

Amy Edmonson, through psychology, and David Rock,through neuroscience, have popularized the role of psychological safety in raising the level of individual and team performance. The bottom line is that when an individual's sense of belonging is threatened fear reduces the brain's faculties. This leads to decreased awareness, emotional intelligence, and diminished decision-making capability.

It appears that the level of psychological safety is tied to the level of emotional intelligence to support and create it. These skills allow colleagues to be heard and encouraged and often bring out people's best work. Exclusion or fear of exclusion is what most frequently creates team breakdowns in trust, conflict and accountability. The resulting low trust levels translate into team members being unable to fully express opposing points of view, and to fear of speaking up or asking questions that might reveal ignorance.

It is helpful to acquire emotional intelligence skills to build psychological safety in your conversations, but creating a sense of belonging on a team requires group activities that help people feel accepted and included. Exercises that reveal emotions and feelings typically undisclosed in meetings decrease many of the defensive behaviors that typically reduce learning and mutual understanding. Conflict management and personal feedback training are helpful, but when they fail it can usually be traced back to the lack of establishing relationships with a sense of belonging among participants.

Jody Gittell's research in the healthcare and airlines industry uncovered seven dimensions of communication that support high performance and could help explain why personal story and connection are so powerful. She discovered four interpersonal dimensions for communication on high performance teams: 1) mutual respect; 2) shared goals; 3) shared knowledge; and 4) a non-blame approach to problem solving. She also identified three other dimensions that deal specifically with the quality of information exchanged in the workplace. Is it timely, at the correct frequency, and accurate? It may be that psychological safety is impacted by the way information is delivered.

Sharing your personal story reproduces Gittell's first four interpersonal dimensions. When people share their knowledge, personal struggles and victories, others connect through respect for their persistence or courage. People discover they aren't so different in their goals, and the way opens up to listening to their perspectives. The blaming lessens with the degree of mutual respect and understanding because empathy arises-that person is like me, perhaps I could have made the same mistake.

Personal Story Telling as Connectivity

Telling your story can be as short as "Telling what are you worried or excited about today," or as long as "Telling the high and low points of your life experience until now."

The power behind storytelling is its ability to stir empathy, to breakdown the barriers that typically can cause people to feel isolated and alone. When we hear someone's story, how they felt, what they are going through now we realize what we have in common, and this sense of connection ends our isolation at least temporarily. The magic can be as simple as a feeling of cordiality replacing anxiety, all the way to the discovery of an inner strength made possible by learning from the suffering and courage of others.

Levels of Sharing

The time and depth of sharing increases with each of these three levels.

Level 1: The Connector (Icebreaker). (10 minutes) I know a lot of people who hate icebreakers because they seem silly and superficial. They can be when they have little to do with the purpose of the meeting or conversation. Effectiveness also depends on the individual level of belief in the importance and purpose of connecting.

Changing the concept from icebreaker to connector changes the purpose and meaning of the activity. A useful one for executive meetings to focus participants in the present and on the agenda is to have each person share what urgent task they had to leave to attend the meeting. They could also share an accomplishment. The result is that participants have a deeper understanding of one another's work, which contributes to trust and mutual respect.

Level 2: Appreciative Inquiry. (1-2 hours) The power of empathy to create belonging was demonstrated in a workshop by Linda Quarles asking a simple question: tell me about a moment (personal or professional) when you felt a sense of belonging; what did you value about yourself in the process; what is the core value of belonging; if you had three wishes to create a sense of belonging for everyone in the workplace what would they be? In the end, participants were asked to write down their personal commitment to enable a sense of belonging for others in their personal and professional lives. New friendships were forged, contact information was exchanged, and commitments to be more present and listen with empathy were made.

Level 3: Tell Your Story. (4 hours) This activity focuses on personal revelation of feelings and emotions-sharing the events that formed your perspective on the world. It is important to set the ground rule that each person has the right to control how much is revealed and how deep to go. However, it has never failed to amaze me how much people reveal.

One example is the lifeline exercise first developed in the 1960's. It is extremely effective in helping a team establish connections that open the way for open communication. Each person individually prepares a timeline marking their highs and lows. Then they share it with the group. This works with a group of up to 12 people. Click here for the guidelines.

It is frequently used in executive retreats and I have begun using it in new employee onboarding sessions to create relationships across functional and hierarchical lines.

People share more than one might imagine and at the end of the experience express a sense of belonging and understanding that allows for conversation far above where they started. Why might this happen, and why do we tend to avoid these types of activities?

Why and How Telling Your Story Contributes to Team Growth and Personal Development

Telling your story can be transformational when there is appropriate follow up and support. It derives historically from 12-Step programs where the sharing of emotions, feelings, struggles and victories takes place in a non-judgmental environment. This experience promotes feelings of physical safety and emotional security, of being understood and unconditionally accepted.

The historical reference should not concern those who worry about bringing personal problems into the workplace. The same dynamic improves levels of trust and communication in the workplace without having to reveal one's deepest secrets or the worst things we've ever done. The thoughts and feelings that go unshared for fear of being judged can be the illness of a loved one, hardships, or an unfulfilled dream. Mistakes and problems can also go unspoken depriving the organization of valuable learning opportunities. Most cultures drive hiding them to ensure greater acceptance and belonging. Some people don't share accomplishments either, which means others can't see or recognize their talents fully.

Carl Rogers, the founder of Client-Centered Therapy, referred to this experience as "unconditional positive regard." It is the absolute, unequivocal respect for and appreciation of others, encompassing acceptance, compassion, empathy, and love. Being on the receiving end of unconditional positive regard, of feeling accepted for who one truly is, is transformational for the individual and for the organization.

A True Story: Sharing or not Sharing Feelings and Emotions Impacts Safety and Productivity

Bob, a deep-sea drilling platform supervisor was at the end of his wits at work and at home. His boss was on his case because his crew's accident rate was too high. At home his son was kicked out of school for drinking and selling drugs. All efforts to talk to him led to a slamming of the door and dead silence.

Desperate about the situation with his son he began to participate in a therapy group where people were asked to share their stories and their pain. It was the only place where he didn't have to pretend that he had it all together. Others around him even cried. He didn't because he had to hold it together for his wife and his guys at work. Keeping his emotions hidden and not talking about his problems had earned him a lot of respect in a grueling environment where freezing temperatures, constant danger and long shifts were the norm.

Yet the therapist kept insisting that Bob reveal his feelings and emotions, and eventually he was able to talk about his disappointment in his son, and how he wished they could talk again. The therapist suggested that he bring his son-maybe he would talk in the safety of the group. When his son came what Bob heard shocked him. His son told him that watching him talk openly in the group made him realize how much he wished his dad had shared who he was at home. Why had his dad been so closed off?

Fortunately they were able to reopen communication, sharing their feelings and perspectives, and the young man's life got back on track. As a result Bob began to think about applying the principle sharing your story with his crew.

So he invited the therapist to conduct some sessions with them. They got together several times over a year and the sole purpose was for team members to share what was going on with them at every level. One particularly emotional story involved witnessing the horrible death of a young co-worker that had been decapitated. At the time the man who watched it had been given a 15-minute break to recover, and get back to work. No one thought anything different should happen at the time.

Bob did the sessions to help his team members relieve stress and have a better quality of life. He didn't know that the accidents would also stop, and that the crew's production stats would soar through the roof.

Why? One crewmember described his experience. "At first we all hated it. Why would we participate in all that touchy feely stuff? After a while we began to notice that hearing each other's stories and talking about difficult experiences in our lives began to make a difference in the way things felt at work and how we worked together. One guy's father had cancer, another one had a missing daughter, and none of us knew about it."

"I think the accident rate went down because we started feeling like we could talk to each other and ask questions. There was a gauge that I didn't understand, but I never wanted to let anyone know, so I never asked any questions. Stuff like that where we could tell someone we thought it might be unsafe without being afraid that we would be considered a wimp."

So I've shared a true story with you to communicate the power of story telling. That might be enough to help you buy into the importance of providing opportunities for your team to get to know each other. There is a lot of research validating the business case for creating opportunities for members of your team to truly get to know each other. According to Uri Hasson from Princeton our brains synchronize when listening to others express emotion. So, when we tell how a story that shaped our thinking and way of life, we can have a profound effect on others.

In the last storytelling session I facilitated one person said, "I can't trust anyone I don't know. Now I feel like I know people on my team and can begin to build trust." Word of warning: once is not enough. Time for meaningful conversation where people have time to reveal what they are feeling and thinking must happen on a continuous basis. Time is always an obstacle, but when we evaluate how much time we lose when communication breaks down and people stop collaborating, is the time we invest in true communication truly optional?

Letting people get to know each other is one of the secrets of building trust and open communication. It is direct and simple. I know there are supervisors and managers that will grab this and find a time to do it in short bursts at the beginning of meetings or at their next team building session. They will experience huge improvements in collaboration. Others will say to themselves that it is fluff and too personal. It will be and can be successful to the level that you believe in it and are willing to be vulnerable yourself.

Revealing vulnerabilities in story exchanges creates intimacy. We may find it a bit puzzling to understand how acknowledging our imperfections can increase trust and collaboration on teams. Many of the imperfections we don't want revealed are tied to our emotions and feelings.

The idea that success comes from acknowledging our imperfections is a radical one. Most cultures drive hiding them to ensure greater acceptance and belonging. Leveraging our imperfections for success is even more radical, however that is exactly what I have experienced.

What can you do as a leader?

Tell your own story to strengthen your connection to others. Plan short conversations to let people share what is going on with them. If you are kicking off a project plan a longer event where team members can share more about who they are and what they know that could impact the project.

The primary role of the leader in creating psychological safety is to lead by example and set the tone for the whole team. This includes being the first one to show their humanness and imperfections. Ask questions, show interest in the work and knowledge of others. Ask for feedback and acknowledge criticism when appropriate.

Email me if you want more tips or you need help facilitating a story telling session with your team. rosa@carrilloconsultants.com. For more on the neuro science see my last post.

[1] Rock, D. 2009. Your brain at work: Strategies for overcoming distraction, regaining focus, and working smarter all day long. 1st edition. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Edmondson AC, Mogelof JP. 2005. Explaining psychological safety in innovation teams. In Creativity and

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Activities to increase psychological safety on teams and EHS/ HSE

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I have used these group activities to increase psychological safety and increase safety awareness for many years. How can a team leader, safety professional, or GM contribute to the level of psychological safety on their team or in their facility?

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Amy Edmondson (Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School) is the author of The Fearless Organization

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HOW DO YOU CREATE PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY AT WORK? Interview with Amy Edmondson

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You already know that psychological safety is the key ingredient for high performing, effective, and happy teams. And you're a great leader and team member, so you're doing all the right things, but how do you know whether your team is actually feeling psychologically safe?

Use these ten statements below to measure the psychological safety in your team or organisation. Consider each one and rate your agreement on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high). If you "score" 50, congratulations! You're on possibly the best team in the world right now. Chances are that there were some statements that you didn't agree with so much, and these are the areas that you can work on, either as a leader or contributor.

1. On this team, I understand what is expected of me.

2. We value outcomes more than outputs or inputs, and nobody needs to "look good".

3. If I make a mistake on this team, it is never held against me.

4. When something goes wrong, we work as a team to find the systemic cause.

5. All members of this team feel able to bring up problems and tough issues.

6. Members of this team never reject others for being different and nobody is left out.

7. It is safe for me to take a risk on this team.

8. It is easy for me to ask other members of this team for help.

9. Nobody on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.

10. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilised.

When you're happy to do so, share these with your team and ask them to rate their agreement too. You can do this anonymously, and gather the scores in aggregate. A great tool for this is Typeform, where you can really quickly and easily paste the above statements into ten statements and add a 1-5 scale. Typeform will give you a link to share with your team, and will even export the data into Excel or Google sheets for analysis. You can also use a survey tool such as Surveymonkey, or the free Google forms service to build your own survey.

Our resource page on Measuring Psychological Safety goes into a lot more detail about what each statement can tell you about your team.

In the Psychological Safety Action Pack, we expand on this measurement with more detailed statements and an action guide to follow for each statement. Also included are workshop exercises, checklists, posters and templates: so if your team score low on one or more of these statements, you can know exactly what to do in order to build psychological safety and team performance.

When running this survey, consider the environment you're asking people to do it in, and ensure that people don't feel under pressure to answer in certain ways, rush it, or worry that they might get in trouble for giving the "wrong" answer! Ensure that you discuss with your team what this data will be used for, why you're asking for it, and assure them that it will be treated confidentially.

After this survey, you may also want to look at some of the other great exercises you can do to build psychological safety, such as a "Fear Conversation", working with values and behaviours, or using a team performance quadrant to workshop how to improve performance in a psychologically safe manner. All of these exercises are in the toolkits provided by the psychological safety action pack.

If you're working with a remote or distributed team, ensure you check out this great guide about building and maintaining psychological safety in remote teams.

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Is Your Team Psychologically Safe? Take This Quiz.

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You already know that psychological safety is the key ingredient for high performing, effective, and happy teams. And you're a great leader and team member, so you're doing all the right things, but how do you know whether your team is actually feeling psychologically safe?

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Training and Workshops | Psychological Safety

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After doing the psychological safety team performance exercise, you may want to workshop with your team to establish how you're going to build psychological safety in the team. Whilst there are some standard and ubiquitous approaches to building psychological safety, such as icebreakers, retrospectives, and video call practices, this is an opportunity for your team...

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Inclusion Safety – members feel safe to belong to the team
Learner Safety – members are able to learn through asking questions
Contributor Safety – members feel safe to contribute their own ideas
Challenger Safety – members can question others’ ideas or suggest significant changes

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When people on a team possess psychological safety, they feel able to ask for help, admit mistakes, raise concerns, suggest ideas, and challenge ways of working and the ideas of others on the team, including the ideas of those in authority. Via this honesty and openness, risks are reduced, new ideas are generated, the team is able to execute on those ideas and everyone feels included.

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When people on a team possess psychological safety, they feel able to ask for help, admit mistakes, raise concerns, suggest ideas, and challenge ways of working and the ideas of others on the team, including the ideas of those in authority. Via this honesty and openness, risks are reduced, new ideas are generated, the team is able to execute on those ideas and everyone feels included.

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Psychological Safety – History, Concepts, Evidence and Application | Psychological Safety (psychsafety.co.uk)

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The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes .

Edmondson, 1999

When people on a team possess psychological safety, they feel able to ask for help, admit mistakes, raise concerns, suggest ideas, and challenge ways of working and the ideas of others on the team, including the ideas of those in authority. Via this honesty and openness, risks are reduced, new ideas are generated, the team is able to execute on those ideas and everyone feels included.

A lack of Psychological Safety was The Primary Cause Of The Chernobyl Disaster

In 1986, the Chernobyl power plant suffered a major disaster that directly killed 31 people and is estimated to have indirectly killed over 4000. Whilst the plant itself possessed an inherently unsafe design, the culture in Russia at the time did not encourage the raising of concerns or speaking up about mistakes. A fear of authority and the need to please political masters resulted in a fear-driven culture. During a simulated power shutdown, operators who were not fully equipped to deal with the situation made a series of protocol mistakes, including shutting off or ignoring safety systems, which resulted in a steam explosion, followed by a nuclear explosion. The cause of the disaster was in large part due to a lack of psychological safety resulting in operators not speaking up about their concerns.

How and Why Paul O'Neill Fostered Psychological Safety at Alcoa

When Paul O'Neill took over as CEO at Alcoa, an aluminium manufacturer, in 1987, he shocked board members and shareholders by pivoting the company strategy to safety and process over purely financial targets. Despite Alcoa already having a good safety record, he insisted that accidents were the enemy, and that unlike other manufacturing environments, he declared any level of risk to employees unacceptable. He encouraged everyone in the organisation to raise concerns, ideas, and mistakes with respect to process and safety.

Though it's unlikely he used the word, what he was creating was an environment of psychological safety, and that psychological safety didn't just result in fewer accidents, but in higher productivity, better quality, improved innovation and employee satisfaction. As well as fewer people suffering physical injury or death. By the time Paul left Alcoa, he'd improved the market value of Alcoa from $3 billion to over $27 billion.

The History of Psychological Safety

First known to be mentioned by Schein and Bennis in the 1960s, psychological safety was first defined as group phenomenon that reduces interpersonal risk. To quote Schein and Bennis's paper "PERSONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE THROUGH GROUP METHODS : THE LABORATORY APPROACH" in 1965, psychological safety reduces "a person's anxiety about being basically accepted and worthwhile". Deming, in his 14 Points for Management, also raises the point of reducing fear of interpersonal risk taking in point 8: "Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company". This highlights a growing change in sentiment at the time, away from reductionist and Taylorist views of workers towards more a progressive paradigm of empowerment and engagement to improve business outcomes.

Wherever there is fear, there will be wrong figures.

W E Deming, The New Economics.

William Kahn, in 1990, renewed interest in psychological safety with his paper "Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work" where he described psychological safety as the ability for someone to "employ or express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally". At the same time, progressive management paradigms at the time such as safety culture and the Toyota Production System (TPS) were emerging that introduced concepts such as the the Andon Cord, which empowers employees to raise issues or concerns around safety and process (which is exactly what Paul O'Neill did).

The Definition of Psychological Safety

Subsequently, in 1999, theirs. As a result, Dr Edmondson formulated the concept of psychological safety, namely: the . She believed that psychological safety was a key factor in team performance. Dr. Edmondson continues to lead the field in expounding the importance of Dr Amy Edmondson was studying clinical teams and the number of mistakes that different teams made. During her research she was surprised to find that the teams with a higher number of good outcomes actually made more mistakes than teams with fewer good outcomes. It was a surprising result, but after further investigation, Dr Edmondson discovered that in fact those teams with better outcomes were more mistakes, whilst the teams with fewer good outcomes were more likely to belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes psychological safety in all fields of work and life, and literally wrote the book on psychological safety.

Psychological Safety Underpins Team Performance

Think about the best team you've been a member of. It could be a sports team, a business team, or some other group of people with a shared goal. Being a member of that team probably felt good, it may have even been energising and inspiring. Whilst the members of that team may well have been experts in their field, it's likely that being a member of that team felt good because that team felt safe to be themselves. They, and you, likely felt free to admit mistakes, ask for help, and even challenge ideas from other team members without fear of humiliation or embarrassment.

Now think about one of the worst teams you've been a member of. Perhaps you felt that you had to put on a metaphorical "mask", and be a different version of yourself in order to fit in. You may not have been able to admit mistakes, or ask for help, in case members of the team saw it as a weakness and used it against you. Chances are, you didn't feel very "safe" in this team.

Think of these two teams when thinking about levels of psychological safety. Psychological safety isn't a binary "on or off" factor, it's a sliding scale. Teams (and members of those teams) possess it to varying degrees. The best team you've been on probably possessed a lot, whilst the worst probably did not possess much at all.

The Difference Between Leadership and Management

It's important to recognise the difference between these two practices. The indubitable Grace Hopper once stated that "You manage ." What she meant is that management consists of all the processes, tools, and controls that need to exist in order for people to work effectively, whilst leadership is far larger in scope and consists of, for example, setting direction, making strategic decisions, supporting and motivating people, and elevating people in order to reach their highest potential.

In practice, this means that neither management nor leadership can be neglected.

In order for people to perform well and possess psychological safety, they need to operate in environments where to deliver. Management is therefore part of leadership, and contributes to the "structure and clarity" that safety, costs, tools and processes are managed effectively. A team cannot deliver if they do not know , or indeed Google's Project Aristotle led by Julia Rozovsky in 2013 defined as the third most important factor in high performing teams. The Project Aristotle team uncovered four key factors (Dependability, Structure and Clarity, Meaning, and Impact) that are essential to team performance, but it was clear during the research that there remained one or more missing elements. The team discovered Edmondson's 1999 research and applied the paper's methodology to measure psychological safety. The results showed that "even the extremely smart, high-powered employees at Google needed a psychologically safe work environment to contribute the talents they had to offer".

Google's Project Aristotle was a turning point for psychological safety. It was enough proof for what we all intrinsically know - that feeling safe to be yourself as part of a team, where you're able to contribute your ideas, admit mistakes, challenge others respectably, and try without fear of failure, is one of the most powerful aspects of human performance.

Happiness precedes success.

Similarly, the 2019 and 2021 " State of DevOps" reports consistently show that psychological safety is an essential and foundational factor in software delivery team performance, and also to organisational performance more widely.

Westrum's Cultural Typologies

Dr. Ron Westrum wrote in 2003 about "The Typologies of Organisational Cultures" that reflect how information flows through an organisation. He wrote: "organisational culture bears a predictive relationship with safety and that particular kinds of organisational culture improve safety..." That is: because the flow of information is influential and indicative of other aspects of culture, it can also be used to predict how organisations or parts of them will behave when problems arise.

Westrum was focussed on real-world physical safety measures in the realm of healthcare and aviation, but in our organisations we should also strive to adopt the same diligent approach to psychological safety for the sake not just of the products we build but for the humans on our teams as well.

See the table below for Westrum's organisational typology model. Each column describes a broad cultural typology: Pathological, Bureaucratic, or Generative, and six aspects of those cultures. It is clear from the table that the Generative culture that Westrum describes is a broadly psychologically safe culture where team members cooperate, share their fears, admit failure and continually improve.

The Westrum organisational typology model: How organizations process information ( Ron Westrum, " A typology of organisation culture)," BMJ Quality & Safety 13, no. 2 (2004), doi:10.1136/qshc.2003.009522.)

The Four Stages of Psychological Safety

Timothy R Clarke in his book "The Four Stages Of Psychological Safety" described a model of four "stages" of psychological safety that teams can move through, progressing from stage 1 to stage 4. These are:

(1) Inclusion Safety - members feel safe to belong to the team

(2) Learner Safety - members are able to learn through asking questions

(3) Contributor Safety - members feel safe to contribute their own ideas

(4) Challenger Safety - members can question others' ideas or suggest significant changes

Whilst " all models are wrong, and some are useful " applies in this case (people do not move linearly through stages 1-4, nor do the stages exist in discrete reality, The "four stages"can be a useful model to reinforce the point that psychological safety is not a binary "on/off" phenomenon: we all move through different degrees of psychological safety in different teams, contexts, times of day, etc.

Another useful model for team development is Tuckman's Model of Team Development , where teams "Form", "Storm", "Norm", and finally, "Perform". It is only in psychologically safe teams that true performance will be reached, since this stage requires the ability for team members to admit and learn from mistakes, and to contribute and challenge ideas. Reaching this stage, as a leader of a team, is one of your goals.

Measuring Psychological Safety

It's really important, and fortunately, really easy to measure psychological safety. You can do this in your team or across an entire organisation: one way to do it is via a survey, which asks for agreement with multiple statements that reflect the degree of psychological safety on a team. This provides quantitative metrics that are really powerful in building psychological safety and ensuring momentum is maintained. Another way, particularly useful for short lived teams, is to use a more discursive method such as the psychological safety matrix, which encourages people to describe where they are.

The Psychological Safety Action Pack is a toolkit that contains thorough and detailed resources on measurement, specific actions to take according to the scores you record, and exercises, tools, and workshops to run with your teams to continuously build psychological safety and performance in your workplace.

Is it possible to be "too" psychologically safe?

In short, no. However, it's important to distinguish psychological safety from existential or other kinds of safety. A mountaineering team climbing K2 require very high degrees of psychological safety in order to know that their teammates will support each other, and make it safe to raise concerns, however small. Their existential safety is very low, and they're in real danger of dying on the mountain: but their high psychological safety aids in maximising their chance of success, and not dying on the mountain.

The lesson: maximise the psychological safety of your teams, but do not shelter them from the real world. Building psychological safety doesn't mean hiding the challenges ahead; quite the opposite.

The Three Fundamentals of Psychological Safety

There are three core leadership behaviours which support psychological safety in teams. These may seem simple, but in practice they extend to every single leadership behaviour and every single aspect of communication. Those three core behaviours (thanks to Amy Edmondson for codifying these) are:

, not an execution problem. Frame work as a learning problem Everything is an experiment. The outcome of work should not exclusively be the output; it must also be learning how to do it better next time.

Acknowledge your own fallibility. By admitting when you make a mistake or don't know the answer, you allow (indeed, encourage) others to do the same.

Model curiosity and asking questions. Stay curious, ask other people what they think, and ask them to contribute. By asking questions and asking for help, you're creating a space and a need for people to speak up, which is essential for psychological safety and for high performing teams.

Dr Amy Edmondson elucidates these core principles in The Fearless Organization.

Whether you work for a private company, non-profit organisation, a government agency or a sports team, building psychological safety and working through the psychological safety action pack will return real results:

The Benefits of Psychological Safety:

1. Increased likelihood of successful innovation, resulting in quicker time-to-market.

2. An increased ability to learn from mistakes, resulting in fewer problems or outages, higher quality, and improved governance and controls.

3. Increased reporting of concerns and security issues, resulting in decreased risk of security, health and safety or non-compliance incidents.

4. Increased employee engagement, resulting in lower churn rates and decreased costs related to recruitment and absenteeism.

5. Improved reputation resulting in an increased ability to recruit the best people.

6. Increased profitability as a result of all of the above.

Fundamentally, building psychological safety is not only the right thing to do for members of your teams, but it's the right thing to do for your business or your organisation.

Download your Psychological Safety Toolkit to measure, build and maintain psychological safety in your teams.

For more information about high performing teams and psychological safety or for training, consulting or workshops, please get in touch.

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Psychological Safety - History, Concepts and Application

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Edmondson, 1999 When people on a team possess psychological safety, they feel able to ask for help, admit mistakes, raise concerns, suggest ideas, and challenge ways of working and the ideas of others on the team, including the ideas of those in authority.

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Inclusion works podcast - looking at psychological safety from the perspective of women of colour

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Inclusion works podcast - looking at psychological safety from the perspective of women of colour

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In this episode, we speak to author, journalist and Founder/CEO of the consultancy Candour, Ruchika Tulshyan, about why focusing on women of color's experiences at work will help us create a more equitable, inclusive workplace for all. Ruchika is working on a second book that explores everyday habits of inclusion, and her research for the book uncovered a troubling phenomenon that psychological safety disproportionately impacts women of color. She shares thought-provoking insights on why we must assess psychological safety through the eyes of women of color, and how privilege and power blocks empathy (see interview with Jamil Zaki at Stanford University linked below). Ruchika also explains why a growth mindset is so useful for how we approach diversity, equity and inclusion at work, and how this relates to the concept of cultural humility versus cultural competency.

Ruchika's first book, The Diversity Advantage: Fixing Gender Inequality - https://www.rtulshyan.com/book

NPR interview with Jamil Zaki about his research into the relationship between privilege/power and empathy - https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/07/09/jamil-zaki-empathy-power

Find out more about Ruchika and her work - https://www.rtulshyan.com/

Follow Ruchika - https://twitter.com/rtulshyan or https://www.linkedin.com/in/rtulshyan/

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45. Why we need to assess psychological safety through the eyes of women of color with Ruchika Tulshyan from Candour

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In this episode, we speak to author, journalist and Founder/CEO of the consultancy Candour, Ruchika Tulshyan, about why focusing on women of color's experiences at work will help us create a more equitable, inclusive workplace for all.

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Article from HBR on how can you increase psychological safety in your own team

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Article from HBR on how can you increase psychological safety in your own team

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The highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety - the belief that you won't be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for taking moderate risks, speaking your mind, being creative, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off - just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs. So how can you increase psychological safety on your own team? First, approach conflict as a collaborator, not an adversary. When conflicts come up, avoid triggering a fight-or-flight reaction by asking, "How could we achieve a mutually desirable outcome?" Speak human-to-human, but anticipate reactions, plan countermoves, and adopt a learning mindset, where you're truly curious to hear the other person's point of view. Ask for feedback to illuminate your own blind spots. If you create this sense of psychological safety on your own team starting now, you can expect to see higher levels of engagement, increased motivation to tackle difficult problems, more learning and development opportunities, and better performance.

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High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here's How to Create It

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The highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety - the belief that you won't be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for taking moderate risks, speaking your mind, being creative, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off - just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.