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Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior

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Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior

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Make It Safe for Employees to Speak Up - Especially in Risky Times

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The World Uncertainty Index remains high. Bank failures, war, inflation, and layoffs are contributing to a growing sense of instability and unease. As an HR manager at a technology firm told us, "Just seeing your team decrease from 35 to 18 can be very scary; it brings forth strong anxiety and worry over your job."

Whenever the world seems like a scary place, it's natural for people to avoid taking risks in order to protect themselves. In our research and consulting with organizations, we're seeing this risk aversion permeate both virtual and real-world hallways, resulting in employees being reluctant to speak up.

We know that in stable times, companies learn faster and better when employees reveal errors, raise ideas, pose questions, and challenge perspectives. In unstable times, those same acts of knowledge-sharing, pressure-testing, and feedback are even more vital, often making the difference between companies that innovate and adapt and those that don't.

For organizations to weather the storms ahead, they need to leverage every asset they have, including the full set of talents and insights available in their workforce. Psychological safety - the belief that one can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation - is what enables employees to use their voices, and it's more important than ever that leaders build it.

Why Silence Is Safer

People don't want to take risks that might harm their reputations or livelihoods, which makes sense when you compare the outcomes of voice versus silence. As the following chart, adapted from Amy's book The Fearless Organization, highlights, speaking up is an act that mainly benefits the organization and/or its customers, not the individual employee. Moreover, those benefits aren't even guaranteed and tend to take time to materialize. Meanwhile, holding back gives the employee the instant and certain benefit of feeling safe from exposure.

Leaders must grasp this asymmetry in order to avoid the all-too-common tendency to blame employees for staying silent. Why should they make a perceived sacrifice to their careers for the sake of a distant, unsure gain for others?

It is thus the responsibility of leaders to make speaking up worth employees' while.

Auditing Yourself and Your Workplace

Your employees aren't the only ones who need psychological safety in order to use their voices at work. As people rise in organizations, the pressure to hold back increases. As INSEAD professor Gianpiero Petriglieri eloquently wrote, "Time does not summon courage. It only morphs the fear of speaking truth to power into the fear of speaking truth in power." The reality is that most leaders are not demonstrating the behaviors that drive psychological safety for themselves or others, as research by McKinsey & Company has found.

When we work with senior executives, we ask them to turn a mirror on themselves before focusing on the behavior of others. For example, at a company that had recently announced thousands of job cuts, Constance asked a business unit leader if she felt increased pressure to present a rosy picture of her unit's work to the C-suite, board of directors, and Wall Street. The leader ruefully admitted that she did, and therefore was actively trying to resist her own temptation to self-censor around these audiences.

Before embarking on a psychological safety campaign, take some time to audit your own fears and behaviors. When do you speak up? When do you hold back? The answers will provide clues as to the risk-tolerance climate you and your employees face. Importantly, remember that if you find that your own psychological safety - your willingness to take risks - is low, you're no doubt subtly signaling to subordinates that it's better to hold back.

The Winning Formula for Psychological Safety

Thankfully, Amy long ago developed a "winning formula" for creating psychological safety: Clarify the rationale for speaking up, issue targeted invitations, reduce (if not eliminate) punishments, and amplify rewards. Here are some ways to implement the winning formula in your workplace:

Clarify the rationale.

Show your employees why each of their contributions are needed - not only for some far-off future, but right now. Discussions where you encourage speaking up should not be separate from conversations about strategy, marketing, R&D, operations, finance, etc. In fact, making the link between those business activities and speaking up is essential for motivating engagement. For example, explain why attracting new customers is dependent upon each team member's bold ideas and different perspectives, or convey how a rigorous, collaborative strengths-and-weaknesses assessment will help the company's developers build a better product.

Alternatively, if the business is focused on cost-cutting, explain why people should still highlight and learn from mistakes or challenge the status quo. These acts feel especially perilous when the prospect of job losses loom large. For example, employees may fear that revealing a problem in a manufacturing line will increase the chance of plant closure, while in truth it may be exactly what's needed to ensure the plant's future. In addition, employees may need to hear that that those who demonstrate initiative and critical thinking will be valued as contributors.

In our experience, it takes many iterations and forms of communication before employees start to internalize this new way of thinking. Clarifying the rationale involves conveying why and how speaking up benefits each employee individually as well as the organization. Be explicit about this logic and repeat it often.

Issue targeted invitations.

Many managers think vague invitations for input are sufficient. They're not. For example, we've met innumerable managers who report having an "open door policy" in the office or being available "anytime" for a quick Teams chat. Yet those same managers also report a lack of candid and timely input from their employees. Even if you have town halls, listening tours, Slack channels, and culture surveys, it still takes effort and follow-up to ensure that they're working. Otherwise, you're at risk of missing important aspects of what's happening, or of hearing from only those employees who are especially passionate about an issue.

Provide employees specific direction for how to effectively speak up - and about what. Ask them direct questions to get their perspectives. If you host a town hall, be explicit with attendees about the topics you need input on in advance. Another practice is hosting monthly one-on-ones with each direct report with just two agenda items: "What should I know - but don't - right now?" and "How can I better support your risk-taking?" The structured invitations don't have to be complicated; they need to be clear and targeted.

Stamp out punishments.

Humans are constantly monitoring their environment. Employees consciously and unconsciously notice the body language, verbalizations, and actions that follow any act of risk-taking. Decades of social science research have shown us that bad is stronger than good when it comes to reinforcing human behavior.

This means you must vigilantly watch for negative consequences of speaking up and swiftly correct any that emerge. Your responses as the boss carry heavy weight. It's essential to monitor and modulate your expression and behavior to convey openness and gratitude in the face of challenges. When you make a mistake (we all do), such as getting upset about bad news, apologize quickly.

Engage a coach to help you with this if needed. Your goal is to rid the social system of censure, ridicule, and disregard toward those who speak up. This may require individual and team training to build up skills. Practice via role-plays and simulations may also be helpful.

Stack up rewards.

Reducing the downside of speaking up is necessary, and so is increasing the upside. Start by over-indexing on appreciation. Speaking up is an act of generosity. It involves an employee doing something that feels potentially harmful to them individually but benefits the collective. So, thank them - publicly, privately, often, and with sincerity.

"Why do I have to thank someone for doing their job?" we hear managers grumble. "Ah," we say in response. "Are you sure that's clearly part of their job?" Really ask yourself that question: Are acts of candor baked into performance appraisals, compensation, bonuses, and promotions? Are teams being celebrated for having honest conversations that catch errors early, involve healthy forms of conflict, and generate feelings of inclusion? If you're not sure, then this is a good time to reassess your performance management system. Alignment between what you ask of employees and what you reward is critical for engagement and holds both sides accountable.

. . .

Contrary to how it may seem, these challenging times present a golden opportunity to foster psychological safety in organizations. In times of acute uncertainty, conducting business-as-usual is a flawed approach. What's required instead is creativity, experimentation, learning, and flexibility, but these can feel riskier than ever to employees. Leaders are dependent on the contributions of employees' ideas, perspectives, talents, and insights. In short, they're dependent on psychological safety if they wish to harness the full power of the workforce to address the challenges ahead.

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Make It Safe for Employees to Speak Up - Especially in Risky Times

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In turbulent times like these, it's natural for people to hold back and avoid taking risks at work. This can mean a reluctance to report mistakes, ask questions, offer new ideas, or challenge a plan. People, whether they're aware of it or not, try to protect their reputations and jobs.

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The Power of Framing in Creating Psychological Safety

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The Power of Framing in Creating Psychological Safety

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The Power of Framing in Creating Psychological Safety

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Over the past two decades, psychological safety has gotten significant traction both in academia and in real world applications. It's one of the few frameworks coming out of research that's been widely proven as critical to team performance. A crucial aspect of this research is the role leaders play by how they frame a given situation. Leaders have an outsized influence on how things get interpreted, and the key skill is framing. Unfortunately, most leaders and managers are oblivious to the importance of framing.
The importance of framing

Framing is a well researched and well understood phenomenon in the social and behavioral sciences. Yet most leaders are not adept at using it skillfully. Why is framing so important to understand?

For one, people tend to copy leaders. They set the tone and are often looked up to for situational cues. Thus how a given situation gets interpreted often depends on leader's framing of that particular problem or challenge.

Why is this important? In most complex situations that are ambiguous with no clear solutions, how the manager frames the challenge influences the team's actions. Did it come across as doable or as an impossible task? Did it come across as a challenge or a nagging problem to deal with?

Framing and performance

So why does this matter? One word: performance. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson [1,2] studied the implementation of a new innovative procedure across 16 different hospitals. The single most powerful factor that explained success or failure was how leaders framed the new initiative:

The difference between success and failure was not determined by management support, resources, project leader status, or expertise. Surprisingly, the difference wasn't determined even by whether the hospital was academic, or by its prior history of innovation. Instead, differences in how the project was framed by each project leader gave rise to different attitudes about the technology and the need for teamwork.

A key insight from this work was that psychological safety is not a personality difference but rather a feature of the workplace that leaders can and must help create. More specifically, in every company or organization I've since studied, even some with famously strong corporate cultures, psychological safety has been found to differ substantially across groups. Nor was psychological safety the result of a random or elusive group chemistry.

What was clear was that leaders in some groups had been able to effectively create the conditions for psychological safety while other leaders had not. This is true whether you're looking across floors in a hospital, teams in a factory, branches in a retail bank, or restaurants in a chain.

Framing influences and distorts

Skill in framing also matters because frames fundamentally influence and often distort how we see situations and thus ensuing actions:

Frames filter what we see. They control what information is attended to and, just as important, what is obscured. Remember: no single window can reveal the entire panorama.

Frames themselves are often hard to see. Just as we have to step back from a window to see that it's there, so too do we have to "step back" from our frame to see that we are viewing the world through a particular perspective.

Frames appear complete. Frames simplify the world. They do not capture all of reality, leaving gaps. But since our mind tends to fill in such gaps, we usually don't even notice that anything is missing.

Frames are exclusive. We typically see one frame at a time. It's hard, after all, to simultaneously look out the windows on both the north and west sides of a room.

Frames can be "sticky" and hard to change. Once we are locked into a frame, it can be difficult to switch, especially without conscious effort. When people have emotional attachments to their frames, changing frames can seem threatening.

- Excerpt from Winning Decisions [5]

Framing enables psychological safety

Edmondson [1, 2], one of the foremost experts on psychological safety, identifies framing as the key step that sets the stage to create the right conditions for psychological safety that enables peak performance.

Whenever you are trying to get people on the same page, with common goals and a shared appreciation for what they're up against, you're setting the stage for psychological safety. The most important skill to master is that of framing the work.

One common leadership gaffe is of making the assumption that what needs to be done, or what approach is best, is obvious to everyone. For most non-technical scenarios, it's not. Each situation can have different focal points, and it's the frame that leaders create that determines what those focal points are.

If near-perfection is what is needed to satisfy demanding car customers, leaders must know to frame the work by alerting workers to catch and correct tiny deviations before the car proceeds down the assembly line.

If zero worker fatalities in a dangerous platinum mine is the goal, then leaders must frame physical safety as a worthy and challenging but attainable goal.

If discovering new cures is the goal, leaders know to motivate researchers to generate smart hypotheses for experiments and to feel okay about being wrong far more often than right.

So what are frames and how can leaders get better at it?

What is framing

Framing is a natural aspect of being a human and operating in complex reality. It's an automatic process that we do on a regular basis but are often unaware of. It's useful to understand some of the nuances of frames.

Framing effects

Consider this classic example by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman [4] that shows how reality is subjective and not as objective as we are prone to think:

Italy and France competed in the 2006 final of the World Cup. The next two sentences both describe the outcome: "Italy won." "France lost." Do those statements have the same meaning? The answer depends entirely on what you mean by meaning.

For the purpose of logical reasoning, the two descriptions of the outcome of the match are interchangeable because they designate the same state of the world. As philosophers say, their truth conditions are identical: if one of these sentences is true, then the other is true as well. This is how Econs understand things. Their beliefs and preferences are reality-bound. In particular, the objects of their choices are states of the world, which are not affected by the words chosen to describe them.

There is another sense of meaning, in which "Italy won" and "France lost" do not have the same meaning at all. In this sense, the meaning of a sentence is what happens in your associative machinery while you understand it. The two sentences evoke markedly different associations.

"Italy won" evokes thoughts of the Italian team and what it did to win. "France lost" evokes thoughts of the French team and what it did that caused it to lose, including the memorable head butt of an Italian player by the French star Zidane. In terms of the associations they bring to mind-how System 1 reacts to them-the two sentences really "mean" different things. The fact that logically equivalent statements evoke different reactions makes it impossible for Humans to be as reliably rational as Econs.

Kahneman calls these framing effects:

Different ways of presenting the same information often evoke different emotions. The statement that "the odds of survival one month after surgery are 90%" is more reassuring than the equivalent statement that "mortality within one month of surgery is 10%." Similarly, cold cuts described as "90% fat-free" are more attractive than when they are described as "10% fat." The equivalence of the alternative formulations is transparent, but an individual normally sees only one formulation, and what she sees is all there is.

Two types of frames

It's essential to understand two different kinds of frames:

One can be called "worldviews" which are global and that we borrow from culture and upbringing.

The second type is local and more specific to a given situation that we actively construct.

Russo and Schoemaker [5] differentiate them as thinking frames and constructed frames:

The terms "frame" and "framing" have their origin in the academic fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence.
...
An adult brain contains thousands of mental models, which have developed over decades of education and experience. Much of decision-makers' special knowledge about their professional activities may be represented as a collection of mental models.

Frames are at the tightly woven structural core of these mental models, what we might call the mental model's "essence." They often reside in our memories and are usually evoked or triggered automatically. Whereas trying to change any substantial portion of a mental model can take weeks, months, even years, because of the vastness and strength of its interconnected network, frames can be exposed, understood, and realigned in less time.

The frames we use can be either borrowed or constructed. Every culture teaches powerful thinking frames (such as democracy) to its young. We unconsciously borrow these frames and apply them to diverse situations. A person's occupation and education, capturing years of training and experience (e.g., learning how to think like a lawyer, engineer, or accountant), similarly produce powerful thinking frames. They become a permanent part of our mental repertoire, and we use them broadly. In fact, many thinking frames become so deeply ingrained in groups or organizations that people cannot change them when the circumstances call for it. When large groups use these widely shared mental models to define their reality, we call them paradigms.

In contrast to the broad thinking frames that we internalize through years of socialization and then borrow to apply to a wide range of situations, we sometimes construct frames to organize our thinking about a specific topic, situation, or decision. For example, when we develop criteria to evaluate possible vacation options, whom to hire for a job opening, or where to open a new retail outlet, we may construct a frame tailored to the problem and decision at hand. Although thinking frames and constructed frames differ in their origin and depth, their impacts on our decision-making processes bear enough similarities that we can talk about them together.

Werner Erhard puts it more simply:

While one's worldview is relative to everything in one's world, each of one's frames of reference is relative to some specific something in one's world. It is as though our worldview is a primary lens through which we view everything in our world. And, our various frames of reference are secondary lenses through which we view specific things in our world.

Frames as applied to leadership

Framing effects are a widely researched phenomenon in the social sciences, behavioral economics and cognitive psychology. But they are equally applicable to leadership. In her highly cited paper Framing for Learning (2003), Edmundson defines a frame as follows:

A frame is a set of assumptions and beliefs about a particular object or situation. The process of framing is a process of creating meaning-either passively and unconsciously or actively and consciously-that is not a necessary or factual aspect of that situation. Frames are shaped by past experiences in similar situations (or situations that seem similar in some way to those perceiving them) and affect both how we feel and how we think.

Framing is neither bad nor good; it is simply inevitable. We interpret what is going on around us through a lens shaped by our personal history and our current social context. The catch is, we tend to assume that our framing captures the truth, rather than presenting a subjective "map" of territory that could instead be mapped differently.

How to get better at framing

Given the importance of framing, what can leaders do to get better at it? Below are some basic strategies to get better at framing:

1. Learn to uncover and identify frames

2. Become familiar with common opposing frames

3. Learn to leverage language forms

4. Learn how to change the frame aka reframing

5. Understand the role of context in leadership

Let's look at each of these.

1. Uncover and identify frames

Every decision, initiative or situation has an underlying frame whether we are aware of it or not. Use the following questions to uncover not just yours but other's frames as well:

What do I consider as givens that go unquestioned? What frame do these assumptions support?

What aspect does the frame address the most? What aspects does it ignore?

What are the boundaries that the frame imposes? What do those boundaries leave out?

What are the measures of success? Are they tailored to that particular situation? Do they encourage the behavior that you want to emphasize?

What are the dominant metaphors and imagery being used to describe the issue? Are they working? If not, can you use another one instead?

What behavior does the frame emphasize? What does it minimize?

Can you borrow a different frame from a different discipline or industry?

How is my background and training influencing my frame?

What do you consider as non-negotiables?

What are the "undiscussables"?

2. Common primary opposing frames

Some frames tend to be more common than others and it's useful to be aware of them. They often lie on a spectrum and are in tension with their polar opposites. Most of the time one tends to be the dominant which automatically makes the other secondary. Consider the following:

Learning vs performing

Goal-achieving vs self-protecting

Health-enhancing vs health-limiting

Positive vs negative

Promotion vs prevention

Growth vs fixed mindset

Optimistic vs pessimistic

Win-lose vs win-win

Competition vs cooperation/coopetition

Cost vs investment

Maximizing gain vs minimizing loss

Global vs local

Past vs present vs future

Transactional vs relationship based

Contractual vs community based

Often you will notice that these opposing polarities exist simultaneously. Thus framing gets even more critical as it drives which aspects get attention. As it turns out paradoxes are all too common in organizations and an often misunderstood aspect of the nature of managerial work.

3. Leveraging language to create and change frames

Gail Fairhurst outlines commonly used forms of language that leaders can use to frame and reframe more effectively:

Metaphorical language portrays a subject's resemblance to something else that is not literally applicable.

Story frames a subject through narrative.

Contrast describes a subject in terms of what it is not.

Spin places a subject in a positive or negative light.

Jargon or catchphrases frame a subject in familiar terms.

Analogy frames a subject's parallels to another subject.

Argument frames a subject in reasoned, rational terms.

Feeling statements frame a subject in terms of felt emotions.

Categories frame a subject in terms of its membership (or not) in a category and of category limits.

Three-part lists organize a subject in easily remembered "threes."

Repetition dramatizes a subject through parallel form.

4. Learn how to reinforce and reframe

In her book Teaming, Amy Edmundson gives tactics for reinforcing a frame and for individual reframing.
Tactics for reinforcing a learning frame:
Use verbal and visual discourse to promote the learning frame.

Reinforce this framing by explaining and modeling the desired interpersonal and collaborative behaviors.

Explain these desired behaviors in practical terms, such as "Speak up if you see something wrong" or "Just pick up the phone and ask if you have a question."

Initiate activities, for example, a kick-off meeting, a meeting to identify personal goals within the teaming or learning effort, and training on how to efficiently deal with interpersonal conflict. These can facilitate new processes or routines and help team members build confidence.

Use artifacts such as a prominent sign in the project work area to visually reinforce the learning frame.
Tactics for individual reframing:
Tell yourself that the project is different from anything you've done before and presents an exciting opportunity to try out new approaches and learn from them.

See yourself as critical to a successful outcome and yet as unable to achieve success without the willing participation of others.

Tell yourself that others are vitally important to a successful outcome and may provide key knowledge or suggestions that you can't anticipate in advance.

Communicate with others exactly as you would if the above three statements were true.

5. Understand the role of context

Learning to use context effectively is a key aspect of effective leadership, and framing is one way of managing context. Netflix is a good example of implementing context at the organizational level.

Another factor that influences your ability or inability to set the right context and frame is your leadership style. All leaders have a default approach. Being aware of your blindspots can help immensely.

Sources and references

1. Teaming by Amy Edmondson

2. The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson

3. Edmondson, A. C. (2003). Framing for Learning: Lessons in Successful Technology Implementation. California Management Review, 45(2), 34-54.

4. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

5. Winning Decisions by J. Edward Russo and Paul J.H. Schoemaker

6. The Power of Framing by Gail T. Fairhurst

7. Here's a tool that Google created for managers to create psychological safety: https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/foster-psychological-safety/

8. Amy Edmundson talking about how anyone can create psychological safety, not just leaders:

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The Power of Framing in Creating Psychological Safety

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Over the past two decades, psychological safety has gotten significant traction both in academia and in real world applications. It's one of the few frameworks coming out of research that's been widely proven as critical to team performance. A crucial aspect of this research is the role leaders play by how they frame a given situation.

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What exactly is psychological safety? It's a term that's used a lot but is often misunderstood. In this piece, the author answers the following questions with input from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase "team psychological safety": 1) What is psychological safety? 2) Why is psychological safety important? 3) How has the idea evolved? 4) How do you know if your team has it? 5) How do you create psychological safety? 6) What are common misconceptions?

No one likes to deliver bad news to their boss. But that's exactly what I had to do when a project I'd been working on wasn't delivering the results we expected. I'd been a big advocate for our team taking on the initiative and, personally, I'd invested a lot of time into it - and convinced others to do the same.

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What exactly is psychological safety? It's a term that's used a lot but is often misunderstood. In this piece, the author answers the following questions with input from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase "team psychological safety": 1) What is psychological safety? 2) Why is psychological safety important?

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Listen for ... Psychological Safety - Percolab

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After playing Percolab's game Listen for... , participants reported:

It felt good to share without being judged.

I felt welcomed and cared for.

This game creates a climate of openness and psychological safety.

Knowingly or not, the latter comment nailed the quality present in the former ones: psychological safety. After hosting dozens of games over many months, Percolab's team realized how powerful the Listen for ... game is in creating conditions for the emergence of psychological safety among the participants.

Amy Edmundson identified psychological safety as one of the most important properties of team effectiveness and well-being. The concept came to prominence in the last few years following the publication of her book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth and a 2016 NY Times article about project Aristotle at Google. Google's research team re-confirmed that psychological safety was one of the key features of high-performing teams.

P sychological safety is "the belief that one can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation".

Edmundson defines psychological safety as "the belief that one can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation". Psychological safety is an emergent property of a team in which people feel interpersonal safety because colleagues will listen to each other's ideas, address mistakes and failures as learning opportunities, and respond to challenges. Because it is an emergent property of a team, psychological safety can only arise through conversation and dialogue, and therefore authentic listening.

Although we may feel that our organizations are based on conversations and open to dialogue, do we really have spaces to listen to each other with genuine empathy and curiosity? Psychological safety relies on active listening, but how do we do this concretely? This is where the Listen for ... game can serve as a tool and a gateway into deep listening and therefore contribute greatly to enhance the psychological safety in a team.

The Listen for... game came out of Samantha Slade's book Going Horizontal in which she presents horizontal or collaborative leadership around seven domains of collaboration. Samantha wanted to create a fun and pedagogical game to dive into these seven domains. Those are all basic domains related to work collaboration and can be used in any organization, not just horizontal ones. The other inspiration for the game was storytelling (you can read The story behind the game from Samantha Slade directly).

Seven domains of collaboration

In a Listen for ... game, one player is invited to tell a short and recent story related to one of the seven domains of collaboration (there are seven storyteller cards). The other players are invited to pick a listening card; there are more than a dozen listening cards with themes such as creativity, power, asking for help, etc. The listeners are invited to listen silently to the story through the listening lens they picked. Once the storyteller is done, listeners reflect back on the story from the perspective of their listening filter. Finally, the storyteller shares any insights gleaned from the listeners' reflection.

With those simple "rules" and within a few minutes (each round lasts around 10 minutes), a safe climate is established, storytellers feel they can share without fear of judgment and listeners are nudged outside their usual biases. The listening cards allow everybody to make sense of the story from multiple and new perspectives. There is no immediate search for solutions or advice being given, just a moment to share a story and to make sense of it. Every time that I introduce and play the game, I am surprised how fast people can generate this interpersonal safety we are looking for and by the authenticity they show to each other, even with strangers.

Amy Edmundson's has shown "how hard it is to establish and maintain psychological safety even in the most straightforward, factual, and critical contexts". The simplicity of Listen for ... makes it an easy gateway towards psychological safety. We have used the game in many contexts now, from open community games to conflict-ridden teams. The game can be pulled out at any moment when we feel we need to make sense of the complexity ubiquitous in today's working life. A game can be focused on a particular issue (hybrid work, work-life issues, looking back on a project, etc.), then people tell short stories related with this specific context.

The game's simplicity nudges people into "productive conversation" in which voice and silence are balanced ( Edmundson and Besieux). Storytellers contribute by focusing on what happened and getting to the essence of their story; listeners are explicitly asked to listen to the story from a particular angle. The rules of the game move people away from unproductive conversation by diminishing disruption and withholding. In the figure below, testimonies from participants in the game are placed into the productive conversation matrix. It shows how Listen for ... enhances productive contributions and decreases unproductive ones.

Change happens through conversations, from the simplest encounter with a person to more complex collaborative processes. And fruitful conversations are based on empathic and deep listening. It is not easy to create psychological safety to allow deep listening to emerge; Listen for ... helps to quickly dive in such a space. Come play with us, Percolab offers a monthly online Listen for... game and it's free.

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Listen for ... Psychological Safety - Percolab

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After playing Percolab's game Listen for... , participants reported: It felt good to share without being judged. I felt welcomed and cared for. This game creates a climate of openness and psychological safety. Knowingly or not, the latter comment nailed the quality present in the former ones: psychological safety.

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6 questions to create Psychological Safety with your team 

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6 questions to create Psychological Safety with your team 

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What Psychological Safety Actually Means For Teams

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To return to the gym analogy: a good fitness trainer will help you to safely exercise and grow your muscles. And you will be uncomfortable. But you will be safe.

The job of a leader is not to protect their team from discomfort. It's to protect them from harm-and to help motivate them to push through the discomfort and harness it for growth.

As NYU moral psychology professor Jonathan Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff put it, "A culture that allows the concept of 'safety' to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in everyday life that they need in order to become strong and healthy."

2) Disagreement is not the same as danger, and ideas are not the same as violence

As Haidt and Lukianoff meticulously documented in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, "the meaning of safety underwent a process of concept creep" in the 21st century.

This mainly came from college campuses, where well-meaning students and teachers began including "emotional safety" as the same thing as physical safety. This makes it possible to say that any idea that someone has-or even the presence of someone who makes you feel emotionally bad (aka triggered) actually makes you unsafe.

When this conflation gets brought into a team environment under the mistaken notion that emotional safety is part of psychological safety, it actually weakens individuals and the team. As CNN's Van Jones put it to University of Chicago students in 2017:

"There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe... not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse... I am perfectly fine with.

But there's another view that is now I think ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that 'I need to be safe ideologically.'

...I don't want you to be safe ideologically. I want you to be strong. That's different."

Psychology research is clear that the most reliable way to overcome psychological pain and discomfort is not to avoid it; it's to gradually dimish the effects of discomfort by systematic exposure. "Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it," write Haidt and Lukianoff.

In other words, the more you face cognitive friction, the better you get at not taking other people's pushback and different ideas personally.

Now of course there's an important caveat here: if an individual is psychologically in a place where they cannot handle being around people with different ideas than them, or around people who make them emotional because they remind them of trauma-that is a job for cognitive behavioral therapy. This person's pain is real, and there is help for them.

However, this is a job for a professional, in an individual setting, to work with that person.

When I was in college, a student once climbed a tree and broke his arm. The college responded by declaring a rule: No climbing trees. A better idea would have been to have a talk with that student, and just tell everyone else to be careful. Instead of showing trust in their students, the college said, essentially, "Trees are dangerous. And we don't trust you."

And that does not create psychological safety, as we'll see in a moment when we explore the relationship between psychological safety and trust.

3) Taking Risks Only Makes Sense When It Helps The Group

If I feel comfortable enough to bring a loaded gun and put it casually on the conference room table-my doing so actually creates both a physical and psychological danger.

In other words, some risky behavior actually threatens a group's psychological safety. So it's false to conflate one's ability to take risks with psychological safety.

Speaking up with a point of view that's uncomfortable helps a group, because it pushes them to consider new ways of thinking. This is a risk worth taking.

But shouting down someone who says something uncomfortable is a risk as well. It takes courage. But it's the kind of risk that cuts off dialogue, and reduces the potential for the group to make progress.

It actually takes more courage to sit with discomfort, coolly look at it, and make a judgment from a big picture standpoint-not from short-term pain-avoidance.

And in order to make it feel safe to do that, we need to reduce some types of risks. As you can see, achieving real psychological safety is not quite as simple as we make it out to be.

4) Feeling Safe Enough To Hurt People Means There Is No Safety

The irony of a black-and-white view of psychological safety-and conflating safety with comfort-is that feeling safe enough to do and say whatever you want can actually create less safety. (This is similar to the paradox of tolerance.)

By making it appear safe and comfortable to do anything, we ironically can make an environment dangerous.

What Psychological Safety Actually Means:

In a team environment, what psychological safety actually means that you know that things you say and do won't be used against you... as long as you're not being malicious.

Think of it as the opposite of that speech cops give when they arrest someone, with an added "be nice" clause:

Psychological safety means nothing you say or do will be used against you-as long as you mean well. (And it means your teammates will assume you mean well until proven otherwise.)

Now, one of the problems with psychological safety is talking about it and actually having it are two very different things. Just telling people that anything they say won't be used against them doesn't automatically convince people that that's actually true.

That's why I think it's helpful to break the term psychological safety apart even further and talk about it in terms of trust.

the difference between psychological safety and trust:

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What Psychological Safety Actually Means For Teams

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To return to the gym analogy: a good fitness trainer will help you to safely exercise and grow your muscles. And you will be uncomfortable. But you will be safe. The job of a leader is not to protect their team from discomfort.

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In a fast-paced and ever-changing business environment, traditional teams aren’t always practical. Instead, companies increasingly employ teaming: gathering experts in temporary groups to solve problems they may be encountering for the first and only time. This flexible approach was essential to the…

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How to Cultivate Psychological Safety at Your Workplace - Lolly Daskal |

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How to Cultivate Psychological Safety at Your Workplace - Lolly Daskal |

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Psychological safety is good for business, good for teams and employees, and good for the leaders who cultivate it

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Psychological Safety Unlocks the Potential of Diverse Teams

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A pervasive idea surrounds diverse teams: They are assumed to perform much better than less diverse teams, thanks to the breadth of perspectives and ideas they generate. This is a familiar refrain we hear from the participants in our executive education seminars.

More diverse teams are believed to be particularly effective when innovation is concerned. In practice, however, they often underperform compared to homogenous teams. The reason is simple: These teams face communication hurdles that prevent them from reaching their full potential.

On a tacit level, norms and assumptions govern how we behave, how we set priorities and how we get work done. When team members come from different backgrounds, these norms and assumptions frequently clash, resulting in frustration and misunderstandings. You might have observed such situations in real life.

The good news is that our research in drug development, an innovation-intensive setting, suggests there is a solution. To unlock the benefits of diversity, the members of diverse teams need to experience psychological safety - a shared belief that team members can express their ideas, questions or concerns and not be embarrassed or ostracised.
Evidence from the pharmaceutical industry
The idea that psychological safety is key to the performance of diverse teams is not new but lacked empirical evidence until now.

We studied 62 drug development teams of varied diversity across six large pharmaceutical firms. These diverse teams had to collaborate with external partners to develop drugs with high safety and efficacy, under tight deadlines.

We measured diversity using a composite index (including gender, age, tenure and functional expertise). Psychological safety was assessed using an established survey tool. We collected team performance ratings from company senior leaders, who didn't know how the teams fared on our two other measures.

As predicted, on average, team diversity had a slight negative effect on performance. This was even more so for teams whose psychological safety score was below average. However, in those teams with high psychological safety, diversity was positively associated with performance.

Our data support the role of psychological safety when it comes to allowing diverse teams to meet their full potential.
Team member well-being
We also found that team diversity was inversely correlated with how the study participants were satisfied with their team members. On average, the more diverse the members were, the less happy they were with their team. Again, this reversed for the subset of teams with high levels of psychological safety. In their case, the more diverse the teams, the more satisfied their members were.

So not only does psychological safety help teams optimise performance, it also improves their well-being. This is a highly relevant finding for firms in this Great Resignation era.

The question then becomes: How can diverse teams build psychologically safe environments? Here are our recommendations, centred around framing, inquiry and bridging boundaries:
Framing
Framing is about helping team members reach a common understanding of the work and the context. In the case of diverse teams, it is particularly important to clearly define the purpose of meetings and the value of individual expertise.

Meetings are opportunities for information-sharing. People generally think of meetings as forums to share updates and make decisions - a context rife with judgment and evaluation. Unsurprisingly, they think twice before speaking up, especially to offer novel ideas.

Managers can override this default frame by emphasising how the goal of the meeting is to share information and ideas. The next step is to systematically invite people with different perspectives to provide input. All ideas should be carefully listened to, captured and evaluated before the group makes a decision.

Differences are a source of value. It is easy to become frustrated when someone voices a different opinion or perspective. Overcoming our instinctive preference for agreement takes effort - even if we understand the value of diversity on an intellectual level.

Being explicit in framing differences as a source of value can help. For instance, say: "We are likely to have different perspectives going into this meeting. This will help us get a thorough understanding of the issues at hand."
Inquiry
The best way to help people contribute their ideas is to ask them directly. It's that simple. When team leaders genuinely inquire about every team member's ideas and listen thoughtfully to what is shared, it fosters psychological safety.

The need for inquiry is heightened in diverse teams because of the number and variety of perspectives represented. But while simple, inquiry is rarely spontaneous. We all have blind spots - gaps in knowledge or understanding we are unaware of. It can be difficult to ask questions until we figure out what it is that we don't know in the first place.

Deep listening skills take practice. They involve asking the right kinds of questions, based on a real desire to learn. Examples include: What do you see in your community? What are you hearing from customers?

Another powerful type of question shows that you recognise the possibility that you contributed to the problems or challenges at hand: Can I check if I have ever done something that put you in a challenging position? If so, how can I help?
Bridging boundaries
Typically left to team leaders, framing and inquiry techniques help build psychologically safe environments. But what can individual team members do? What do they need to know about each other, in order to build bridges?

For one thing, they don't need to know each other's entire life story or body of expertise. But they do need to figure out in what context their objectives, expertise and challenges come together. Any two people - or members of the entire team - can do that by seeking the following information about each other.

Hopes and goals. What do you want to accomplish?

Resources and skills. What would be the best way for you to contribute to the team?

Worries and concerns. What stands in your way?

In our experience, these questions are surprisingly efficient in helping a group move forward. They are all task-relevant; none is overly personal, but each requires the team member to open up and show vulnerability.

While diversity is conducive to breakthrough performance, particularly when seeking innovation, it is rarely sufficient. Diverse teams need to feel psychologically safe before members can bring their best.

Along team members, leaders play a crucial role in nurturing psychological safety. They can use framing, inquiry and bridge building to unite different perspectives into a cohesive whole. When this happens, team performance benefits, but a healthier work environment and a more satisfying team experience are also worthy goals.

This is an adaptation of an published in Harvard Business Review.

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Psychological Safety Unlocks the Potential of Diverse Teams

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A pervasive idea surrounds diverse teams: They are assumed to perform much better than less diverse teams, thanks to the breadth of perspectives and ideas they generate. This is a familiar refrain we hear from the participants in our executive education seminars. More diverse teams are believed to be particularly effective when innovation is concerned.

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How to foster Psychological Safety on your teams 

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How to foster Psychological Safety on your teams 

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Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety

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Twenty-one years ago, 17 software engineers published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, more commonly known as the Agile Manifesto. Responding to the bureaucratic waterfall model of software development, with its linear phases and heavy documentation, these engineers advocated a more flexible approach, one that could adapt and succeed in a highly dynamic environment.

That simple declaration of values and principles has since spawned a global movement that has gone far beyond software development, gradually expanding to include under its umbrella a broad set of tools, processes, and functions.

Agile has fundamentally changed the way we build software. In my organization, for example, we scrum, run sprints, and far outperform the pace of development from the past. During the last 20 years, the agile movement has gained astonishing momentum, even outside of software development. There's agile HR, agile project management, agile customer service, agile sales, agile operations, agile C-suite, and so on.

Thousands of organizations can testify that their agile efforts have paid off in terms of speed, quality, value, and long-term growth. But not everyone can say that - in fact, approximately half of organizations that undertake agile transformations fail in their attempts.

If your team has yet to reap the rewards of agile, you need to understand what's preventing you from delivering the fast, frictionless, scalable solutions you envisioned. After evaluating several agile teams and conducting a series of interviews with leading agile experts, I believe the primary factor is disregard for the first value of the Agile Manifesto: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools."

Processes and Tools are Scaffolding

Agile processes and tools provide support, but the central weight-bearing mechanism of the agile approach is not the scrum or the sprint. Rather, it's the team's dialogic process - the way team members interact - that ultimately determines success. The dialogic process informs how the team harnesses intellectual friction (i.e., conflicting ideas) to perform interdependent work. Are team members able to give and take, push and pull, talk and listen, question and answer, act and react, analyze and solve? Or do they censor one another and end up in self-preservation mode? In essence, agile's core technology isn't technical or mechanical. It's cultural. Agile teams ultimately rely on psychological safety - an environment of rewarded vulnerability - to have a collaborative dialogic process.

High psychological safety elicits a performance response with innovation as the goal, whereas low psychological safety elicits a fear response with survival as the goal. When team members stop asking questions, admitting mistakes, exploring ideas, and challenging the status quo, they stop being agile. How can a development team perform rapid prototyping, for instance, if it's swimming in fear? Or how can an HR team make equitable candidate selections if they can't safely point out actions that may be inadvertently driven by bias? To borrow a line from William Butler Yeats, without psychological safety, "things fall apart; the center cannot hold."

When giving candid feedback, exploring unconventional ideas, and dissenting from the majority become sources of punished vulnerability, people stop doing them. How do you punish vulnerability? You criticize, embarrass, discourage, silence, shame, trivialize, bully, and intimidate. At that point, the team's dialogic process breaks down and may ultimately collapse.

For example, I sat in a scrum meeting with a product development team that was in the middle of a two-week sprint. Unfortunately, the team was missing the core technology of psychological safety. Guarded and focused on self-preservation, the team ultimately failed because the dialogic process fell apart. As it became more emotionally and politically expensive to speak up, they gradually stopped doing it. They sabotaged their agility by punishing each other's vulnerability. After the team was disbanded, I conducted a formal postmortem and interviewed each of the nine members. Ironically, every member of the team had been extensively trained in agile processes and tools, but those processes and tools couldn't save them. Only psychological safety could have done that.

Here are five practical ways to increase psychological safety to foster a collaborative, successful agile team.

Frame agile as a cultural implementation.

Soon after implementing agile, many organizations revert to the default position of worshiping at the altar of technical processes and tools, because cultural considerations seem abstract and difficult to operationalize. It's easier to pay lip service to the human side and then move on to scrumming, sprinting, kanbaning, and kaizening because these processes serve as tangible, measurable, and observable indicators, giving the illusion of success and the appearance of developing agile at scale.

Begin your agile transformation by framing agile as a cultural rather than a technical or mechanical implementation. In doing so, be careful not to approach culture as a workstream. A workstream is defined as the progressive completion of tasks required to finish a project. When we approach culture as a workstream within the context of agile, we classify it as something that can be completed. Culture cannot be completed. Yet I see agile teams attempting to project-manage it as part of the work breakdown structure, as if it has a beginning, middle, and end. It doesn't.

Remember, there's always the risk that a team's culture will snap back to fear-based norms, so focus on individuals and interactions as the highest priority. Small and seemingly insignificant acts of disrespect, rudeness, or indifference can push a team back into withdrawal and personal risk management. If a team can identify and manage detailed behavioral terms of engagement, such as, "let people finish their thoughts without interrupting them," they quickly become norms the team upholds through peer-based accountability.

Develop, document, and display vulnerable behavior/response pairings.

Hold a formal discussion with your team to identify the vulnerable behaviors they believe will be crucial to success. Team members will most likely begin by identifying common behaviors like asking questions, giving feedback, or registering different points of view. Keep going until you flesh out a longer and more nuanced list. Then identify positive response patterns for each behavior. For example, you might identify pointing out an error as a vulnerable behavior and then saying, "Thank you for pointing that out. What do you think the root cause is?" as a positive response to it.

Document the behavior/response pairings and display them in your meeting room. If you're running a virtual team meeting, post them in the chat. Consider the list a living document and revisit it in your sprint retrospectives. Create a printed job aid of the list that team members can carry with them, and provide a digital version that acts as a prompt and guide in virtual meetings.

Focus on one behavior during each scrum and practice cultural accountability.

Now that you've jointly produced a list of vulnerable behavior/response pairings, pick one to practice during each sprint. When the team focuses on a specific behavior and response pattern, it provides a manageable scope for practice and activates peer-based cultural accountability.

If a gap emerges between the vulnerable behavior/response pairings and the team leader's own modeling behavior, that dissonance will breed cynicism and erode credibility. But if the leader strives to model the behaviors and publicly acknowledges mistakes along the way, the team will make cumulative progress. The leader must make it clear that the members of the team are responsible for holding each other accountable for performing and rewarding vulnerable behaviors.

Formally evaluate your dialogic process in the sprint retrospective.

Set aside time during the sprint retrospective - the meeting held at the end of every sprint to review what went well and what could be improved - to formally evaluate the quality of the team's dialogic process. Make this review a standard part of the agenda.

Discuss the quality of the team's interactions and identify potential threats to openness. Ask questions like: Did you feel included in the process? Why or why not? What was the most vulnerable behavior you engaged in during this sprint? How did the team react to it? Was there anything you didn't say or do because you didn't feel safe? Does the team display a democratic pattern of participation and influence? Why or why not?

Conclude your scrum with a "question/reflection."

Scrum meetings are meant to be fast-paced, daily coordination meetings in which team members review the backlog, identify obstacles, and prioritize tasks. We often do them standing up to keep them short. Though they're not meant for brainstorming, you can use them to create time for reflection between meetings when necessary.

For example, if a team faces a difficult obstacle, pose a question about the issue and ask the team to come to the next scrum meeting prepared to discuss it. This approach offers more time for team members to crystalize their thoughts and encourages them to engage in divergent thinking. Reassure your team that you want to hear gut instincts as well as data-supported options.

. . .

If you drop agile tools and processes into a legacy culture that punishes the very acts of vulnerability required to be agile, you will fail. Environments of punished vulnerability - i.e., low psychological safety - leave organizations agile in name only, like the talented team that stalled and then failed.

If a team is struggling in its agile transformation, shadow it. Evaluate its dialogic process. Are members respectful? Do they tolerate candor? Do they protect and reward vulnerable behavior? If the answers to those questions is no and members are touchy, temperamental, or territorial, you've got work to do. You may be blessed with resources, expertise, and mastery of technical processes and tools, but ultimately, being agile relies on the ultimate enabler - psychological safety.

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Agile Doesn't Work Without Psychological Safety

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During the last 20 years, the agile movement has gained astonishing momentum, even outside of software development. There's agile HR, agile project management, agile customer service, agile sales, agile operations, agile C-suite, and so on. But approximately half of organizations that undertake agile transformations fail in their attempts.

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Psychological safety is critical for high-performing teams

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Big launches and milestone achievements deserve to be celebrated. When organizations take time to recognize the hard work that went into the completion of a release or even a bite-sized milestone, this helps employees recharge and stay motivated. The celebration might entail a release party, ending work a few hours early on a Friday, or a handwritten thank-you note.

But what happens when a team fails? The deadline for a big release is missed. A bug causes a security vulnerability. Or a change to the production environment causes product downtime.

Are these failures discussed? Do employees feel comfortable talking about what went wrong with their manager and team? Does your team take the time to reflect upon these situations through sprint retros or post-incident reviews? Does your team explore ways to overcome these mistakes in the future with a different path forwards or approach?

If the answer is no to the questions listed above, this could be a sign that teammates or employees across the organization lack psychological safety.

What is psychological safety?

A psychologically safe work environment encourages team members to speak up with ideas, concerns, or recent failures instead of choosing to remain silent.

According to Amy Edmondson, "psychological safety in the workplace is the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. It is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes."

When employees feel psychologically safe, they're willing to take more risks, share ideas, and speak their truth. There is an unspoken agreement that employees will not feel punished or embarrassed when speaking up, whether it's exposing one's ignorance by asking questions or offering a new solution or idea to a problem. Trust is created through interpersonal connections and reinforced through an open and transparent environment.

This engagement leads to uncharted collaboration, growth, and excellence. In fact, the 2017 Gartner Culture Workforce Survey found that when employees work in a psychologically safe environment, the discretionary effort can improve up to 24%. Discretionary effort means employees put in extra effort above and beyond what is expected because they want to.

Psychological safety and high-performing teams

Company retreats with trust falls and ice breakers can seem nonsensical, but at the core of these activities, there is a desire to create a space in which employees can be vulnerable-a judgment-free zone.

By having a psychologically safe environment, employees perceive risk as a good thing, and there is an understanding that employees won't be seen as ignorant, incompetent, or invalid. Risk in this context could mean challenging the status quo, pitching a novel idea, etc.

Teams thrive when they take risks and fail (or succeed!) fast. Instead of being stagnant, the momentum continues forward as employees learn from their mistakes. Risk-taking and learning from mistakes so the team doesn't repeat them again are behaviors of high-performing teams.

Evaluating your organization's psychological safety

Below are a few ways to gauge the level of psychological safety within your team or organization:

There is a tolerance for mistakes

Employees are open about the mistakes they made instead of avoiding them or, worse yet, covering mistakes up. When team members make mistakes there is a level of acceptance and it's not held against them. Leaders treat mistakes as an opportunity to learn and often communicate their own fallibility.

Micro-moments of learning occur regularly

Leaders model curiosity by sharing their ignorance on a topic and asking questions. Employees are empowered to ask questions, poke at proposals, and when the answer is unclear, employees are encouraged to level up through on-the-job learnings.

Space is created for reflection and review

The team takes time to learn from past performances to help with future improvements. Retrospectives allow teammates to discuss what went well and what didn't go so well. It's an opportunity to brainstorm ways to make future improvements. The 4Ls approach helps to structure team or one-on-one conversations and uncover what was liked, learned, lacked, or longed for after a particular project or after a certain timeframe such as a year or quarter.

Risk-taking is encouraged

Employees voice radical business and technical ideas. They're willing to take interpersonal risks by speaking up in meetings, voicing their concerns, and never settling without asking "why." These risks lead to deep levels of participation and ownership.

There is a diversity of thought

More and more organizations will continue to focus resources on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) efforts, and Gartner's research found a 1.8x increase in HR executives listing DEI as a top initiative from 2019 to 2020. Companies benefit from cognitive diversity as a result of varying levels of experience, background, gender, and age across the team. ​​There is no "strict power structure" mentality for ideas or initiatives from the leadership team and leadership team only. Employees, regardless of their role, seniority, or tenure, have an equally valid opinion.

Creating a workplace environment that promotes psychological safety is an art, and there is no silver bullet. There are unspoken agreements, company-wide values, leadership qualities, and technology to help support this ongoing work.

This is part one of a three-part series on psychological safety. Next, we discuss how to build a psychologically safe environment through continuous learning opportunities.

Tags: performance, psychological safety

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Psychological safety is critical for high-performing teams

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Big launches and milestone achievements deserve to be celebrated. When organizations take time to recognize the hard work that went into the completion of a release or even a bite-sized milestone, this helps employees recharge and stay motivated. The celebration might entail a release party, ending work a few hours early on a Friday, or a handwritten thank-you note.

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Psychological safety in teams: practices and activities - Alchemy Research & Consultancy

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It probably comes as no surprise that as teams are coming back together in person there is a lot of talk about mental health, and psychological safety. Over the last two years we have had to learn to be different kinds of teams at the same time as managing wide ranging personal challenges. We are now in another period of transition.

There have been two very public examples recently of high profile organisations (that will remain nameless but you'll know who they are!) where reviews have found toxic work cultures with junior staff members unable to speak up, cases of bullying, harassment, and wide ranging discriminatory attitudes.

These two things coming together have led me to revisit my thinking about the nature of teams and how we create the psychological safety that it is only reasonable to expect at work. Psychological safety can be defined as ' the belief that you will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions concerns or mistakes' (Edmondson, 2002)

Serendipity led me to a fantastic Twitter thread created by @tom_geraghty - he asked the organisational development community:

If you had to decide on 'one' practice that built psychological safety in teams, what practice or activity would you choose?

It's a very long thread with some fantastic responses. Well worth a look if you have a moment. Given we weren't able to post our selection box last Friday I thought I'd share a summary of Tom's thread responses with the things that stood out for me. The replies can loosely be grouped under:

Emotional climate

Culture

Processes and tools

Other noteworthy points

Emotional climate: lots of characteristics for what makes a safe environment - honesty, candour, vulnerability, transparency, playfulness, humility, accepting conflict without judging, kindness, admitting not knowing everything. Much of which were defined in terms of what was required of leadership, a definite leaning towards ego management.

Culture: lots about owning mistakes and embracing failure (in some cases celebrating failure); publicly sharing your own development goals as a leader; building engagement; treating people like adults; co-creation; working on the 'yes and...' principle, always building on ideas etc; dialogue; and deep listening.

Processes:

First and foremost, communications!

Ensemble programming

Training in mental health first aid and psychological safety

Lots of mentions for post event reviews, critical incident analyses, blameless reviews and stepping back and taking time out

Sharing experiences particularly the 'messy' details

360 degree reviews that focus on value and worth. An interesting way of reframing the 360 which often has quite negative connotations

Working on the basis of 'things to figure out' rather than to do lists

Using check-ins to create a human environment

Circle meetings

Regular training and coaching

Eating together and taking time out to just 'be' together

Taking holidays!

Invite dissent - listen deeply

Finding bright spots - those in the team who achieve more with less

Small change experiments so people can see that change is both possible and happening (a point I agree with wholeheartedly)

Honest to do lists with the following headings - to do, done, postpone, won't do anyway and too late!

Tools:

Please note I am not endorsing any of these, but they may be of interest or relevant for you:

The main theme that ran through many of the answers was that of respectful dialogue:

Asking great questions

Active and deep listening

Genuine conversations

Other points:
One response raised an interesting point about leader self-development/awareness; a proposal that the leader should be in therapy, having counselling or supervision. I am sure this will raise eyebrows but given the public examples of leadership we are experiencing at the moment there may be something important here to unpack.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It is an incredibly rich thread and I'm sure we'll pick up on some of the points in more detail. What would your 'one' practice be?

I'll end with a great quote from @hallOween138, their advice being:

Not to be an asshole, and have empathy and be humble.

References
EDMONDSON, A. C. 2002. Managing the risk of learning: Psychological safety in work teams, Division of Research, Harvard Business School Cambridge, MA.

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Psychological safety in teams: practices and activities - Alchemy Research & Consultancy

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It probably comes as no surprise that as teams are coming back together in person there is a lot of talk about mental health, and psychological safety. Over the last two years we have had to learn to be different kinds of teams at the same time as managing wide ranging personal challenges.

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If you had to decide on *one* practice that built psychological safety in teams, what practice or activity would you choose?

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If you had to decide on *one* practice that built psychological safety in teams, what practice or activity would you choose?

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If you had to decide on *one* practice that built psychological safety in teams, what practice or activity would you choose?
— 🇺🇦 Tom Geraghty (@tom_geraghty) February 1, 2022

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If you had to decide on *one* practice that built psychological safety in teams, what practice or activity would you choose?

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If you had to decide on *one* practice that built psychological safety in teams, what practice or activity would you choose?

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If you had to decide on *one* practice that built psychological safety in teams, what practice or activity would you choose?

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How Psychological Safety Creates Cohesion: A Leader’s Guide

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As Soldiers we learn personal courage means to face physical or moral fear, danger, and adversity. This is an Army Value for a reason, as fear is powerful enough to determine the decisions we make. Personal courage is frequently correlated to fearless acts of great honor on the battlefield, but seldomly to actions in garrison. If these fearless actions are carried out on the battlefield without hesitation, how do we channel that same energy into our daily lives and our organizations? An energy where we feel the cohesion that allows us to be brave enough to overcome personal fears and actively work for the well-being of our teammates? To create the psychological safety necessary for Soldiers to be courageous daily, leaders must create an inclusive culture built on trust. Psychological safety is a belief that an individual can speak up or take action without feeling they are risking rejection, punishment, or ostracization. However, for organizations to achieve psychological safety, they must identify and address its antithesis, psychological danger.

Psychological danger encompasses fear of negative repercussions or exclusion. If individuals feel they are not 'safe' enough to be honest, they will feel disconnected from their team thus fracturing unit cohesion. We see this quite often with the hesitancy to seek help through many of the Army's support programs. But if these programs exist to help, what do Soldiers fear they are risking?

Here are some examples of how fears manifest into negative self-talk and psychological danger:

* "I do not want to talk to the SHARP VA because I am scared I will get in trouble for doing something I was not supposed to be doing."

* "If I enroll in ASAP I will be labeled a drunk or addict."

* "If I tell someone I have suicidal ideations then they will see me as fragile and want to tiptoe around me."

* "If I go to EO about some racist or extremist interactions then I will be singled out as a snitch and a troublemaker."

What these thoughts have in common are the fears that being vulnerable puts us at risk of future exclusion, based on the assumed reactions of our leaders and peers. It is dangerous for leaders to perpetuate this mindset in our military culture because we then leave our Soldiers to fight alone, just as if we left them on the battlefield. Soldiers and leaders at all levels must invalidate these assumptions and remove these stigmatic fears, as everyone has a part in producing psychologically safe environments. So, what does psychological safety look like at each echelon?

Beginning at the individual level, self-awareness and accepting vulnerability play a huge role. Share how you like to communicate and what motivates you to work at your best. Embrace honest mistakes as learning opportunities and do not take criticism personally. A psychologically safe environment is not necessarily a comfortable environment. Be sure to understand the difference. Individuals must push themselves out of their mental comfort zones, just as if they were pushing themselves on a run or lifting weights at a gym. It is in those spaces that you grow stronger and perform better. Be sure to address negativity at every opportunity. Also, you must be willing to seek help, take responsibility for your actions, and give your leaders a chance to assist in your endeavors.

Leaders at the squad and team level are critical for voicing concerns and offering support both up and down the chain of command. Teams must be aware of Soldiers' strengths and weaknesses and where there could be vulnerabilities for in-groups and group think. Enforce discipline fairly and be accountable for the successes and failures of the team. If junior leaders are to promote inclusiveness, they must empower Soldiers to share ideas and validate their experiences. Junior leaders should be the first ones who Soldiers seek when they are fearful or need help. Advocate for them and fervently support them.

Lastly, the organization is responsible for breaking the stigma that certain resources can harm careers and are just "insurance" to cover leaders. Move beyond mandatory training and find innovative ways to educate the formation. A little humility can go a long way in showing that everyone can be fallible. Do not shut down criticism. Reward productive discourse and achievements. Encourage Soldiers to use these dedicated Army programs when necessary and ensure you follow up at every opportunity to demonstrate genuine support for the Soldiers' wellness. Leaders who establish daily dialogue with all ranks demonstrate a value for people over processes. This opens up opportunities for leaders to identify the root causes of exclusivity in formations while creating a culture conducive to trust and cohesion.

We are intrinsically motivated to want to belong and be valued, and the above stated strategies are a means to support this motivation in our units. Start asking yourself some questions to build self-awareness of how your actions are either psychologically safe or dangerous. Do you scoff at mandatory training? Do you have favorites? Do you publicly praise others? Do you gossip? Do you own your mistakes? Do you suffer in silence? We must analyze how our behaviors fall on the spectrum of psychological safety versus psychological danger. This is critical to remember in an Army that is people-oriented and relies on cohesive teams to fight and win. Soldiers are capable of doing amazing things because they know others "have their six." This is psychological safety, and it must extend to our daily battles so that we may exercise the personal courage that the Army profession values. Our actions and reactions matter, as they can cultivate or deteriorate an inclusive and listening environment. By closing that gap, you will move from exclusion to inclusion, from disconnection to understanding, and from fear to courage.
Maj. Kimberly Brutsche Capt. Tiarra McDaniel is an Adjutant General Officer currently serving as an instructor for MX400-Officership at the United States Military Academy. She has a master's in organizational psychology and leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. is an Air Defense Artillery Officer currently serving as the Assistant Course Director for MX400-Officership at the United States Military Academy. She has a master's in leadership studies from the University of Texas at El Paso.

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How Psychological Safety Creates Cohesion: A Leader's Guide

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As Soldiers we learn personal courage means to face physical or moral fear, danger, and adversity. This is an Army Value for a reason, as fear is powerful enough to determine the decisions we make. Personal courage is frequently correlated to fearless acts of great honor on the battlefield, but seldomly to actions in garrison.

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The History of Psychological Safety, Tom Geraghty: Psych Safety Meetup 25 January 2022

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The History of Psychological Safety, Tom Geraghty: Psych Safety Meetup 25 January 2022

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Psychological safety is an idea that has come into its own after being discovered, rediscovered, and now popularized. This slideshow explains the concepts and offers some excerpts from my delightful Friday Fireside Chat with Harvard’s @AmyCEdmondson.

https://t.co/ty2y0Mg3w8

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Somebody Always Knew: A Conversation Between Amy Edmondson And Rita McGrath, Top-Ranked Global Think

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Read Somebody Always Knew: A Conversation Between Amy Edmondson And Rita McGrath, Top-Ranked Global Think by Rita Mcgrath on Issuu and browse thous...

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Psychological safety is an idea that has come into its own after being discovered, rediscovered, and now popularized. This slideshow explains the concepts and offers some excerpts from my delightful Friday Fireside Chat with Harvard’s @AmyCEdmondson.

https://t.co/ty2y0Mg3w8

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Psychological safety is an idea that has come into its own after being discovered, rediscovered, and now popularized. This slideshow explains the concepts and offers some excerpts from my delightful Friday Fireside Chat with Harvard’s @AmyCEdmondson.https://t.co/ty2y0Mg3w8
— Rita Gunther McGrath (@rgmcgrath) January 19, 2022

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Psychological safety is an idea that has come into its own after being discovered, rediscovered, and now popularized. This slideshow explains the concepts and offers some excerpts from my delightful Friday Fireside Chat with Harvard’s @AmyCEdmondson.

https://t.co/ty2y0Mg3w8

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Psychological safety is an idea that has come into its own after being discovered, rediscovered, and now popularized. This slideshow explains the concepts and offers some excerpts from my delightful Friday Fireside Chat with Harvard’s @AmyCEdmondson.

https://t.co/ty2y0Mg3w8

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Psychological safety is an idea that has come into its own after being discovered, rediscovered, and now popularized. This slideshow explains the concepts and offers some excerpts from my delightful Friday Fireside Chat with Harvard’s @AmyCEdmondson.

https://t.co/ty2y0Mg3w8

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Conversations That Build Psychological Safety | QAspire

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As a leader, or a member of a team, you're probably pretty good at creating a psychologically safe environment where performance is high and people can flourish. Providing clarity of expectations, goals, team behaviours, and exhibiting generative leadership practices may be hard work, but it's achievable.

Building psychological safety in a team is one thing, but how do you scale out psychological safety across an entire organisation? In this article, we highlight some of the successful strategies that we've used to transform an organisation from one with pockets of psychologically safe, high performance teams, to one where psychological safety is the default standard throughout, including every person, every team, and extending all the way to the executive board. This is what Dr Amy Edmondson defined as a " learning organisation ": it's hard work, and it will take time, but again, you can get there.

Here are Four Approaches to Scaling Psychological Safety

These are four high-level strategies that describe essential approaches to long-term change. This article doesn't describe the details of the individual methods, behaviours, measurement of success, workshops, feedback and other actions and practices involved; for detailed hands-on guidance, refer to the psychological safety action pack.

Which practice you focus on will be determined by many factors, including your sphere of influence, your degree of authority, the size and shape of the organisation, the types of teams and structures, and the existing appetite for change. Identify which of the practices below best suit your situation - maybe you're able to adopt a single one, or maybe you can utilise more than one approach at the same time: or maybe you'll adopt one, then move to another. If you want help with any of these approaches, we can help!

Photo by Gage Smith on Unsplash

"The Shining Star"

Your aim in this case is to build a great example of what can be achieved, and influence other leaders across the organisation to do the same. Begin by identifying one team, or group of teams, that you're able to influence. Maybe you're in a leadership role, or a member of those teams. Work on the team practices, measurement approaches, values and behaviours that build psychological safety and establish a high performing, psychologically safe team - you can use the psychological safety action pack to do this. Evangelise to the rest of the organisation, showcasing the approaches you've taken and the results you've achieved. Ensure that you have the members of this team on board and be explicit and transparent about what you're trying to do, and recognise that members of the team may feel somewhat under a magnifying glass. Strong leadership will be required to support the team under this scenario.

Attract other leaders across the organisation by publicly sharing your story, and support them to adopt similar approaches. Given time, more and more leaders and teams across the organisation will be creating psychologically safe, generative, high performing teams.

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

"The Community of Excellence"

Your aim with this approach is to create a broad community, spanning multiple teams, functions or geographies of the organisation, who share a common enthusiasm and understanding of psychological safety. Whilst it's useful to have representatives from leadership within this community, it's more important that the members are diverse, enthusiastic, engaged, and motivated, so make it a welcoming, inclusive space where everyone feels they can contribute and get value from being a member. This community should co-create a manifesto or team charter in order to build cohesion and agree on ways of working and communicating.

Take a look at the Communities of Practice playbook shared in episode 41 of the psychological safety newsletter for an incredibly comprehensive guide to establishing a community such as this in your organisation. This community exists in order to evangelise and share best practices, showcase the benefits of psychologically safe environments, and provide a feedback mechanism for learning by doing. Members are able to carry out experiments and practices in their own teams and bring those findings back to the community so that the learning can be shared across the organisation.

"The Rebel Alliance"

Inspired by Gene Kim's "The Unicorn Project", the Rebel Alliance is similar to the Shining Exemplar approach, but may be more appropriate when in an organisation that has previously rejected a psychologically safe, generative or progressive transformation. In this case, as a member or leader of a team (or collection of teams), you may know that building a psychologically safe environment where people can excel, is the right thing to do, but explicit or implicit instructions for a different approach (such as command-control) are in place. This is the most risky approach, and likely to be hard work and stressful for leaders who push ahead with it, but if you're not averse to risk, ready for a challenge, and keen to do the right thing despite potential personal cost, this could be for you.

Again, it's important to set the scene for those teams and people involved. Ensure that everyone understands what your ambitions are, and that everyone is on board with any new approaches you take. Even though these practices might not be espoused by your organisation, you may decide to adopt regular retrospectives, define team charters, and change work practices and tools in order to build a high performance, psychologically safe unit. As a leader, you may need to manage the psychological safety gradient where your unit boundaries the rest of the organisation: maintaining that steep gradient of high versus low safety will be challenging, and this is where much of the burden will be shouldered.

When you have generated some success, and maybe you've also measured psychological safety in your team over time, you have the evidence to show that you did the right thing. After all, as Grace Hopper said, " it is easier to beg forgiveness, than get permission." And this is exactly the sort of situation Grace had in mind - where it's important to " Do the right thing within the organization, whether or not they know it. That way you can help the people that you work for." Now comes the hard part though - using that evidence to persuade other parts of the organisation to adopt these practices and move forward. You may choose to create a Community of Excellence as above, or you might go for the bold option, and shoot for a full transformation programme, as below:

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

"The Transformation Programme"

This might be the most heavyweight approach, but it's also the approach most likely to succeed at truly transforming an entire organisation, if done well and carried out with the full buy-in and support of senior leadership. And this buy-in is also your biggest challenge.

To achieve buy-in from an executive team or board, we need to speak their language, understand their motivations, and address their fears. The key point here is to understand what the organisation's goals and mission consist of. Some organisations are driven by rapid innovation: getting new products and services to market before competitors do. Some are driven by quality of service: ensuring that reliability, quality, and performance are of the highest standard, so that customers receive the best service possible. Others may be driven primarily by compliance with regulations, cost-efficiency, or positive impact on society. Ensure that you understand this mission before obtaining buy-in.

When you understand and can articulate the mission of your organisation, you need to understand how to present psychological safety to the leadership team in a way that shows that building it in the organisation will help achieve the mission's goals. Maybe psychological safety will help identify risks and threats to non-compliance, or maybe it will help generate new ideas and get them to market, or maybe it will help identify efficiency and quality improvements. This is the language you need to speak, and we can help with that through our Senior Leadership Ignite Sessions.

Once you have buy-in and enthusiasm from the senior leadership team, it's time to assemble the transformation team members. Similar to the Community of Excellence, this requires representatives fro al areas of the organisation, who possess enthusiasm for the change (again, potentially some work to do there), the capability and understanding to deliver, and the authority to make decisions and implement change. From here, the feedback loop-based approach as described in the Psychological Safety Action Pack will enable you to easily develop an organisation-wide programme of actionable change, based upon the process of Study - Measure - Build - Maintain - Reflect.

When is the transformation complete?

Sorry, but your work is never done! In part, because organisation changes, people leaving and joining teams, and changing priorities and needs, mean that an organisation is constantly in flux: tomorrow's organisation is not the same as today's. In significant part however, because psychological safety doesn't just take effort to create, it takes great effort to maintain, so your transformation programme should become part of your organisation itself.

Get in touch if you want to find out more, if you would like help transforming your organisation, or if you have any suggestions to improve this guidance!

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As a leader, or a member of a team, you're probably pretty good at creating a psychologically safe environment where performance is high and people can flourish. Providing clarity of expectations, goals, team behaviours, and exhibiting generative leadership practices may be hard work, but it's achievable.

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What is Psychological Safety and why should you care?

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8 minute talk on why psychological safety matters to software engineering teams 

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8 minute talk on why psychological safety matters to software engineering teams 

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What is Psychological Safety and why should you care?

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Why is psychological safety is important to software teams? 

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Why is psychological safety is important to software teams? 

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Short post on why psychological safety is important to software teams due to the complexity involved in the work

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JitGo Jitesh Gosai Tester, Speaker, Presenter

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4 minute read Update: Scroll to the bottom for a video of what is Psychological safety and why should you care in under 10 minutes.
Before you can answer this question you need to know what psychological safety is. Amy Edmondson in her book The Fearless Organisation describes it as:

The best way to understand what this means is to break down the three key areas.

Interpersonal is defined as relating to relationships or communication between people therefore interpersonal risks are issues that could affect relationships or communication. This can be thought of as others perceiving you to be:

ignorant - when you share you don't know something

incompetent - when you make a mistake as you don't know how to do something

negative - when you highlight mistakes, issues or potential problems

disruptive - when you make suggestions that are different to others or generally asking questions that no one else is

The most effective way to counteract these risks? Staying silent or limiting what you do say to just the bare minimum.

The problem here is that those very risks are some of the best ways we can learn from each other. By not taking those risks we slow or even limit the innovation opportunities for ourselves and others.

Work environment

This can vary from situation to situation but typically the group of people you find yourself working with to accomplish some goal. For software teams this is usually the team in which you work in day to day. But other working groups could also exist such as your peers across the department or the leadership team you are a part of.

Belief

This relates to the individual within a work environment and is what they think about taking interpersonal risks.

What does a psychologically safe environment look like?

Based on the above definition a work environment would be one that allows individuals to speak up and take interpersonal risks by asking questions, saying they don't know something, pointing out problems, admitting to making mistakes or make alternative suggestions without other people thinking less of them for it. In fact it is actively encouraged and rewarded to speak up in this way.

A point to note is that psychologically safe environments don't mean that there can never be any conflict. In fact it's quite the opposite and that conflict is almost a characteristic of psychologically safe environments. In an environment like this individuals can have different views but, importantly, can work through them productively without resorting to stalemate.

Complexity in the work environment

A lot of work done by software engineering teams can be thought of as complex. Complexity arises from a number of factors such as uncertainty in what needs to be done, how best to do it and if the outcome is even obtainable. On top of that no one person can understands all the intricacies involved with the work due to most systems being larger than any one person can fully understand. This leads to high levels of interdependence between team members while they carry out the work and learn more about the system as they go. This all needs highly effective collaboration between teams members to work out what needs to be done, how they will do it and how they will know it's been successful.

These are some of the core reasons why software teams adopt agile delivery methods as they take into account this complexity and allow the people involved to learn as they deliver the system.

Effective collaboration for group learning

Effective collaboration between team members isn't simply each person completing their part of the work and then handing this off to the next person like a production line. All this requires is effective cooperation between team members and coordination to fit all the pieces together*. The problems with this production line framing of the work is that it misses the interdependence that exists between team members due to the complexity in the work environment.

With effective collaboration individuals are able to learn from each other much more effectively as they are able to speak up and take the interpersonal risks without needing to second guess if their fellow team mates will think less of them for it.
*learn more about cooperation, coordination and effective collaboration using the scales of collaboration
Why is psychological safety important to software engineering teams?

Creating software systems needs people to share information due to the complexity involved with the work. One of the best ways to make sure that information can flow freely as possible is for the people involved to feel it is safe for them to take interpersonal risks. While this does not guarantee success, teams that do are more likely to identify issues, come up with solutions and implement them much quicker than teams that don't.

Psychological safety is a characteristic of highly performing teams and is a prerequisite for effective collaboration which is fundamental within software teams.

Video: What is Psychological safety and why should you care?

What do you think?

Do teams need psychological safety?

What else can they do to help smooth the flow of information in teams?

How have your teams addressed collaboration?

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Why is psychological safety important to software engineering teams? - JitGo Jitesh Gosai Tester, Speaker, Presenter

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4 minute read Update: Scroll to the bottom for a video of what is Psychological safety and why should you care in under 10 minutes. Before you can answer this question you need to know what psychological safety is. Amy Edmondson in her book The Fearless Organisation describes it as: The belief that the work ...

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#EP 20 : Swimming Upstream with Amy Edmondson

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#EP19: Swimming Upstream with Amy Edmondson

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Psychological safety is an emergent phenomenon: a property and state of a group that is felt (differently) by members of the group. For this reason, it's a difficult (but worthwhile) concept to study, and many efforts have been made to codify and structure psychological safety in both conceptual and practical frameworks.

There are multiple frameworks of psychological safety, ranging from Tim Clarke's "4 Stages" of psychological safety to Viktor Cessan's Integrative Framework, and the SAFETY model (which frankly, I can't help but feel was an acronym looking for a model). When I began to work on psychological safety a few years ago, I was frustrated by the lack of a framework (that I knew of) that provided not just a way to understand psychological safety, but also included methods to sensitively measure it alongside practical and achievable actions suggestions for leaders and team members to take in order to build it.

The psychsafety framework for implementation of psychological safety.

The Psychological Safety Action Pack is designed around an implementation framework of the practices of psychological safety that not only provides a somewhat conceptual model, but also (primarily) practical ways to measure, build, and maintain psychological safety in an organisation. In this article, I'm going to look at and describe the elements and foundations of that framework.

The psychsafety framework stands on the shoulders of giants, and builds on previous excellent work by W E Deming, Dr Amy Edmondson, among others. I don't intend to present it as entirely net new work, nor do I claim any ownership of the concepts. I only hope that we, as a community focussed on researching psychological safety, extolling the benefits, and empowering teams and organisations to create it, can collectively progress towards a state where psychological safety in teams is the new normal.

Image of the model for improvement with the PDSA Cycle via Clearing Up Myths About the Deming Cycle.

Many years ago, I learned about Deming's PDSA (Plan - Do - Study - Act) cycle, often framed instead as PDCA (Plan - Do - Check - Act). Deming preferred the term "study" as it suggests less a perfunctory "check", and more detailed analysis and true understanding of the system. What Deming is describing in the PDSA framework is essentially the scientific method, and an experimental approach. As we know through models such as Cynefin, the only truly successful way to operate and succeed in a complex, adaptive, sociotechnical system such as a large team or organisation, is through an experimental approach: Snowden describes this as a Probe - Sense - Respond cycle.

The Möbius Loop of the Open Practice Library adopts a similar approach:

This iterative, experimental approach to creating value is powerful, and encourages short, effective feedback loops in order to discover user needs, examine options, deliver, and analyse the results through discovery again.

And this is exactly the approach I took when creating the PsychSafety Framework during the Covid Pandemic of 2020:

The framework is based upon a cycle of Study - Measure - Build - Maintain - Reflect. The Study element is in homage to W E Deming, and is ideally the first stage, though you could, in theory, begin at any stage.

The simplified cycle can be seen as a reflective process of understanding and acting: to ensure that practitioners can not only decide what to do, but also reflect upon the success of their actions and take appropriate action. All too often, we get stuck in a Plan-Do cycle, forgetting to ensure we take the time to study and act on the learning.

The Five Phases

1 - Study. We begin with the study of psychological safety, because it's critical for leaders to understand what they are trying to do, what the impacts and benefits may be (as well as the dangers). In this phase, we may also put together a business case for a programme, if we need to persuade senior stakeholders of the value of the programme. In this phase, we also build enthusiasm and energy, alongside the theory.

2 - Measure. As with any improvement effort, if we don't take a baseline, we won't know if we've improved, and we won't know if the actions we're taking are having a positive or negative effect. The measurement phase includes carrying out surveys (granular to a team or business unit level), alongside education and training, and building enthusiasm for psychological safety across the organisation. The survey consists of 10 statements based upon Dr Amy Edmondson's research, which highlight any areas of concern in respect to the behaviours that engender psychological safety. More importantly, carrying out this phase also:

1. Educates people about psychological safety itself

2. Makes psychological safety a safe thing to talk about

3. Encourages the very behaviours that build psychological safety.

That is to say, even if you discarded the results of the survey, there would still be some positive impact. Please don't do that though, because the results inform the next phases of:

3 - Build. By highlighting areas of concern in respect to certain behaviours and practices (are mistakes used to blame team members, or used to create enquiry, or do team members feel they are able to suggest ideas?), we are able to identify crucial interventions and actions that are specific at a team level. Via the implementation of certain practices such as retrospectives, or workshops such as the fear conversation, we are able to build psychological safety within these team units. The same interventions, carried out at multiple layers of the organisation, create further momentum and improvement.

4 - Maintain. Psychological safety is not something we can build and forget about. We cannot measure it, run some workshops, and then go back to our "old ways" of command-control, blameful management. The maintain phase, whilst the least "exciting", is possibly the most important phase. This is where practices and behaviours become habits in teams and across the organisation.

5 - Reflect. This phase involves self-reflection alongside team level retrospection. It's absolutely crucial to ensure we learn from the previous phases before looping back to measurement once more. What practices and workshops succeeded? Which teams improved and where did we struggle? Do we need to modify the psychological safety survey to better suit the language and context of the people involved? These may be difficult lessons, but they are powerful and important.

Please feel free to apply this framework yourself and provide feedback to improve it, or adapt it to your own needs. To download the Psychological Safety Toolkit in its entirety, download it here.

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Psychological safety is an emergent phenomenon: a property and state of a group that is felt (differently) by members of the group. For this reason, it's a difficult (but worthwhile) concept to study, and many efforts have been made to codify and structure psychological safety in both conceptual and practical frameworks.

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We strive for psychological safety in our teams, but what comes after that? Psychological safety fulfils lower tiers in Maslow's hierarchy of needs but higher levels need "psychological enrichment", allowing true learning & experimentation: https://t.co/6axcdOLzy3 V @tom_geraghty

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This is the next step after psychological safety - HRM online

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You can't stop at offering staff psychological safety – that's a basic expectation. Here's how to take it to the next level.

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We strive for psychological safety in our teams, but what comes after that? Psychological safety fulfils lower tiers in Maslow's hierarchy of needs but higher levels need "psychological enrichment", allowing true learning & experimentation: https://t.co/6axcdOLzy3 V @tom_geraghty https://t.co/zBO00b6Vj7

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We strive for psychological safety in our teams, but what comes after that? Psychological safety fulfils lower tiers in Maslow's hierarchy of needs but higher levels need "psychological enrichment", allowing true learning & experimentation: https://t.co/6axcdOLzy3 V @tom_geraghty pic.twitter.com/zBO00b6Vj7
— Helen Bevan (@HelenBevan) November 14, 2021

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We strive for psychological safety in our teams, but what comes after that? Psychological safety fulfils lower tiers in Maslow's hierarchy of needs but higher levels need "psychological enrichment", allowing true learning & experimentation: https://t.co/6axcdOLzy3 V @tom_geraghty https://t.co/zBO00b6Vj7

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
We strive for psychological safety in our teams, but what comes after that? Psychological safety fulfils lower tiers in Maslow's hierarchy of needs but higher levels need "psychological enrichment", allowing true learning & experimentation: https://t.co/6axcdOLzy3 V @tom_geraghty https://t.co/zBO00b6Vj7

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We strive for psychological safety in our teams, but what comes after that? Psychological safety fulfils lower tiers in Maslow's hierarchy of needs but higher levels need "psychological enrichment", allowing true learning & experimentation: https://t.co/6axcdOLzy3 V @tom_geraghty

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Allison Metz, Ph.D. Professor of the Practice and Director of Implementation Practice, UNC Chapel Hill

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Psychological Safety – Workplace Training, Workshops and Consultancy on Psychological Safety, Just Culture, Resilience and High Performing Teams

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Hi, I’m Tom Geraghty, founder of Iterum Ltd

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Getting your seventh wind, and other small epiphanies

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It's been a long pandemic. We hope we are in the home stretch, but many of us in one way or another need to find our second wind. Or any wind. Pick a number.

I had a tiny epiphany about this over the weekend. As I have said in my writings, we are all leaders in our teams, at work and at home. And these days, those teams are demanding more of us than ever. Home and work are converging and overlapping, ebbing and flowing, in and out constantly.

At work and at home, every task seems 10 times more complicated. The interpersonal landscape seems 100 times more complicated.

My tiny epiphany flew in, as epiphanies often do, on the wings of something truly minor: dinner prep. Our whole family was in the kitchen at the same time. We were bumping into each other and standing in front of drawers that someone needed to get into. The sum total of those minor irritations brought on a wave of abject weariness.

I wrote about second winds in a more technical way last year in the Harvard Business Review. The context: millions of health care workers who now have to think in terms of marathons rather than sprints - and make the extraordinary happen on a daily basis.

But today my topic is more pedestrian: those facing the everyday struggles of leading a team at home and on the job.

That night in the kitchen, I felt tired of responsibility. I felt tired of mediating squabbles. I felt tired of deciding whose turn it was to get their way, doing truly ridiculous things like tallying up in my head how many nights we have watched Community, and how many we have watched Kimmy Schmidt. I was tired of worrying whether the evening's cook would adequately consider the vegetarians, and whether the people who like to work solo in the kitchen would annoy or be annoyed by the people who like to work in tandem.

Sometimes these are dangerous shoals which need to be navigated. Sometimes they are just puffs of wind that will subside. The art of leadership is knowing the difference.

That night in the kitchen it came to me like a blinding flash of the obvious: the one creating those puffs of wind was me. Our pod consists of adults who know how to cook, who know what food is in the house, and what we all want to eat. The one who was bumping into people and standing in front of drawers? Both literally and figuratively, it was me.

I was micromanaging - and exhausting myself and others in the process. I was acting like I had all the answers. I was dispensing wisdom on stone tablets from a great height.

I have written and published actual books on leadership and teamwork, and all of this flies in the face of my own words.

I gave myself a little talk, right then and there, right from Chapter 7 of The Fearless Organization: be honest about the challenge ahead, admit fallibility, be explicit about what you don't know, invite input, and respond constructively.

When you hear your own stone tablets crashing around your feet, it's the only reasonable thing to do.

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Getting your seventh wind, and other small epiphanies - Amy C. Edmondson

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It's been a long pandemic. We hope we are in the home stretch, but many of us in one way or another need to find our second wind. Or any wind. Pick a number. I had a tiny epiphany about this over the weekend.

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This is the next step after psychological safety - HRM online

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You can't stop at offering employees a psychologically safe workplace - that's just a basic expectation. Here's how to take it to the next level.

​​Psychological safety is a commonly discussed topic at the moment, and rightly so. Most employers understand that in order to get the best out of people, they need to provide an optimal psychological environment in which they can flourish.

"Psychological safety describes an environment where you believe you can offer ideas, ask for help or report a mistake without negative repercussions."

Why does this matter? That is the million-dollar question. Or rather, the billion-dollar question.

Mentally unhealthy workplaces cost the Australian economy about $60 billion a year , according to Deloitte. While there are plenty of factors contributing to this - such as from the pandemic, or our increasing tendency to overwork - from the University of Pennsylvania shows that feeling like you can't speak up at work also has significant impacts on wellbeing, as it can increase our likelihood of .

In short, if you want a thriving, innovative workplace culture, you need a foundation of psychological safety. However, it is just that - foundational. Employers don't get a pat on the back for simply catering to their people's baseline psychological needs. That would be the equivalent of an employee arguing they should be paid simply for showing up to work.

"Psychological safety is just one dimension, albeit an important one, that we need in our workplaces," says Edmondson. The way to think about it, she says, is as a means towards excellence. It's what is calling psychological enrichment - the things that motivate, challenge and inspire us at work.

"There are different ways of thinking about the fuel that motivates us to exert ourselves," says Edmondson.

What enrichment looks like for one person will be completely different for another. Someone might want their employer to help them live a healthier lifestyle, for instance; whereas enrichment for another person might look like sinking their teeth into a fascinating project that requires them to learn about something completely different from their 'day job'.

"When I think of psychological enrichment, I think of a garden," says Deb Travers-Wolf FAHRI, founder of I Lead Consulting.

"I've got this big row of plants I've been looking after for about three years now. I've watched them thrive then not thrive, and I try to figure out what the consistent factors are."

There's no silver bullet for psychological enrichment, she says. It's built upon a collection of purposeful acts.

However, one of the key elements, she thinks, is intentional inclusion efforts.

Lynda Edwards, Director of Consulting Operations and Insight Design at the NeuroLeadership Institute, points to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to demonstrate the difference between psychological safety, which exists in the lower two sections of the pyramid, and psychological enrichment, which kicks in from the third level up.

"We need psychological safety to survive," says Edwards. "If we think about the neurobiological response in terms of threat and reward, when people aren't psychologically safe, they're sitting in a threat state. In this state, their cognition is impacted, their creativity is impacted, their perception is impacted. And collaboration - playing nicely with others in the sandpit - doesn't happen."

It's the flight-or-fight state. If people feel in threat, which many would right now when you consider the world we are living in, they're potentially going to hunker down and hold back.

"That can encourage protectionist-type behaviours. They're not tapping into their discretionary effort. They're not going to add as much value. They might feel defensive and they're not going to feel fulfilled."

Helping an employee to feel enriched doesn't just mean eliminating the threats, says Edwards. You have to "take it to the next level".

"I think of it like those regenerative practices from farming - leaving the earth better than we found it. We need to think about this in terms of talent and leadership. How can we provide a sense of enrichment to our people so we leave them much better than when we found them?"

From psychological safety to a thrive state

"You'll have people who feel more valued, have greater wellbeing and resilience, and they'll be more motivated, which we know has significant positive health outcomes. All of that can be translated to the bottom line."

This might sound obvious, but despite the clear win for businesses, many organisations are still struggling to get to this ideal state. That's most likely because dealing with a collection of individuals and their respective needs and challenges can be tricky. But it could also be because some employers are stopping at the start point.

It's about setting high standards, facilitating impactful motivation and having a shared ambition or purpose, says Edmondson.

"I also think we as human beings want to be stretched so we grow. That feels good because we have something hard to do that we can eventually master," she says.

"Even if that's taking a process we currently have and making it just that tiny bit better. We get that feeling of 'I got well-used today.'"

This important sense of mastery or purpose could be achieved through a process known as 'job enrichment'. It's a concept popularised by psychologist Frederick Herzberg in the late 1960s, whereby an employee's work is altered in a way that makes it more stimulating or challenging, so they can learn new skills and stretch themselves.

Importantly, job enrichment isn't the same as job enlargement - i.e. simply expanding an employee's remit - which could result in further disengagement, burnout or increased intention to quit.

1. Skill variety - increasing the skills an employee uses (or needs to learn) to do their job.

2. Task identity - seeing a project through from start to finish to feel a sense of ownership.

3. Task significance - offering work that has a strong sense of purpose to the individual, organisation or other important stakeholders.

4. Autonomy - allowing employees to take on more decision-making power and giving them the freedom to choose when and how the work is completed.

5. Feedback - ensuring consistent, regular recognition of good work is shared throughout the organisation.

Neel Doshi, co-founder of Vega Factor, former partner at McKinsey & Company and author, might offer a sixth point to that framework: experimentation.

"Experimenting in your work is actually a lot of fun," he says. "It's very motivating.

If you have a job where you feel you can try things, see what works, try something different, and feel creative, you will be much more motivated to do that work."

When we go into crisis mode - when our physical, emotional or psychological safety is threatened - we tend to lean towards tactical work (rote tasks), he says. What people need to feel motivated is to engage in adaptive work (work that engages our creativity and ingenuity).

"How can we provide a sense of enrichment to our people so we leave them much better than when we found them?" - Lynda Edwards, Director of Consulting Operations and Insight Design, NeuroLeadership Institute

The trouble is, a thriving organisation requires a healthy balance of both sides. People need to be able to solve problems and challenge themselves, but tactical work is still required.

"Imagine if the building is on fire," Doshi . "People don't want you to empower them to find the door. If it's a genuine crisis, they want you to just tell them how to get out."

Many employers misdiagnose the moment they're in, he says. They always think the building is on fire. Therefore, they might double down on the rules or tighten employee freedoms and, often without realising, they smother the last lick of the flame that is that individual's sense of experimentation.

Leaders often don't have the confidence to try new things in crisis, says Travers-Wolf.

"When leaders are fearful, they play it safe, which makes exploring and experimenting really hard. But we know from research on high-performance teams that being able to explore far and wide increases not only our own performance, but our own intelligence."

Experimentation leads to a stronger sense of motivation. To demonstrate how impactful this can be on an individual and organisation's sense of enrichment, Doshi uses the example of a call centre he worked with.

"The opposite of purpose is fungibility - when you feel you're easily replaced. These days, call centres are designed to make [workers] completely fungible. You sit down, log into the phone system and then a customer is in your ear. The moment you log off, it's really no big deal because your calls are automatically redirected to hundreds of other call centre workers."

"We as human beings want to be stretched so we grow. That feels good because we have something hard to do that we can eventually master." - Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership, Harvard Business School

Doshi and his colleagues worked with a call centre in the insurance industry to increase employee motivation through experimentation.

"These are big football field-sized rooms with thousands of people, many of whom are in a low-play, low-purpose state," he says.

They asked the workers to identify the things they wanted to improve and made sure they were engaging in experimental work every week to solve these specific pain points.

"It took us a few weeks to set this up," says Doshi. "But within a week of working this way, a frontline call centre rep came up with a multi-million-dollar idea. This kind of stuff happens all the time."

We need to work together

Job satisfaction and psychological enrichment shouldn't just sit on a leader's shoulders alone, says Edwards.

"Co-creation around things like this is important," she says. "This approach does a couple of things. Firstly it tells people that they're valued and that they're masters of their own destiny. It gives employees autonomy to plan their work or the projects they want to work on, or to take on that volunteer opportunity, for example. We want to give people a sense of ownership and empowerment."

This is more likely to offer enrichment to an employee than taking a prescriptive route, she says, because if you assume you know what people need, there is a good chance you will get it wrong.

"You need to be asking them questions like, 'What would it look like for you to get more from your work and fill your cup?'

"Remember, sometimes it won't be about climbing the ladder. It could be being able to lean in and add value to something they feel strongly about, such as a particular project or part of the business."

We can't forget that our organisations are made up of living things, says Edwards.

"It's about enriching the individual and growing them in many ways, enriching the team through cross-skilling and enriching the organisation in terms of diversification."

This people-centric mindset is what has got businesses through the pandemic so far. And it will be the mark of a successful business strategy moving forward.

If all you do is plant the bulbs, dust off your hands and call it a day, you've got little chance of creating a thriving garden. You need to constantly tend to it and respond to its changing needs in order to see it blossom.
A longer version of this article first appeared in the October 2021 edition of HRM magazine. AHRI has a suite of fantastic health and wellbeing resources available for its members. Browse them all here.

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This is the next step after psychological safety - HRM online

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​​Psychological safety is a commonly discussed topic at the moment, and rightly so. Most employers understand that in order to get the best out of people, they need to provide an optimal psychological environment in which they can flourish. "Psychological safety describes an environment where you believe you can offer ideas, ask for help or report a mistake without negative repercussions."

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After studying ED teams, I am thrilled to share insights about how they work and some simple hacks to make them even better. 

Spoiler alert: psychological safety is what it’s all about - thanks @amyCEdmondson @RoisinODonovan4

#RCEMasc @RCEMevents @SocraticEM

A thread…

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
After studying ED teams, I am thrilled to share insights about how they work and some simple hacks to make them even better. 

Spoiler alert: psychological safety is what it’s all about - thanks @amyCEdmondson @RoisinODonovan4

#RCEMasc @RCEMevents @SocraticEM

A thread… https://t.co/5fDDSApq8F

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After studying ED teams, I am thrilled to share insights about how they work and some simple hacks to make them even better.

Spoiler alert: psychological safety is what it’s all about - thanks @amyCEdmondson @RoisinODonovan4#RCEMasc @RCEMevents @SocraticEM

A thread… pic.twitter.com/5fDDSApq8F
— Eve Purdy (@purdy_eve) October 5, 2021

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After studying ED teams, I am thrilled to share insights about how they work and some simple hacks to make them even better. 

Spoiler alert: psychological safety is what it’s all about - thanks @amyCEdmondson @RoisinODonovan4

#RCEMasc @RCEMevents @SocraticEM

A thread… https://t.co/5fDDSApq8F

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
After studying ED teams, I am thrilled to share insights about how they work and some simple hacks to make them even better. 

Spoiler alert: psychological safety is what it’s all about - thanks @amyCEdmondson @RoisinODonovan4

#RCEMasc @RCEMevents @SocraticEM

A thread… https://t.co/5fDDSApq8F

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
After studying ED teams, I am thrilled to share insights about how they work and some simple hacks to make them even better. 

Spoiler alert: psychological safety is what it’s all about - thanks @amyCEdmondson @RoisinODonovan4

#RCEMasc @RCEMevents @SocraticEM

A thread…

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‎Rewired: Employee Experience: 10. Fostering a Fearless Organisation with Amy Edmondson on Apple Podcasts

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We're back! On this episode: what does it take to be a fearless organisation? One where employees can raise new ideas, concerns and even share mistakes without hesitation. When people feel psychologically safe, organisations thrive: better ideas, greater risk taking, more learning and fewer disastrous decisions. Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School her groundbreaking research on creating psychological safety in the workplace. Plus: the secret behind Pixar's unprecedented success in the entertainment industry.
Episode Notes:
Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organizational learning. Her most recent book, "The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth", offers a practical guide for organizations striving for success in today's economy.

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10. fostering a fearless organisation with amy edmondson

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‎Rewired: Employee Experience: 10. Fostering a Fearless Organisation with Amy Edmondson on Apple Podcasts

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We're back! On this episode: what does it take to be a fearless organisation? One where employees can raise new ideas, concerns and even share mistakes without hesitation. When people feel psychologically safe, organisations thrive: better ideas, greater risk taking, more learning and fewer disastro...

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High Performance teams and Psychological Safety: Missile Destroyers, Super Computers and Chernobyl.

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High Performance teams and Psychological Safety: Missile Destroyers, Super Computers and Chernobyl.

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Co-authored with Per Hugander. Per is a strategic advisor helping executives achieve their goals by leveraging science and research in practice.
"Companies should mandate hygiene factors like ethics and psychological safety."

The comment-made by a participant in an executive program a few minutes into the first discussion of a brand new Harvard Business School case study, Leading Culture Change at SEB-caught us both by surprise. We had worked together on the case, which tracked a successful attempt to influence culture at the fifteen-thousand employee Nordic bank, directly aimed at building psychological safety and perspective-taking so as to enable candid, rigorous conversations about strategic priorities. We each had the same thought at that moment: Psychological safety is not a hygiene factor-defined as something that must be present for a work environment to qualify as adequate, such as a paycheck, benefits, employee physical safety, freedom from harassment, and so forth. Elucidated by Frederick Herzberg, building on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, hygiene factors don't create competitive advantage for a company. They merely satisfy basic expectations that free people up to focus on doing a good job. Creating psychological safety, in contrast, constitutes a high standard, an ambition that allows an organization to be truly excellent and capable of transformation.

Beyond the Basics

This is an important distinction, because psychological safety has the potential to offer a competitive advantage for most organizations, it is not table stakes for being in business. In a recent article, "4 steps to boost Psychological Safety at your workplace," we outlined an approach to developing the skills to create this advantage. Here we build on that work to explore how executives can arrive at the beginning of a transformational journey. To help, we introduce a hypothetical scale for conceptualizing different levels of psychological safety in an organization.

The scale ranges from 1-10, where a "2" or below represents a toxic environment with greater problems than the mere loss of employee voice, possibly including backstabbing, excessive self-protection that precludes focused, excellent work, and a guarded, suspicious approach to colleagues and managers. If that does not describe your workplace, that is certainly good news, but it's not the end of the story.

A company that falls between 3 and 6 on our scale presents a work environment that appears reasonably healthy, but in fact is less engaged, open, and learning-oriented than first meets the eye. Here, unbeknownst to many managers, countless good ideas are withheld, the information or help needed to do a job well is not sought, and teamwork and collaboration suffer, all without being visibly problematic or toxic. This is the quiet middle zone where the illusion of a healthy work environment persists.

The risk of this middle zone is that managers believe their culture is conducive to innovation or agility, when in reality it is more cautious and self-protective than they think. A handful of prominent case studies serve to illustrate this risk, notably, in recent years: Wells Fargo, VW, and Boeing. In these companies, ambitious business goals were not backed up with the open, candid work environment that would have been needed to achieve them. What happened instead was senior executives lived under the illusion that all was well, when in fact bad news was simply being withheld. The culture invisibly all but guaranteed strategic failure in each case.

Finally, the top of scale, say 7 and above, represents a significant culture achievement. Here is where people can-and do-engage in the hard, interpersonally risky, work of offering criticism, asking for help, sharing out-of-the-box ideas, engaging in dialogue, and other behaviors that promote good decisionmaking, learning, innovation, and ultimately excellence in a changing world.

Recognizing and Overcoming An Interpersonally Risk-Averse Culture

"We don't have a problem with psychological safety" is a phrase we have both encountered in organizations we've studied or worked with several times. Of course, it may be true. But more often than not, even though the organization lacks a toxic environment, people may still shy away from the interpersonal risks necessary to making progress on the transformative strategies the market environment demands. For organizations operating in a predictable environment (as was the case in many industries before the COVID-19 pandemic, or before digitalization transformed so many business models) a medium level of psychological safety might have been good enough to maintain a solid position. However, if a demanding, fast-changing environment calls for agility, innovation, or transformation to succeed, this will not be adequate. The necessary level of candor and vulnerability are missing.

When leaders choose to build the level of psychological safety conducive to genuine risk-taking and learning, they improve their chances of success. Despite such organizational cultures being relatively rare, we do not mean to imply that creating them requires heroics or miracles. Both of us have studied and helped with such transformations. For example, in our case study of SEB, one executive reported, "The results came quicker than we expected, and they came in the shape of quicker decisions, better decisions. You slow down to speed up. Strategic problems that had been around for a while, we were able to solve them relatively quickly. Internally and with external stakeholders."

The goal of the intervention at SEB was to strengthen psychological safety and dialogue skills to improve performance in the organization's fast-changing, demanding market environment. Focused training, as we previously outlined, appears to create strategic progress both for incumbents aiming to adjust to a new environment and for startups that need to transform as they grow rapidly. But crucial to doing this work is recognizing the particular challenges of measuring psychological safety. Research shows that those further up the hierarchy tend to experience higher psychological safety than those lower, despite depending on them for input, ideas, and challenging questions. We believe that the conceptual scale we present in this article can help by making the risky middle zone salient.

Invite Others to Shape the Journey

We have worked with hundreds of executives who have tackled the challenge of altering how they think and interact with peers and subordinates so as to improve business performance. By making a few simple (not easy) tweaks to their leadership behavior, especially in how they set the stage, invite others' voices, and respond to bad news or challenges, the executives' conversations slowly transform to become more authentic, courageous, and productive. It becomes clear that psychological safety is neither a hygiene factor nor (our other pet peeve) the "soft stuff" to push aside in favor of hard-nosed business concerns. But getting to this point starts with recognizing the risks lurking in ostensibly healthy workplaces in which holding back sensitive information is the invisible norm.

We have found that discussing our scale so as to explain its three basic zones helps build motivation to take the following steps to move further to the right, from anywhere on the spectrum.

1. Articulate the compelling performance goals the team or organization seeks to achieve.

2. Explain why achieving these goals requires people to voice ideas, challenge each other, and be open about problems and failures along the way.

3. Ask your team members for ideas about how to hold yourselves accountable for moving to the right on the psychological safety scale.

4. Agree on a schedule for checking in to assess progress on the business and culture goals as a means for making changes in what will necessarily be an iterative journey.

This approach prioritizes a team or an organization's performance goals as a way of opening up discussions of culture, rather than the other way around. It also helps people understand that the absence of toxicity is not evidence of cultural health and helps executives to see psychological safety as a key to success in a transforming industry while also appreciating the challenge that lies ahead if they choose to hold themselves accountable for building it.

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Psychological Safety Is Not a Hygiene Factor

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It's a key to success in times of transformation.

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62. CANDOR, CURIOSITY & COMPASSION / Amy C Edmondson - Nathalie Nahai

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I speak with Professor Amy C. Edmondson about the role of psychological safety in teamwork, business and innovation, in a digital world.

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McKinsey: Psychological Safety and the importance of Leadership Development

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When employees feel comfortable asking for help, sharing suggestions informally, or challenging the status quo without fear of negative social consequences, organizations are more likely to innovate quickly, unlock the benefits of diversity, and adapt well to change -all capabilities that have only grown in importance during the COVID-19 crisis. Yet a McKinsey Global Survey conducted during the pandemic confirms that only a handful of business leaders often demonstrate the positive behaviors that can instill this climate, termed psychological safety, in their workforce.

As considerable prior research shows, psychological safety is a precursor to adaptive, innovative performance-which is needed in today's rapidly changing environment-at the individual, team, and organization levels. For example, successfully creating a " network of teams "-an agile organizational structure that empowers teams to tackle problems quickly by operating outside of bureaucratic or siloed structures-requires a strong degree of psychological safety.

Fortunately, our newest research suggests how organizations can foster psychological safety. Doing so depends on leaders at all levels learning and demonstrating specific leadership behaviors that help their employees thrive. Investing in and scaling up leadership-development programs can equip leaders to embody these behaviors and consequently cultivate psychological safety across the organization.

A recipe for leadership that promotes psychological safety

Leaders can build psychological safety by creating the right climate, mindsets, and behaviors within their teams. In our experience, those who do this best act as catalysts, empowering and enabling other leaders on the team-even those with no formal authority-to help cultivate psychological safety by role modeling and reinforcing the behaviors they expect from the rest of the team.

Our research finds that a positive team climate-in which team members value one another's contributions, care about one another's well-being, and have input into how the team carries out its work-is the most important driver of a team's psychological safety. By setting the tone for the team climate through their own actions, team leaders have the strongest influence on a team's psychological safety. Moreover, creating a positive team climate can pay additional dividends during a time of disruption. Our research finds that a positive team climate has a stronger effect on psychological safety in teams that experienced a greater degree of change in working remotely than in those that experienced less change during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet just 43 percent of all respondents report a positive climate within their team.

Positive team climate is the most important driver of psychological safety and most likely to occur when leaders demonstrate supportive, consultative behaviors, then begin to challenge their teams.

During the pandemic, we have seen an accelerated shift away from the traditional command-and-control leadership style known as authoritative leadership, one of the four well-established styles of leadership behavior we examined to understand which ones encourage a positive team climate and psychological safety. The survey finds that team leaders' authoritative-leadership behaviors are detrimental to psychological safety, while consultative- and supportive-leadership behaviors promote psychological safety.

The results also suggest that leaders can further enhance psychological safety by ensuring a positive team climate (Exhibit 1). Both consultative and supportive leadership help create a positive team climate, though to varying degrees and through different types of behaviors.

With consultative leadership, which has a direct and indirect effect on psychological safety, leaders consult their team members, solicit input, and consider the team's views on issues that affect them. Supportive leadership has an indirect but still significant effect on psychological safety by helping to create a positive team climate; it involves leaders demonstrating concern and support for team members not only as employees but also as individuals. These behaviors also can encourage team members to support one another.

Another set of leadership behaviors can sometimes strengthen psychological safety-but only when a positive team climate is in place. This set of behaviors, known as challenging leadership, encourages employees to do more than they initially think they can. A challenging leader asks team members to reexamine assumptions about their work and how it can be performed in order to exceed expectations and fulfill their potential. Challenging leadership has previously been linked with employees expressing creativity, feeling empowered to make work-related changes, and seeking to learn and improve. However, the survey findings show that the highest likelihood of psychological safety occurs when a team leader first creates a positive team climate, through frequent supportive and consultative actions, and then challenges their team; without a foundation of positive climate, challenging behaviors have no significant effect. And employees' experiences look very different depending on how their leaders behave, according to Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School (interactive).

What's more, the survey results show that a climate conducive to psychological safety starts at the very top of an organization. We sought to understand the effects of senior-leader behavior on employees' sense of safety and found that senior leaders can help create a culture of inclusiveness that promotes positive leadership behaviors throughout an organization by role-modeling these behaviors themselves. Team leaders are more likely to exhibit supportive, consultative, and challenging leadership if senior leaders demonstrate inclusiveness-for example, by seeking out opinions that might differ from their own and by treating others with respect.

The importance of developing leaders at all levels

Our findings show that investing in leadership development across an organization-for all leadership positions-is an effective method for cultivating the combination of leadership behaviors that enhance psychological safety. Employees who report that their organizations invest substantially in leadership development are more likely to also report that their team leaders frequently demonstrate consultative, supportive, and challenging leadership behaviors. They also are 64 percent more likely to rate senior leaders as more inclusive (Exhibit 2). However, the results suggest that the effectiveness of these programs varies depending upon the skills they address.

Reorient the skills developed in leadership programs

Organizations often attempt to cover many topics in their leadership-development programs. But our findings suggest that focusing on a handful of specific skills and behaviors in these learning programs can improve the likelihood of positive leadership behaviors that foster psychological safety and, ultimately, of strong team performance. Some of the most commonly taught skills at respondents' organizations-such as open-dialogue skills, which allow leaders to explore disagreements and talk through tension in a team-are among the ones most associated with positive leadership behaviors. However, several relatively untapped skill areas also yield beneficial results (Exhibit 3).

Two of the less-commonly addressed skills in formal programs are predictive of positive leadership. Training in sponsorship-that is, enabling others' success ahead of one's own-supports both consultative- and challenging-leadership behaviors, yet just 26 percent of respondents say their organizations include the skill in development programs. And development of situational humility, which 36 percent of respondents say their organizations address, teaches leaders how to develop a personal-growth mindset and curiosity. Addressing this skill is predictive of leaders displaying consultative behaviors.

Development at the top is equally important

According to the data, fostering psychological safety at scale begins with companies' most senior leaders developing and embodying the leadership behaviors they want to see across the organization. Many of the same skills that promote positive team-leader behaviors can also be developed among senior leaders to promote inclusiveness. For example, open-dialogue skills and development of social relationships within teams are also important skill sets for senior leaders.

In addition, several skills are more important at the very top of the organization. Situational and cultural awareness, or understanding how beliefs can be developed based on selective observations and the norms in different cultures, are both linked with senior leaders' inclusiveness.

Looking ahead

Given the quickening pace of change and disruption and the need for creative, adaptive responses from teams at every level, psychological safety is more important than ever. The organizations that develop the leadership skills and positive work environment that help create psychological safety can reap many benefits, from improved innovation, experimentation, and agility to better overall organizational health and performance.

As clear as this call to action may be, "How do we develop psychological safety?" and, more specifically, "Where do we start?" remain the most common questions we are asked. These survey findings show that there is no time to waste in creating and investing in leadership development at scale to help enhance psychological safety. Organizations can start doing so in the following ways:

Go beyond one-off training programs and deploy an at-scale system of leadership development. Human behaviors aren't easily shifted overnight. Yet too often we see companies try to do so by using targeted training programs alone. Shifting leadership behaviors within a complex system at the individual, team, and enterprise levels begins with defining a clear strategy aligned to the organization's overall aspiration and a comprehensive set of capabilities that are required to achieve it. It's critical to develop a taxonomy of skills (having an open dialogue, for example) that not only supports the realization of the organization's overall identity but also fosters learning and growth and applies directly to people's day-to-day work. Practically speaking, while the delivery of learning may be sequenced as a series of trainings-and rapidly codified and scaled for all leaders across a cohort or function of the organization-those trainings will be even more effective when combined with other building blocks of a broader learning system, such as behavioral reinforcements. While learning experiences look much different now than before the COVID-19 pandemic, digital learning provides large companies with more opportunities to break down silos and create new connections across an organization through learning.

Invest in leadership-development experiences that are emotional, sensory, and create aha moments. Learning experiences that are immersive and engaging are remembered more clearly and for a longer time. Yet a common pitfall of learning programs is an outsize focus on the content-even though it is usually not a lack of knowledge that holds leaders back from realizing their full potential. Therefore, it's critical that learning programs prompt leaders to engage with and shift their underlying beliefs, assumptions, and emotions to bring about lasting mindset changes. This requires a learning environment that is both conducive to the often vulnerable process of learning and also expertly designed. Companies can begin with facilitated experiences that push learners toward personal introspection through targeted reflection questions and small, intimate breakout conversations. These environments can help leaders achieve increased self-awareness, spark the desire for further growth, and, with the help of reflection and feedback, drive collective growth and performance.

Build mechanisms to make development a part of leaders' day-to-day work. Formal learning and skill development serve as springboards in the context of real work; the most successful learning journeys account for the rich learning that happens in day-to-day work and interactions. The use of learning nudges (that is, daily, targeted reminders for individuals) can help learners overcome obstacles and move from retention to application of their knowledge. In parallel, the organization's most senior leaders need to be the first adopters of putting real work at the core of their development, which requires senior leaders to role model-publicly-their own processes of learning. In this context, the concept of role models has evolved; rather than role models serving as examples of the finished product, they become examples of the work in progress, high on self-belief but low on perfect answers. These examples become strong signals for leaders across the organization that it is safe to be practicing, failing, and developing on the job.

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Psychological safety and the critical role of leadership development

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When employees feel comfortable asking for help, sharing suggestions informally, or challenging the status quo without fear of negative social consequences, organizations are more likely to innovate quickly, unlock the benefits of diversity, and adapt well to change -all capabilities that have only grown in importance during the COVID-19 crisis.

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When it comes to effecting change, they say the best approach is any approach that you'll stick to-and that certainly goes for digital transformation. Nevertheless, in our experience working with large companies, we've seen that some strategies work better than others. For example, we recently shared why starting small should always be your Plan A for your digital transformation: because of how it aids you in validating your ability to execute, arms you with evidence of success to fend off skeptics, and nets you additional resources to invest.

Beyond starting small, there are other tenets that we follow internally that we strongly believe to be universally useful and necessary in any organization that embarks on its own digital transformation. Chief among them is the importance of establishing a culture of psychological safety. This is especially true for the teams who are doing the heavy lifting on your digital transformation projects. Because while psychological safety is important for everyone, it's especially critical for employees being asked to be creative, move fast, and to take risks.

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety refers to an individual's perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk. The term was first popularized by organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson of Harvard. She postulated that psychological safety is essential whenever people face uncertainty and interdependence-two words that often come up when people talk about digital transformation.

At Google, we've come to appreciate the value of psychological safety through our own research. Between 2012-2014, Google People Operations (what we call HR) set out to understand what sets apart high performing teams using data and statistical analysis.

The results? Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, and that a sense of psychological safety within the team was the most important of the five predictors identified. Our guide on team effectiveness on our Re:work With Google site has all the details.

Statistical analysis identified the five most important characteristics of an effective team, of which psychological safety is most important.
re:Work with Google

An emphasis on psychological safety is something that we try to keep at the core of our culture. In fact, our managers' performance is evaluated by their direct reports in part on how well they create a psychologically safe environment in their team.

For example, there's the blameless postmortem, a cultural tenet of Google's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) methodology. In a blameless postmortem, engineers "focus on identifying the contributing causes of the incident without accusing any individual or team of bad or inappropriate behavior," say John Lunney and Sue Lueder, two Google Site Reliability Engineers. Why is this so important? "If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams for doing the 'wrong' thing prevails, people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment."

Psychological safety is also something that differentiates the best-performing DevOps organizations from lower-performing teams. Specifically, our DevOps Research & Assessment (DORA) program identifies a generative culture as one of the key factors that sets high and elite performers apart.

Table 1: The Westrum Organizational Typology Model (2004)
Ron Westrum

In other words, based on the research, we empirically know that teams with a culture that doesn't 'shoot the messenger' but values learning and safety will have higher throughput-shorter lead times, increased deployment frequency, and better stability metrics.

So what does practicing psychological safety look like?

Harvard's Edmondson suggests three exemplary behaviors:

1. Frame the work as a learning problem and not an execution problem

2. Acknowledge your own fallibility

3. Model curiosity and ask lots of questions

Bringing it back to digital transformation, when you embark on a large program, the initial focus is often on staffing plans and workstream charters. Thinking about 'how we will be' is often lost in the hustle and bustle of mobilizing, but this is exactly the right time to explicitly address it, setting the foundation of how all parties will work together. This is why we emphasize psychological safety when we kick off our largest customer programs.

The kickoff workshop can take the form of the co-creation of 'golden rules' for how we'll work together, or a manifesto of behaviors that everyone signs up for. But the key is a shared expectation that everyone will adhere to creating an environment of psychological safety, leaders, and team members alike.

Of course, each team's rules and behaviors will have their own particular flavor. What's really important is that you sustain them beyond the kickoff. We've found that something salient to create a ritual or habit can be particularly effective for this; it could be as simple as a quick 'check-in' to ask people what's on their mind before a meeting starts. Or it could be something deliberately a little bit 'off the wall'; for example, in a recent coaching cohort, the group decided to start each workshop by drawing an emoji representing their mindset that day-and explaining their choice to their peers. Aside from getting to examine your peers' scribbling skills, it adds a degree of structure to the start of a meeting which is normally free-form small-talk and gives the whole group permission to connect quickly to make the discussion more productive.

How do you start today

Kickoffs aside, there is one thing that everyone on your team can do, starting today, and which takes no practice at all: when communicating remotely, turn on your webcam! It's the next best thing to having everyone in the same room, sitting in a circle.

So much of our interpersonal communication is non-verbal in nature. Without eye contact and body language there's no telling whether a colleague is silent because they are attentively listening, distracted, or in resentful disagreement.

Turning on your camera during meetings will ensure you pick up all the nonverbal cues essential to proper communication.
Google Cloud

At Google, we are convinced of the positive power of being seen that we made it the default setting in Google Meet. Unlike most other video conferencing solutions, before joining a virtual meeting we present you with the choice of turning off your camera, not the other way around. It's also why we worked hard to make sure Google Meet can display up to 49 participants' video feeds simultaneously.

This might have felt like a big step, pre-pandemic, but it's really only a start; and there are also several additional, small tactics to make the conversation equitable.

As mentioned earlier, creating a ritual to more equitably 'share voice' helps ensure there isn't a 'two class' meeting where some people speak and everyone else listens. There are also a range of Meet add-ons to track 'talk time' within a meeting, identifying if anyone is 'hogging' the conversation and helping to nudge each participant to share and be heard.

All that said, being seen and heard isn't right for everybody. When fielding questions and answers (Q&A) from your team in the traditional way, you are likely to solicit primarily the opinions of those most extroverted and/or those most senior-even in a psychologically safe environment. You will hear the most passionately held opinions, not necessarily the most insightful or pertinent ones. You also won't hear the silent majority. This is where a simple Q&A software tool can be a game changer. Whether you use the feature integrated into your video conferencing solution (like Google Meet) or you use use third-party software as a service, fielding questions from your team in written form and letting the entire team upvote those questions/suggestions with the most merit or urgency gives voice to those whose natural state it is to not raise their own voice. And it gives you the confidence that the top ranked questions/comments are deserving of your attention and thoughtful consideration. Of course, this only works if you fully commit to the tool and announce that you will ONLY answer questions posted there! You can find more ideas in Google's distributed working playbook.

In summary, psychological safety is as much about unlocking the full potential of your teams as it is about honestly recognizing the interdependent and uncertain nature of the challenge ahead.

And the earlier you can begin to model the Edmonson's suggested behaviors, establish "golden rules" and ensure everyone can be seen and heard, the more natural it will feel, the easier it will be to maintain, and the greater success you will have on your digital transformation journey.
For more insights about how to succeed with your digital transformation team, stay tuned for our next article, where we'll discuss the benefits of building small, cross-functional teams.

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Google Cloud BrandVoice: Safe Space: How Psychological Safety Can Make Your Team More Effective

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When it comes to effecting change, they say the best approach is any approach that you'll stick to-and that certainly goes for digital transformation. Nevertheless, in our experience working with large companies, we've seen that some strategies work better than others.

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A study conducted by Google's People Operations team set out to answer this question: What makes a team effective? After two years of research with 200+ interviews amongst Google team members, the study revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety (the belief that you won't be punished when you make a mistake).

Follow along as we recap our expert #ManagerChats panelist's answers to common questions about psychological safety!

What is Psychological Safety?

Ensuring psychological safety is important if you want a healthy and safe environment. To expect your employees to be vulnerable and share their ideas (especially conflicting ones), you must provide this environment.

According to Alice Ko, Gallup Certified Strengths Coach & Startup Coach, "psychological safety is feeling safe enough to...

Be authentically YOU

Share honest ideas, no matter how bizarre

Speak your mind

Tell your manager & CEO what you REALLY think

Not censor oneself (with respect for others in mind of course)"

How to measure psychological safety

Now that we know what psychological safety is, how do we measure it? All of our expert panelists have shared that the best way to measure psychological safety is to ask questions!

Asking team members questions through regular check-in surveys will anonymously get your team members' opinions on whether they feel that they are in a psychologically safe environment or not.

Richard McLean, Senior Director at Elsevier Connect, suggests asking your team members a series of 7 questions and rating them from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree" to measure psychological safety:

1. If I make a mistake in this team, it is held against me.

2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.

3. People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.

4. It is safe to take a risk in this team.

5. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.

6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.

7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

7 Tips to promote a psychologically safe environment

1 Promote an empowering culture

Promoting an empowering culture will encourage team members to speak up and be vulnerable.

According to Alice Ko, following these tips will promote an empowering culture:

Be transparent

Follow through on your actions

Own up to your mistakes

Accept diverse opinions and strengths

Reward bravery

2 Learn to handle (and encourage) opposing views

Learning how to handle opposing views is an important step in fostering psychological safety. Not every team member is likely to see eye-to-eye. And these differences are what create conversation. However, guiding the conversation positively is very important to ensure that each person, no matter their viewpoint, feels safe sharing their ideas.

Furthermore, having a variety of viewpoints is what makes a team strong. We've all been in a similar situation; you come up with an idea and are so excited to share it that you don't look at the idea from all different angles. This blind spot is very common and can be avoided by encouraging different viewpoints to get a variety of perspectives.

3 Ask for criticism

In addition to learning how to handle opposing viewpoints, it is also important to learn how to ask for criticism. Asking for criticism will encourage team members to share their opposing views on an idea and ensure them that this is a safe place to speak up.

Mallam Tamon added to the conversation and said that to earn trust, you must ask for criticism; "Specifically ask, 'Now I only want to hear criticism of this idea'. Listen, say 'Thank You', and only ask clarifying questions".

Pro tip

Use a meeting management tool like Fellow to have a collaborative agenda so everyone can voice their questions, opinions, and document views.

4 Engage human to human (not boss to employee)

When somebody is authoritatively talking to you, it can make you feel uncomfortable. Therefore, engaging with your employees as a human and not as their superior will show them that you respect them and that everyone's opinion is equal.

According to Dr. Soracha Cashman, trust is everything in psychological safety, and by engaging human to human rather than boss to employee, you can foster trust in your relationship.

5 Encourage risk-taking and failure

For managers to expect their employees to take risks, they must provide a psychologically safe environment. Taking risks, especially in a group setting, makes us vulnerable. Therefore, it is important to know how to create an environment where employees feel safe to be vulnerable and try new things around their co-workers.

It can be scary speaking up because of the risk of failing. But failure only makes you stronger and being in a supportive environment will encourage employees to not fear failing.

According to Amanda Greenberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Balloon, failure does not exist. She views the act of failing as an opportunity to learn something and grow.

6 Provide constructive feedback

There can be a fine line between constructive feedback and negative criticism. Therefore, to provide a psychologically safe environment, you must learn how to give feedback constructively.

Following Dr. Soracha Cashman's feedback checklist, you can ensure your feedback is constructive and not a criticism:

Feedback should outline the issue and show how to fix it

Feedback should be said in a positive way

Feedback should come from a caring place

Feedback should be timed appropriately

Feedback should be private (not for the rest of the team to see)

Feedback should come from the correct person (not your co-worker, but your boss)

7 Speak last

Mallam Tamon shares that by speaking last, employees will not feel like they need to align with their bosses. So, by letting your employees speak first, you are letting them share their thoughts and ideas without trying to agree with their superiors. This will facilitate a psychologically safe environment by making sure that your employees know that their opinions matter.

Parting advice

Fostering a psychologically safe workplace is extremely important. As a manager, it is your responsibility to ensure that your employees feel safe to express their thoughts and ideas. By promoting an empowering culture, encouraging opposing views, asking for criticisms, engaging human to human, encouraging risk-taking and failure, providing constructive feedback, and speaking last, you can foster psychological safety in your workplace.

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What is Psychological Safety? (FAQ with Management Experts) | Fellow.app

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We asked management experts how they create a psychologically safe workplace. Follow their top tips for psychological safety in the office.

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In this episode, Mandi Walls talks with Tom Geraghty, Transformation Lead at Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs, about psychological safety and why it is crucial for modern high-performing teams.

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Harvard Business School: How To Build Fearless Organizations - Episode 51 - Scaling Culture

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Our guest is Amy Edmondson - Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School.Amy has authored multiple books, including her most recent, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation ...

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© Highbrow, 2022. All rights reserved.

When you visit or interact with our sites, services or tools, we or our authorised service providers may use cookies for storing information to help provide you with a better, faster and safer experience and for marketing purposes.

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creating psychological safety in your teams

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Creating Psychological Safety in Your Teams | Listenable

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This audio course will teach you how to create psychological safety in your team. Whether you are a team lead, team manager, director, or an employee, you can find actionable insights in this course.

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Is it Safe to Speak Up at Work? - WorkLife with Adam Grant

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Are you afraid to share bad news, ask for help, or admit you were wrong? These are signs of being in a psychologically unsafe work environment.

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Flip the Script E2: What does psychological safety really mean?

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Listen to this episode from Flip The Script on Spotify. My guests today are Laura Delizonna, Stanford instructor and executive coach, and Daniela Landherr, Head of Talent Engagement at Google in EMEA. In this episode we discuss a question that has been preying on mind for quite a while: Why is psychological safety so attractive in theory and yet so rare in practice?

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We can all perhaps think of examples where colleagues, maybe even ourselves, have been forced or gently nudged out of an organization for voicing unpopular opinions. This may be providing candid feedback on the status of a project or the performance of a peer, it might be altogether more serious and involve blowing the whistle on major indiscretions. The logical course of action is for organizations to listen and take on board this information so that they can improve, but we have all probably experienced organizations where that does not happen and the easiest course of action is to get rid of the dissenting voice.

This not only has negative consequences for the individuals that are forced out but also for those left behind, as it creates what Harvard's Amy Edmondson calls a "psychologically unsafe" environment. It is a concept that Edmondson first proposed in a hugely influential published in 1999, in which she highlighted that in hospital teams, the best teams counterintuitively made the most mistakes.

The finding may seem strange, but the reality of the situation was that they were not actually making more mistakes than other teams, but they were highlighting the mistakes that were made rather than brushing them under the carpet. It is the kind of mind-shift that companies like car giant Toyota go through every time they open a new factory, complete with the company's famous andon cord, which allows any employee to halt the production line if they spot something going wrong. To start with, it takes a lot of guts for even the most senior employees to do something so drastic, but the company insists on learning about problems as quickly as possible, so they work hard to create a psychologically safe environment to encourage the cord to be pulled. It results in even award-winning plants like in Lexington, Kentucky, seeing the cord pulled hundreds of times.
Freedom to speak up
The Toyota example highlights the important role psychological safety plays in uncovering mistakes, but in Edmondson's latest book The Fearless Organization , she goes much further than that. Indeed, she argues that business today is largely a talent-driven affair, but the talent on its own is not enough for organizations to thrive. Instead, we need to create organizations that are free of fear so that creativity and teamwork are not stifled.

What is more, if you don't have such a culture, you create an environment where rather than owning up to mistakes, as is so common at Toyota, you instead have the kind of culture seen at some of their competitors that leads to major scandals.

"The problem is that, in today's volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, this is no longer a script that's good for business," Edmondson writes. "Rather than success, it's a playbook that invites avoidable, and often painfully public, failure."
Stifling creativity
Recent from the Rotman School at the University of Toronto highlights how damaging this can be for creativity and innovation. It highlights that a poor culture of feedback can significantly stunt the creativity of individuals, teams and the organization as a whole. The paper argues that negative feedback can be terminal to creativity, especially if it is delivered by your boss. This is important because it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that psychological safety is simply creating an idyllic world in which no one says anything bad, everything is positive, and reality seldom rears its head.

That is not actually the case at all, and Edmondson uses the example of Pixar to illustrate the advantages of creating a psychologically safe culture. She explains that the film industry is notoriously unpredictable, with directors often following up a roaring success with a blunder or two. Pixar is different however and has had success after success for the best part of a decade. Central to their success, both at the box office and with critics alike, is their culture of psychological safety.

At the start of the creation process, they will openly admit that the movies at this early stage are bad, terrible even. This is not so much something that they are celebrating in "the failure is a great way" that is so common these days, but rather to illustrate to staff that every movie goes on a journey, and failure is a central part of that journey. Indeed, it is impossible to achieve greatness unless you first go through the bad storylines, the boring characters or the sappy plot twists. It is about creating an environment that appreciates that the film is the baby of those working on it, and no one likes having their baby criticized. It is much better to hear it now, when it can be fixed, from people who ultimately share your goals for a great production, than it is from moviegoers or critics when it is in theaters.

This sense of safety and trust matters for employee retention, as psychological safety, forms a fundamental part of the employment contract you have with your team. When this is broken, suggests that this leads inexorably to higher staff turnover rates, higher absenteeism, lower productivity and all manner of other negative outcomes, as people simply do not trust you to have their best interests at heart, and so feel less inclined to do their best for you. If you truly are in the talent business, it is not a situation you can afford to have.

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Why Psychological Safety Is Vital For Great Teams And Happy Employees

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We can all perhaps think of examples where colleagues, maybe even ourselves, have been forced or gently nudged out of an organization for voicing unpopular opinions. This not only has negative consequences for the individuals that are forced out but also for those left behind.

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His full name is Mehmet Baha and everyone calls him Baha. Since his childhood, he has been fascinated by the question: "How can I make a difference in the lives of people?" His interest leads him to win a scholarship from Fulbright and finish his master's in the USA on the topic of Conflict Resolution. He has lived and worked in Germany, Turkey, Cyprus, Ireland, Guatemala, and the USA with more than 18 years of work experience. Baha was one of the first employees of Facebook in Europe. Throughout his professional life, he has seen the importance of engaged employees. So far, he has delivered training and given talks in more than 28 countries across 5 continents. Recently, he completed MIT Sloan's Executive Education Program "Leading Organizations and Change". Currently, he lives in Berlin, Germany. He is fluent in English, Spanish, Turkish, and German. In his free time, he loves to play percussion, travel with his family, and play puzzles with his 4-year old daughter.

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Playbook for Engaged Employees: Practical Insights to Master Leadership, Agility, Teamwork, Learning, and Psychological Safety

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How can we create conditions to have engaged employees? Many business people have difficulty achieving this. At times, they feel lost or unsure. In today's fast-changing and highly competitive world, it is crucial to have engaged employees and teams to innovate, grow and add value to customers. A...

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Psychological Safety and Sense of Belonging

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Psychological Safety and Sense of Belonging

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Psychological Safety and Sense of Belonging

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Psychological safety in the workplace mini guide | Insights

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Read the 5 ways to create psychological safety in the workplace mini guide from Insights. Find out more about psychological safety in the workplace today.

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Lessons from the cockpit - below 10,000 feet

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In Design Thinking...it's known as a 'mash up'. In the context of human performance, we would call it 'psychological safety'. Through the lens of the mindset, it's 'a beginner's mindset'. Whichever way you look at it, there are valuable lessons from an industry outside our own.

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Psychological Safety Made Simple - An Intro Guide

"There's no team without trust."-Paul Santagata

Psychological Safety is the foundation of high-performing teams. No matter how talented, smart, or diverse team members are, they won't take risks or experiment if they fear being punished.

In previous articles, I've addressed how psychological safety helps create fearless cultures and how to build a safe workplace environment. This post is an intro guide to the approach, key concepts, and methods.

Psychological Safety Frequently Asked Questions

What is Psychological Safety in the workplace?

Psychological safety is the foundation of high-performing teams. It creates a space where people feel secure and safe to speak up, be themselves, and experiment.

Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. People are not afraid of negative consequences like being criticized, ignored, laughed at, or punished.

High-performing teams need psychological safety. When people feel accepted and respected, they bring their best selves to work.

What Psychological Safety is not

Working in a psychologically safe environment does not mean that people always agree for the sake of being nice.

It also doesn't mean that people will praise or unconditionally support everything you say. It's not about being nice, but candid.

Psychological Safety provides the space to address conflict productively. It enables people to speak up, be candid, and think of what's best for the team.

Psychological Safety isn't about saying everything you want or being disrespectful either. It's not about being authentic, but candid.

What are the benefits of Psychological Safety?

Increased Psychological Safety drives higher engagement, collaboration, and participation.

It increases creativity, conflict resolution, and overall well-being.

Psychological Safety makes it easier to include the voice of quiet members. It leads to better team performance by increasing participation of women, introverts, and minorities - the ones who are interrupted the most at work.

Does Psychological Safety lower team performance?

On the contrary, feeling safe doesn't mean being comfortable. It allows people to embrace discomfort, address conflict, and solve problems.

A study by The Science of Creating High-Performing Teams shows that employees who feel their teams are safe are:
- 76% more engaged
- 50% more productive
- 50% more likely to stay

What's the difference between Psychological Safety and Trust?

Psychological safety is often confused with trust.

The primary difference is that Psychological Safety is a "shared" belief - it's a group norm that involves all team members. The group as a whole is safe for everyone to participate.

Trust, on the other hand, is something between two people. It's a mutual feeling between you and someone else.

Trust is about two individuals; Psychological Safety is about the whole team.

Why is Psychological Safety Important for teamwork?

Psychological Safety increases participation by integrating different voices and perspectives, thus improving collaboration.

High psychological safety practices:
- Open dialogue
- People sharing their opinions and ideas confidently
- Fearless behavior and mindset
- Emotions are welcome and acknowledged
- Team members solve conflict productively
- Conversational turn-taking-leaders speak last

Low psychological safety behaviors:
- Silence or self-censoring
- People keeping their opinions or ideas to themselves
- Fear of being ignored, ridiculed, punished, or fired
- Emotions are ignored or bottled
- Conflict avoidance
- Quiet voices are not included-leaders interrupt and influence others

Who coined the term Psychological Safety?

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson coined the term. While studying medical teams in hospitals, she found that high performing teams were making more errors than worse performing ones.

Edmondson realized that high performing teams were admitting and discussing their mistakes. Those teams felt safe to talk about them--they could learn and improve their performance.

Edmondson's definition is that Psychological Safety is, "a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking."

What's the Project Aristotle?

Project Aristotle was an initiative by Google to uncover what makes or breaks a high-performing team. It was named Aristotle because of the eponymous Greek philosopher's quote: "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

Google evaluated various hypotheses of what defined high-performing teams. The initial assumption was that it requires having the best talent working together. Then they evaluated the impact of mixing people with diverse personalities, skills, and backgrounds.

The researchers also explored the impact of gender and ethnic diversity as well as whether high performing teams benefit from consensus or disagreement.

In the end, Google concluded that Psychological Safety is crucial for building high-performing teams.

What are the 5 behaviors of high performing teams according to Google?

Google's Project Aristotle uncovered 5 behaviors that create high performing teams: Psychological Safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact.

Psychological Safety: How much risk team members perceive and what consequences they believe they may face when asking a question, suggesting a new idea, or owning up to a problem.

Dependability: Members are able to rely on each other to complete the required tasks.

Structure and clarity: Defines clear roles for each individual. All members understand their short-term goals and contribute to overall objectives.

Meaning: Personal fulfillment derived from the person's role or the team's overall accomplishments.

Impact: Members of the team feel their work is meaningful and makes a difference.

How do I start building Psychological Safety?

Amy Edmondson recommends three key steps.

1. Start with the leader. The most senior people in a team or organization must set the stage to frame the work and emphasize the purpose. They must lead by example.

2. Invite participation. Leaders must practice inquiry to encourage people to challenge beliefs and established practices. This requires intellectual humility and to set transparent processes to drive equal participation of all team members.

3. Respond productively. Listen to people's ideas and opinions but, most importantly, appreciate their input and make it explicit that you paid attention. Also, destigmatize failure and making mistakes.

How do I encourage Psychological Safety?

There are four actionable ways to build a fearless, safe culture, as I wrote here:

1. Increase Self-Awareness:
Trust starts with yourself. If you want someone to trust you, you must trust them first. Self-awareness not only helps us grow but also uncovers our blind spots. Feedback is vital to understand how we deal with trust.

Self-aware leaders embrace vulnerability - they aren't afraid of recognizing mistakes. That's the first step to heal an unsafe culture.

Self-awareness makes us both trusting and trustworthy.

2. Facilitate Participation:
Organizations have a silence problem, but most don't realize it. Silence encourages groupthink - people keep their genuine opinions to themselves.

Design meetings to increase participation and openness.

Practice conversational turn-taking. Provide each team member a turn to speak up. Managers or loud people should always go last -- you don't want them to influence or intimidate the rest.

3. Design Team Rituals:

Rituals are an effective way to drive meaningful change. They accelerate collaboration, creativity, and trust. Team rituals bring people together -they help correct or reinforce behaviors in a human, non-threatening way.

Flipboard, for example, promotes vulnerability by sharing work in progress during their Mock O'Clock ritual.

Stride has increased inclusion and participation with their Lean Coffee ritual. It's an open, no-agenda meeting where everyone shares topics they would like to discuss. The entire team votes on what items will be addressed.

4. Establish Adult Rules and Norms:
Most companies say they trust their employees, but then their rules show the opposite.

Psychological safety is encouraging people to behave like adults; to address things openly, with respect, and candor. Corporate rules should promote that same behavior.

Trust is not built with words, but with acts. Many companies are now offering an unlimited vacation policy while others have removed the approval process from expense reports.

When company policies trust rather than control employees, people feel safe to bring their best selves.

5. Reward and Punish Behavior:
Building a culture of psychological safety requires action, not just words. Leaders must reward good behaviors and don't let bad ones go unpunished.

Managers define who gets promoted, works on the cool projects, or attends leadership training -- their actions signal what the organization rewards. Their behaviors could encourage or hinder Psychological Safety.

Trust is fragile  -- hard to build, easy to destroy. One act is worth a thousand words.

How to measure Psychological Safety

When Google started measuring psychological safety, Amy Edmondson suggested asking employees seven questions:

1) If you make a mistake on this team, is it often held against you?
2) Are members of this team able to bring up problems and tough issues?
3) Do people on this team sometimes reject others for being different?
4) Is it safe to take a risk on this team?
5) Is it difficult to ask other members of this team for help?
6) Would anyone on this team deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts?
7) When working with members of this team, are my unique skills and talents valued and utilized?

Use the questions above with a 5-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
Note: In question 3, I recommend replacing "being different" with "thinking differently," as it feels less personal or judgmental.

With Psychological Safety, it's imperative not to single people out. Don't make issues about a particular person. Psychological Safety needs to be built and corrected as a team.

Perceptions and emotions vary. Don't expect results to be stable or always grow in a positive direction. Ups and downs can be course correction or a change in direction.

Why bother measuring Psychological Safety?

High performing teams need Psychological Safety. It's important to understand how your team is doing.

Start with a baseline with which to compare. The initial assessment usually surprises leaders and team members alike; we all believe that our teams are safer than they actually are --no worries. The purpose of measuring is not to feel bad about it but to identify areas to focus on.

Don't get obsessed with the measurement per se. Some companies want to create a Psychological Safety score and monitor constantly. Rather than feeling safe, that makes people feel observed and controlled.

Become better at observing your team member's behaviors (and yours too).

Are people participating more? Does everyone get a chance to speak up? Are people embracing conflict positively or with a passive-aggressive approach? Are people honest or adapting to what the most senior people say?

Measuring is important, but focus on building the right habits, not just on monitoring an index.

How to Get You Started

Hold check-ins at the beginning of meetings. Ask participants, "What's got your attention?" This simple practice creates empathy but also drives focus, people can let go of worries and distractions.

Start small & be patient. Increasing psychological safety requires time and consistency.

Design safe meetings. Silent Meetings or Progressive Brainstormings: being progressive makes it less intimidating for people to share their ideas. They liberate everyone's hidden talents.

Leverage the power of duos. Creating accountability partnerships between two people is a quick and effective way of building a safe space - one duo at-a-time.

Hold a team retrospective. Take time to pause and reflect on how the team is doing. Focus on the overall collective dynamic rather than on individual behaviors. Great retros build safer teams.

Leverage the positive. Practice asking "What's working at our team/ company?" But also, "What's not working at our team/ company?" Create a habit of addressing conflict productively at work.

Take care of remote teams. Google research shows that remote teams need to meet in-person from time to time. Also, make time to strengthen personal connections and bonding.

Related Posts

Facilitate the Psychological Safety Ladder Canvas to map, assess, and improve psychological safety in your teams.

Increase Psychological Safety in Your Organization or Team

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High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. How to Build It. | By Gustavo Razzetti

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"There's no team without trust."-Paul Santagata Psychological Safety is the foundation of high-performing teams. No matter how talented, smart, or diverse team members are, they won't take risks or experiment if they fear being punished. In previous articles, I've addressed how psychological safety helps create fearless cultures and how to build a safe workplace environment.

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Free webinars on psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and team performance, and leadership. Watch the recordings or register for our next live event.

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Have you ever attended a meeting that wasn't the meeting? Everyone was pleasant and agreeable in the room, but then filed off to engage in back-channel conversations and hold kangaroo courts. This kind of charade is one of the many symptoms of a "nice" culture. But what's touted as niceness is often nothing more than the veneer of civility, a cute nod to psychological safety, a hologram that falsely signals inclusion, collaboration, and high performance. In many of these cultures, leaders have simply spread a thin layer of politeness over a thick layer of fear. There is the appearance of harmony and alignment but in reality there's often dysfunction simmering beneath the surface that results in a lack of honest communication, intellectual bravery, innovation, and accountability.

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In far too many companies, there is the appearance of harmony and alignment but in reality there's often dysfunction simmering beneath the surface. The intention behind cultivating a nice culture is often genuine. Leaders believe they're doing a good thing that will motivate people and create inclusion.

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Psychological Safety Newsletter – Psychological Safety

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How to Promote Psychological Safety on Your Team

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Psychological Safety is the shared belief that everyone within an organization can take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed. Almost as simple as it sounds - it's the idea that emplo...

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One of the main ways to build a Radically Candid culture is by creating an environment where people feel comfortable speaking truth to power. This kind of culture can only be achieved when managers understand that it is authentic relationships and not power that drive them forward. Unfortunately, finding a job that fosters this kind of culture can feel akin to finding a unicorn.

However, companies that encourage people to speak truth to power build trust between employees, no matter their role in the organization. Case-in-point, video-software company Wistia. The team read Radical Candor together and then had a virtual Q&A session with author and Radical Candor, LLC co-founder Kim Scott. They've since been committed to actively practicing Radical Candor, and reached out to us to share an experience about what happened when an employee used the principles of Radical Candor (caring personally while challenging directly) to speak up about an offensive term used in a meeting.

Speaking truth to power is difficult in any situation, but it's more likely to happen in an environment where people feel a sense of psychological safety. Where they feel they will be heard and acknowledged versus being retaliated against. In her book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmonson says that psychological safety allows people to give candid feedback, openly admit mistakes and actively learn from each other.

In this situation, the term "digital sharecropping" was used during a team presentation. Coined by author Nicholas Carr, digital sharecropping is described as "the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few." The term is problematic because sharecropping is deeply tied to racial inequality.

While most people's first instinct is to avoid making others uncomfortable, and to remain quiet, even if feeling uncomfortable themselves, one team member, Kristen Bryant, a brand marketing and partnerships manager, decided to address the issue. Bryant provided feedback that was kind, clear and direct, sharing her own experience in service of everyone's growth.

"During the presentation I was completely thrown by the use of the term 'digital sharecropping.' As a Black woman from the South, sharecropping makes me think of racism, leftover slavery, oppression and poverty. And immediately, this is where my mind goes," she said in an email to the team.

"I fundamentally understand how content creators are giving dollars to the big media companies, but we can find better language to describe this trend. I was in my head from that point forward and I think I might have missed the rest of the presentation," Bryant continued.

"During the presentation I was completely thrown by the use of the term 'digital sharecropping.' As a Black woman from the South, sharecropping makes me think of racism, leftover slavery, oppression and poverty. And immediately, this is where my mind goes." - Kristen Bryant, Wistia

"Instead, I was struggling with how this term might have made [other people of color on the team] feel. Struggling with whether or not I should provide feedback. Wondering whether or not my colleagues were proud that they found a term that was succinct. Wondering if I would have said anything about it in the meeting where it originated."

This internal struggle is one that so many people can relate to. Should I say something? What will happen? Will I be supported by my team? Will I face retaliation?

Acknowledging Unconscious Bias

Bias in the tech industry, and within the actual coding itself, is something Princeton University Professor Ruha Benjamin writes about in her book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code . "Presenting the concept of the 'New Jim Code,' [Benjamin] shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies," the book description notes.

Along these lines, the term "digital sharecropping" is still being widely used to describe pay-to-play web content trends, which highlights the lack of awareness present in the industry in 2019. A better term to describe this practice might be digital tariffs or digital leasing.

When one person coins a term that goes viral in an industry, others can pick it up without thinking through what that term might actually mean, which is what happened in this instance. But when you examine what the words mean culturally and historically, it's easy to see how they are harmful and offensive to an entire group of people. While that may not have been the intention, it was the impact. And Radical Candor is measured not at the speaker's mouth, but at the listener's ear.

It's hard enough to be Radically Candid with those who look like us. It's even more difficult when people look different, speak a different language or practice a different religion. We are all more likely to be "ruinously empathetic" or "obnoxiously aggressive" or "manipulatively insincere" toward people who are different from us. This is what the nonprofit Project Implicit refers to as, "implicit social cognition - thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control."

This means you may be biased against people who are different from you without being consciously aware of it, and this bias may cause you to treat people differently or use hurtful language without understanding the implications. Becoming aware of our own bias may be uncomfortable, but it's necessary to acknowledge it in order to create a culture of inclusion.

Speak Truth to Power

Learning how to push ourselves and others past this discomfort, to relate to our shared humanity, can make a huge difference. What transpired at Wistia is a perfect example of the good things that can happen when people feel safe enough to push past their discomfort.

"If this email makes you uncomfortable, then it probably mimics how I felt in the meeting. This sounds more emotional than I am about it - I really just want to inform on my perspective more than make anyone feel guilty. Also, know I always assume the best intentions from my colleagues," Bryant explained. "I just wanted to let you know how the term impacted me in the hopes that it won't be included in further [communications] about this."

Because the team at Wistia is committed to practicing Radical Candor - encouraging people to care personally about the people they work with while also challenging each other directly - Bryant felt empowered to speak up.

What's more, the person who gave the presentation actively listened, actually heard the feedback and immediately addressed the team.

"I want to take a moment to call attention to, and reflect on, a term I used yesterday when talking about the future of content marketing work: sharecropping. First and foremost, I want to sincerely apologize for my ignorant use of the term and any pain it may have caused."

In this case, the presenter acknowledged the mistake and accepted responsibility. Next, they said they were grateful for the candid feedback.

"I feel grateful to work in a culture where we can openly learn from our mistakes, and I'm very thankful that someone on the team exercised Radical Candor and let me know that the meaning of the word is deeply rooted in slavery, and how that made them feel."

Finally, the person who used the term encouraged others to speak up in similar situations. "I want to say that too many times I have found myself or others sitting quietly and allowing offensive words and actions to be used because doing otherwise is too uncomfortable. If you find yourself in a situation of discomfort, whether due to a conversation, workshop or presentation, I hope you feel empowered by the Wistian who kindly called this out."

Not only is this situation an example of a successful execution of Radical Candor, it was done so in a way that encourages everyone on the team to give guidance and feedback no matter their position on the team.

The experience the team at Wistia went through highlights that you have to be not just self-aware but relationally and culturally aware, too. While feedback can be difficult to hear, especially when you've made a mistake, Radical Candor is a process that allows everyone to learn and grow.

About Wistia
Wistia is proud to help more than 500,000 businesses grow with video. Their software is designed to engage and grow an audience, turning passive viewers into brand fans. In addition to their world-class video hosting, they offer tools for businesses to present their videos in a binge-worthy Channel to keep viewers engaged, the ability to grow a list of subscribers and email them every time a video is published, and integrations so businesses can leverage viewer data to retarget and reach new audiences with social media ads.

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Speak Truth To Power By Embracing The Principles Of Radical Candor

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One of the main ways to build a Radically Candid culture is by creating an environment where people feel comfortable speaking truth to power. This kind of culture can only be achieved when managers understand that it is authentic relationships and not power that drive them forward.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: 'Psychologically Safe Leadership: Strategies for facilitating mental health in the workplace' is a web series in partnership with Dr. Bill Howatt of Howatt HR Consulting in Ottawa, and Troy Winters, senior health and safety officer at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in Ottawa.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many employers to focus on their employees' mental health.

An Ipsos poll reports that nine out of 10 leaders (managers and supervisors) want to do better for their workers by improving their own emotional intelligence, and 85 per cent agree that it would be a good use of their time to build skills to better respond to emotionally distressed workers.

Additionally, many leaders, regardless of their position, recognize that becoming psychologically safe leaders will make them more valuable to their organization.

The fallout of the pandemic on workplace mental health will not be fully understood for years. For example, COVID-19 has shone a light on the psychosocial factor of isolation and how working remotely has increased employees' risk of loneliness.

"Becoming a psychologically safe leader is not intuitive; it requires professional development, feedback and coaching." - Dr. Bill Howatt

Kniffin and a group of researchers from around the world anticipate changes in work practices (for example: working from home) and for workers (for example: social distancing and loneliness).

How employees cope with the changes in how work is organized and its impact on their stress levels and mental health will require additional monitoring and research to be fully understood.

Whether employees are working in a building, remotely, or in a hybrid model of remote and on-site work, how well they cope with the new circumstances and workplace psychosocial factors and hazards will fall to their direct managers.

The Canadian Standards Association 's CSA-Z1003-13 National Standard: Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace describes its vision for a psychologically healthy and safe workplace as "one that actively works to prevent harm to workers' psychological health, including in negligent, reckless, or intentional ways, and promotes psychological well-being."

One key imperative that the standard highlights is the importance of ensuring leaders have the training and skills to facilitate psychological safety by creating the right climate, mindsets, and behaviours within their teams. Leaders need to identify and remove hazards in the workplace while simultaneously supporting their team to help build resiliency.

Google played a significant role in promoting the value of psychologically safe leaders when they promoted: "Psychological safety question: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?"

Amy Edmondson, who coined the term psychological safety in the workplace in 1999, suggests, "Psychological safety at work takes effort. It's not the norm. But it's worth the effort."

Psychologically Safe Workplace Awards provide employers tools, data on mental health

Psychologically safe leaders' microskills framework

This series will provide guidance to human resources and occupational health and safety leaders on the kinds of microskills that can help them develop their leadership skills aligned to those of a psychologically safe leader.

Microskills that will be packaged for this series will fall under one of four headings:

Emotion: To support employees' emotional well-being in the workplace, leaders need to know how to provide guidance and understand how their own behaviour can directly impact employees' experience.

Inclusiveness: Because inclusion is a core factor of a psychologically safe workplace, leaders must be clear on what they can do to make all employees feel included.

Conflict: Leaders must know how to effectively deal with unpleasant emotions and anticipate conflict before it happens.

Relationships: The foundation for a trusting and psychologically safe relationship with employees is the degree that a leader understands how to create such a connection.

Mini-series application

This mini-series will introduce practical microskills for psychologically safe leaders - managers and supervisors who create an employee experience where all employees feel welcomed, are free from fear, believe their ideas are valued, and feel included.

The motivation of this editorial series is to provide leaders with guidance towards the microskills they can focus on and practice to become more psychologically safe leaders - so that they can create psychologically safe workplaces.

Each article will introduce one topic and discuss the microskill(s) from one of the above categories, with the hope that human resources and occupational health and safety leaders will share this series with their teams to put leaders on track to psychologically safe leadership.

Readers will be provided with the ideas for the knowledge and skills, setting the expectation that being psychologically safe leaders makes good business sense.
Dr. Bill Howatt is the Ottawa-based president of Howatt HR Consulting in Ottawa.

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Workplace mental health requires psychologically safe leaders - OHS Canada Magazine

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EDITOR'S NOTE: 'Psychologically Safe Leadership: Strategies for facilitating mental health in the workplace' is a web series in partnership with Dr. Bill Howatt of Howatt HR Consulting in Ottawa, and Troy Winters, senior health and safety officer at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in Ottawa.

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Culture

Why are some teams more successful than others?

Google has been on the top of many top employer surveys. In the last couple of years, its People Analytics team interviewed hundreds of employees and analyzed data about people in more than 100 active teams over two years to understand why some teams succeed and why some other's stumble and fail. The company found that there are five key dynamics that sets successful teams apart from others: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning of work and impact of work. The top in the list is 'psychological safety' - a concept introduced by Amy Edmondson, who describes it as "a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes."

In the book "Smarter, Faster, Better" by Charles Duhigg outlines how the company approached psychological safety. To create psychological safety, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors. They were given Google checklists:

1. Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations because that will establish an interrupting norm

2. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it

3. They should admit what they don't know

4. They shouldn't end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once

5. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways

6. They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion

Duhigg also notes that while the checklists had dozens of tactics, they come down to two general principles: Teams succeed when team members can speak up and when they show that they are sensitive to how one feels. And although there may be many reasons to undermine psychological safety in situations where one has to cut-off a debate, make a quick decision or ask the expert, in the long run, it's much more productive. That's because a team amplifies its internal culture.

But does psychological safety mean moving away from accountability and excellence?

Not necessarily. As Edmondson notes in this TED Talk, the two are correlated. Creating a psychologically safe environment increases motivation. "If you only do psychological safety, it's possible you're creating a comfort zone. And if you're only talking about people's accountability for excellence and not making sure they aren't afraid to talk to each other, then you're in the anxiety zone," she adds.

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Google's checklist to ensure psychological safety in its teams

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Why are some teams more successful than others

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Psychological Safety Checklist: How to Foster High Team Performance

A fundamental need for humans is safety. That's probably not a surprise to you. Most of us long to feel safe from potential threats - both physical and psychological. Thanks to laws, regulations and OSHA, many of us feel physically safe at work. However, psychological safety seems more elusive day-to-day.

When Google released its team-effectiveness findings from its two-year research study focused on high performing teams, psychological safety took center stage.
Researchers discovered that psychological safety is the most important factor in contributing to high team performance.
What is Psychological Safety?

Google defines psychological safety as the belief that you, a team member, feels safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of peers. You're also able to express dissenting opinions without the risk of punishment or shame.

Can you think of a time when you felt completely safe to disagree with a colleague or executive? What about asking a "dumb" question in front of others? Were you able to fully express yourself without the fear of judgement or retaliation?
Do your employees feel safe to be vulnerable and take risks at work?
Sadly, for many of us, office politics, poor leadership skills and organizational dysfunction run rampant at work. Ourselves and our teams suffer as a result, and so do our organizations' bottom lines.

When you and your teams feel safe, you're more likely to embrace diverse ideas and see potential "failures" as stepping stones to greater success. As a result, innovation, communication and collaboration improve.

Your Psychological Safety Checklist

I've created a Psychological Safety Checklist you can use this week with your teams:

1. Admit when you don't have all of the answers or when you've made a mistake. It's important to be vulnerable in front of your teams to show them that's okay.

2. Listen carefully when your employees speak and paraphrase what you've heard. They will know that you heard them, even if you disagree with them.

3. Encourage all team members to listen without judgement and applaud them when they praise one another.

4. Ensure all team members have offered their points of view during collaborative discussions and team meetings.

5. Model healthy communication styles.

6. Address conflict quickly and encourage team members to express disagreements in healthy ways.

7. Note and openly address when a team member is dominating conversations, talking over others and diminishing others' ideas. Do this with kindness and compassion.

Use these seven actions as a guide the next time you meet or communicate with your team.

Anything to add to my checklist that's helped you/your team? What challenges have you faced to foster psychological safety? I'd love to know.

If you'd like to discuss your particular situation or learn more about developing high performing teams, send me an email to schedule a time to chat. I'm happy to address your questions, provide insight or offer additional support.

Cheers,

Jennifer

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Psychological Safety Checklist: How to Foster High Team Performance

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A fundamental need for humans is safety. That's probably not a surprise to you. Most of us long to feel safe from potential threats - both physical and psychological. Thanks to laws, regulations and OSHA, many of us feel physically safe at work. However, psychological safety seems more elusive day-to-day.

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What Is Psychological Safety at Work? How Leaders Can Build Psychologically Safe Workplaces

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What is psychological safety at work? Learn how to assess and build psychological safety in the workplace to improve collaboration and culture.

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This post is part of TED's "How to Be a Better Human" series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. Do you remember that day in November 2018 when 20,000 employees walked out of Google to protest over the handling of sexual harassment claims at the company?
The protest was dramatic, headline-grabbing and done as a clear signal that employees would no longer check their identities and values at the workplace door. It was also the exception rather than the rule. While certainly brave, Google employees felt safe enough to organize without fear of reprisals. Even if they did lose their jobs, they'd still be highly employable somewhere else. Not everyone has that luxury, and not everyone feels OK about speaking up at work.

When we feel psychologically unsafe or unvalued, we protest quietly and often unconsciously.

Yet walkouts happen every day in the workplace; they're just not usually done with our feet. Instead, they're checkouts - invisible walkouts that happen with our hearts and our hands and our voices.
But let's be honest: All of us have checked out at some point in our careers, haven't we?
When we feel psychologically unsafe or unvalued, we protest quietly and often unconsciously. Maybe we stop trying as hard at work. Or maybe we act in ways that subtly undermine leadership or act against our organization's objectives just a little bit. We become disengaged or actively disengaged - at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the global economy.
So if you're a leader and want to avoid walkouts or checkouts before they become issues at your organization, there are three things you can do.
1. Unblock communication

Walkouts and checkouts happen when we feel we're not being heard or not being respected or considered. Just about all of us have had our ideas shot down or ignored in the workplace. When it happens, we tend to experience this as an identity threat. Some of us respond by closing down and shutting off when we feel that we don't belong or that we're unimportant. And we stop caring as much about our work and caring as much about the people around us.

When I was a new manager, I remember a time that I encountered this. I asked a colleague of mine with decades of work experience for a recommendation on a problem she brought to me. While she searched for an answer, we stood there in silence. After a long pause, she looked up and said to me, "I've never been asked what I think at work before now." Her attitude was tragic, and it's all too common.

To avoid this pitfall, we need to continually invite people to speak up at work and make these invitations a routine part of how we engage with each other in the workplace. This lays the important groundwork that's needed for those times when people want to speak up on issues that might be hard for management to hear.

In that fragile moment when people have the courage to challenge us, leaders need to embrace them for it and be responsive.

2. Be responsive

Backed into a corner by the scale and the intensity of the protests in 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had a choice. He could respond in a way that would close the door to people who were acting in line with their values, or he could choose to open it wider.

His public response was not defensive. He sent an email out to the whole company, saying he understood the anger and disappointment that many of them felt because he felt it too. And saying that he was fully committed to making progress on an issue that had persisted for far too long in society and at Google too. Pichai's public response was admirable, but whether the protests were effective is still an open question.

But invisible checkouts are much harder to notice and address than a 20,000 person walkout. Instead, leaders must proactively work to unblock the organization. They need to ask questions, invite input and foster creative conflict. And in that fragile moment when people have the courage to challenge us, we need to embrace them for it and be responsive. Because it's not enough just to hear people out - words without action breed cynicism and leave seeds for future walkouts and checkouts.

Now when leaders and employees are on the same page, action is a natural next step.

Can we stay unified even in dissent? Or will we allow our relationships to become inauthentic and our identities to become diluted?

But here's the thing: We're not always going to agree. Sometimes employee activists will raise issues that leaders don't agree with, and in that fragile moment we will determine what kind of culture we will have. Will we engage in dialogue and debate? Can we stay unified even in dissent? Or will we choose to skate over our differences, allowing our relationships to become inauthentic and our identities to become diluted? Which will it be?

At a minimum, we can have a dialogue. We can try to resolve our differences and find some common ground that even if it's not ideal for any one party may be acceptable for all. At times, though, that's just too hard; common ground simply can't be found. In that difficult place, we have three choices.

First, if we feel we can't live with the resolution, we can choose to leave the company and find employers whose values are more closely aligned with our own. Second, we can choose to stay with the company. We can compartmentalize, keep doing a good job and look for a time to address the issue again in the future. Third, we can consider a tactic from Amazon's Jeff Bezos. He'll say, "Let's disagree and address the issue head on." He'll ask his team, "Look, I know we don't agree here but will you gamble with me on it? Can we disagree and still commit?"Now you can't do this every time. But if the reservoir of trust is deep enough, you can respectfully acknowledge your differences on important issues where you can't find consensus. You aren't walking out or checking out. You can continue to move forward on the work and agree to keep working on the issue as you go.
Regardless of which choice you make, any of them are better than the alternative of checking out, which is a surefire path to organizational demise and professional misery.

When everyone can bring the entirety of their life experiences, we have so much more to offer each other.

3. Aim higher

Doesn't it seem like we're setting a low bar if we're just trying to avoid checkouts and walkouts? Shouldn't we strive for more? Shouldn't we aspire to invite people to bring their whole selves to work?

When everyone can bring the entirety of their life experiences, we have so much more to offer each other. We are more than the sum of our resumes.

Joan Bohan is a finance director at Disney Europe. She's also a mother, and her son Roman has dyslexia. Did you know that 1 in 10 people live with dyslexia? That's a huge population to serve for a company like Disney. So when Disney announced an internal contest for new and impactful business ideas, Joan applied. She'd heard about modifications that could make it easier for dyslexics to read - changes like different and larger fonts; wider spaces between letters; ruling between lines. Her idea was put into practice. And because Disney invited Joan to bring her whole self to work and all of her unique strengths, values, passions and experiences - not just her finance resume - they can now better serve millions of people with dyslexia.
If this - unblocking communication, becoming responsive, aiming higher - all sounds good to you as a leader, where should you begin?

Ari Weinzwig, CEO of Zingerman's Deli, likes to say that success doesn't mean you have no problems - it just means you have better problems.

Here's a quick way for you to find out.
On Monday morning, I'd like you to go to work, talk to 10 different people in your organization - in person or online - and ask them this question: "What don't we talk about around here that we really should be talking about?"
You'll probably experience one of those awkward silences, and that's OK. They'll probably come to you later with an answer. But if no one has any answers, then your organization is probably blocked. Still, by asking this question, you have signaled an openness to keep going and keep asking questions.

Ari Weinzwig, CEO of Zingerman's Deli, likes to say that success doesn't mean you have no problems - it just means you have better problems. My closing wish for you is that you earn your organization some better problems by unblocking communication, becoming responsive, and aiming higher.

As more and more people open up and start sharing more of themselves, their ideas and their unique offerings, over time you will have a new better problem - harnessing all of their energy and creativity.
This post was adapted from Chris White's TEDxAtlanta Talk. You can watch it here. And to get another take on organizations and how they can build (and rebuild) cultures of trust, watch Frances Frei's TED Talk now:

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3 ways to create a work culture that brings out the best in people

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It's possible to stop employee checkouts or walkouts before it's too late, says organizational culture expert Chris White. Just follow these three basic principles.

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What is Psychological Safety, and How do you create Psychological Safety at Work?

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What is Psychological Safety | Intro to The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

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This post is part of TED's "How to Be a Better Human" series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. I was churning through social media feeds one morning when the phrase "tough compassion" made me pause mid-scroll.
On a podcast episode, psychologist, Greater Good Science Center founding director and TEDxBerkeley speaker Dacher Keltner described the idea, explaining how some contemplatives practice a form of kindness - but with a decided edge.
"In the deeper traditions of compassion, like a lot of the Buddhist traditions, they have an idea of tough compassion - to step in and, in a good way, guide the person to a different form of behavior or out," said Keltner.

An uncompromising approach to compassion is one you can try when other attempts to engage with difficult people fail.

The concept stuck with me because it seemed so at odds with the way many people today are socialized to think about compassion. Among some, a compassion-centered lifestyle is one shared in breezy, pastel-colored Insta posts and involves attending idyllic retreats and practicing meditation. And giving someone else an honest piece of our minds isn't it.

It might be time to paint a new picture of compassion. When it comes to reducing suffering in the world, an uncompromising approach to compassion often trumps a pastel-hued one - and it's an approach you can try when other attempts to engage with difficult people fail.

"The Dalai Lama always had this greater good analysis," Keltner later told me. "Like, 'What does it bring about? Is being hard in the moment going to bring about greater well-being or kindness for a lot of people?'"

Warm and fuzzy compassion has little power to sway relatives who spout conspiracies or counter leaders who tout equality while harvesting the fruits of privilege.

The case for tough compassion
Tough compassion is gaining traction because the rosy version is proving so unequal to the present moment, which has been defined by human failures to meet challenges posed by the pandemic, widespread inequality and climate change.
Of course, there will always be a "soft" side to compassion. It's always crucial to learn how to be a calm sounding board or comfort grieving loved ones. But warm and fuzzy compassion has little power to sway relatives who spout conspiracies, stop close friends from radicalizing online or counter leaders who tout equality while harvesting the fruits of privilege.

In the Buddhist contemplative tradition, the goal of true compassion is to find ways to promote the least suffering for everyone. In this broader framing, nodding along with someone's bigotry, bullying, or falsehoods for the sake of preserving that relationship is the opposite of compassion. It interferes with peace-building on a societal level, even though it might seem on the surface like a nonviolent act.

If you're a parent, you probably practice small-scale tough compassion on a daily basis, vetoing pre-dinner snacks or enforcing homework time before kids go out. Larger-scale tough compassion flows from a similar source: the willingness to bear - and even inflict - some discomfort in the moment to promote longer-term well-being.

"Our actions implicate a lot of people," Keltner says. "You've got to step back and think about all the utilities and consequences downstream."

"You have this sense, and you're in the position to assume, that this is a struggle they have to face," Keltner says. "It's good for them."

The Dalai Lama has spoken of the importance of this kind of tough love. It means that if your aunt makes an offhand racist remark or your work buddy insults a colleague, tough compassion involves speaking up - without rancor, but with conviction - if your goal is to promote less suffering for all.

"By withdrawing from the conversation, you don't force the other person to really have to encounter a different set of values," says Medical College of Wisconsin psychologist Zeno Franco, whose research focuses on community engagement.

In committing to tough compassion, you buy into a certain kind of risk-benefit calculus. You accept the discomfort involved in hopes that the other person will consider a different way of engaging, one that will carry over into her interactions with others, and perhaps even their interactions with those close to them.

"Our actions implicate a lot of people," Keltner says. "You've got to step back and think about all the utilities and consequences downstream."

In Franco's view, tough compassion involves conveying that you value someone as a person while disagreeing openly with what they are doing.

Tough compassion in practice

It's one thing to endorse the tough-compassion approach, and quite another to try to make it work. What does it actually look like to show uncompromising compassion in the moment? And when someone in your life does something that's actively harmful, what's the best way to guide them without outright coercing or controlling?

In Franco's view, tough compassion involves conveying that you value someone as a person while disagreeing openly with what they are doing. When he calls loved ones out for hateful or harmful behavior, he's not shy about saying what he thinks.

But at the same time, "I try to remain accessible as a human being who can be vulnerable, who can be hurt, and who can appreciate the person," he says. "Part of that is thinking about how to respond in a way that is not designed to escalate, but almost to reach past the 'facts' or points that they are making to where what they are saying impacts me at an emotional level."

If you want to hold a relative accountable for homophobic remarks, for instance, you can describe the effects of that kind of behavior on people close to you.

A powerful way to convey this emotional impact is through storytelling, says Juliana Tafur, a filmmaker and founder of the Listen Courageously project.
If you want to hold a relative accountable for homophobic remarks, for instance, you can describe the effects of that kind of behavior on people close to you: "My good friend is gay, and she hears insults like that all the time. She's also been attacked in public. Because of that, it's hard for her to trust that people are going to respect her as a human being."

With storytelling, you can take a tough stance and show the other person the results of their actions without launching a direct attack. When you do this, "you're really communicating - in a way that is enveloped in compassion - your fundamental boundaries, what you can and cannot accept, and inviting the other person into that conversation," says Tania Diaz, a psychologist at Albizu University. Studies show that this story-based approach can create significant change in people's worldviews.

Even when you know you'll create more lasting change through dialogue than exclusion, you may have to push past significant inner resistance to engage in these conversations. Showing any kind of compassion - even tough compassion - to a person who behaves harmfully can feel like a form of surrender, or like tacit acceptance of their behavior. But from the broader perspective of reducing suffering, what might seem like fraternizing with the enemy can be a potent way to guide someone on to a less toxic path.

"When you listen, truly understand and get curious, it creates space for the person to think a little bit differently," says Diaz.

"A lot of people have this misunderstanding that if I engage or listen, I am somehow going to be tainted or I'm going to be influenced," Diaz says. When she facilitates these conversations, she's found that quite the opposite is true. "When you listen, truly understand and get curious, it creates space for the person to think a little bit differently."

To avoid shaming the other person into submission - a tactic studies show can backfire by making people withdraw from the situation - you can go on to explain how a change of course would be a win-win scenario, for the other person as well as for the world at large. "I show them what life might be like after they change and explain the positives," says Dian Grier, a licensed clinical social worker in Mojave, California. That might mean pointing out that your homophobic relative will have a much better relationship with gay nieces and nephews if he chooses to engage with them differently.

Tough compassion, by contrast, is like an anchor pole that holds fast no matter how hard the rope tugs on it.

Holding fast

Perhaps the biggest challenge of practicing tough compassion is staying internally grounded while emotional storms rage. When you take a stand, other people may fire back with remarks that send your heart hammering. If you're not prepared, that physical reaction can propel you straight into a " lizard brain," fear-based mindset where you're more likely to fall back on old, reactive rules of engagement.

Tough compassion, by contrast, is like an anchor pole that holds fast no matter how hard the rope tugs on it. "In those moments, I'm trying to be fully present and yet no longer upset," Franco says. "The intent of every word is thought through to take the argument almost to a different place."

To hone this kind of in-the-moment composure, it can help to write down some thoughts beforehand about what you want to say to someone or the kind of stories you want to tell. Then, once you're up for it, schedule a real-life conversation or Zoom. This face-to-face connection often feels more humanizing than a long text thread, and deciding where and when it happens can help you feel more in control of the process.

In line with the Buddhist teaching of dropping attachment to results, the tough-compassion approach is simultaneously about holding fast and letting go.

But while tough-compassion conversations can be fertile ground for shifting others' perspectives, your own well-being should always remain front and center. To steer clear of potentially traumatic encounters, "you need to know if the other person is in a position to be willing and able to engage in that conversation with you," Tafur says. "And I think you'll know that right off the bat."

If someone ridicules your attempts at dialogue or continues to sling insults, "the tough-compassion act is to leave or disengage," Keltner says. Exiting from a harmful situation can be its own form of uncompromising truth-telling.

In line with the Buddhist teaching of dropping attachment to results, the tough-compassion approach is simultaneously about holding fast and letting go. At its core, tough compassion is about "creating space for dialogue to unfold," Diaz says. "Ultimately, that person decides if they're going to shift."
This article was originally published on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Watch Betty Hart's TEDxCherryCreekWomen Talk here: Watch Dylan Marron's TED Talk on talking to people you disagree with here: Watch Dacher Keltner's TEDxBerkeley Talk here:

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Tough compassion - here's what it is and why you need to practice it

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Most of us think of "compassion" as something that's soft and feel good. But that approach doesn't work in tough moments or in tough conversations. Writer Elizabeth Svoboda shares the benefits of "tough compassion" and how to use it in your relationships.

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Before you read this review of "The Fearless Organization" by Amy Edmondson, I'd encourage you to wach Amy's Tedx Talk in which she talks about how to build psychological safety. Edmondson is a management professor at Harvard Business School and has done a tremendous amount of work in the area of psychological safety. In her Tedx Talk, she describes psychological safety as "a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking." I believe that psychological safety is a critical yet often overlooked concept, and one which underpins Edmondson's latest book, The Fearless Organization - Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhoLuui9gX8
These are the things that I took away from reading The Fearless Organization:

1. Starting with "Personal and Organizational Change through Group Methods" - The aforementioned concept of psychological safety dates back to a 1965 book titled "Personal and Organizational Change through Group Methods" by Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis, which addresses the need for psychological safety for to help people cope with the uncertainty and anxiety of organizational change. Schein later noted that psychological safety was vital for helping people overcoming the defensiveness and "learning anxiety" they face at work, especially when something doesn't go as they'd hoped or expected.

2. Psychological safety isn't a personality trait or difference - Based on her extensive research, Edmondson observes that psychological safety "is not a personality difference but rather a feature of the workplace that leaders can and must help create." This observation made me think about the conditions that leaders can and must 'enable' to create a culture of psychological safety within the organisation, establishing a climate that supports learning. Edmondson mentions a number of other things which psychological safety is not, and which I've captured in Fig. 1 below.

3. Measuring psychological safety - Perhaps you think of psychological safety as quite a fluffy idea, but it can actually be measured. I like the seven survey items which Edmondson introduced in her original research dissertation and which I've included in Fig. 3 below. She uses a seven-point Liker scale to obtain responses (from strongly agree to strongly disagree), and three out of seven items are expressed positively. Agreement with these items indicates greater psychological safety, whilst those items items expressed negatively (highlighted with an "R" for reverse), such that disagreement is consistent with higher psychological safety.

4. Adopting an agile approach to strategy - I loved Edmondson's point about viewing a company strategy as a hypothesis, to be tested continuously, rather than a plan. This perspective ties in with Edmondson's broader theme around organisational learning. She argues that organisational learning - championed by company leaders but enacted by everyone - requires actively seeking deviations that challenge the assumptions underpinning a current strategy.

5. Set the stage for psychological safety - In the book, Edmondson offers some useful tips with respect to 'facilitating' psychological safety, sharing a valuable toolkit (see Fig. 4 below).

6. Proactive inquiry - Being able to say that you don't know and driving participation through inquiry are two strong tenets of psychological safety. Edmondson shares some rules of thumb for asking a good question: one, you don't know the answer; two, you ask questions that don't limit responses to Yes or No, and three, you phrase the question in a way that helps others share their thinking in a focused way (see also Fig. 5 below).

Main learning point: In "The Fearless Organization", Edmondson has written a valuable book about psychological safety. Even if you're unable to create a truly fearless organisation anytime soon, Edmondson offers a number of valuable starting points with respect to critical aspects such as questioning, conflict and speaking up.
Fig. 1 - What Psychological Safety Is Not - Taken from: Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organisation, pp. 15-19

Psychological safety isn't about being nice - Working in a psychologically safe environment doesn't mean that people always agree with one another for the sake of being nice. It also doesn't mean that people offer unequivocal praise or unconditional support for everything you have to say. Psychological safety is about candour, about making it possible for productive disagreement and free exchange of ideas. Conflict inevitably arises in any workplace. Psychological safety enables people on different sides of a conflict to speak candidly about what's bothering them.

Psychological safety isn't a personality factor - Some have interpreted psychological safety as a synonym for extroversion. They might have previously concluded that people don't speak up at work because they're shy or lack confidence, or simply keep to themselves. Psychological safety, however, refers to the work climate, and climate affects people with different personality traits in roughly similar ways. In a psychologically safe climate, people will offer ideas and voice their concerns regardless of whether they tend to toward introversion or extroversion.

Psychological safety isn't just another word for trust - Although trust and psychological safety have much in common, they aren't interchangeable concepts. A key difference is that psychological safety is experienced at a group level. Further, psychological safety describes a temporally immediate experience.

Psychological safety isn't about lowering performance standards - Psychological safety is not an "anything goes" environment where people aren't expected to adhere to high standards or meet deadlines. It isn't about becoming "comfortable" at work (see Fig. 2 below). Psychological safety enables candour and openness and, as such, thrives in an environment of mutual respect.

Fig. 2 - How psychological safety relates to performance standards - Taken from: Amy Edmondson, The Competitive Imperative of Learning, Fig. 3 - A survey measure of psychological safety - Taken from: Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organisation, p. 20

1. If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you. (R)

2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.

3. People on this team sometimes reject others for being different. (R)

4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.

5. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help. (R)

6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.

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

Fig. 4 - The leader's tool kit for building psychological safety - Taken from: Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organisation, p. 159 Setting the stage: Leadership tasks:

Frame the work - Set expectations about failure, and interdependence to clarify the need for voice

Emphasise the purpose - Identify what's at stake, why it matters, and for whom

Accomplishes:
Shared expectations and meaning
Inviting participation: Leadership tasks:

Demonstrate situational humility - Acknowledge gaps

Practice inquiry - Ask good questions and model intense listening

Set up structures and processes - Create forums for input and provide guidelines for discussion

Accomplishes:
Confidence that voice is welcome
Responding productively Leadership tasks:

Express appreciation - Listen, acknowledge and thank

Destigmatise failure - Look forward, offer help. Discuss, consider and brainstorm next steps

Sanction clear violations

Accomplishes:
Orientation toward continuous learning
Fig. 5 - Attributes of a powerful question - Taken from: Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organisation, p. 171

Generates curiosity in the listener

Stimulates reflective conversation

Is thought-provoking

Surfaces underlying assumptions

Invites creativity and new possibilities

Generates energy and forward movement

Channels attention and focuses inquiry

Stays with participants

Touches a deep meaning

Evokes more questions

Related links for further learning:

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/amy-edmondson-on-psychological-safety-2015-11

2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207284.1967.11642993

3. https://hbr.org/2008/07/the-competitive-imperative-of-learning

4. https://marcabraham.com/2017/08/17/book-review-radical-candor/

5. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-tenney/be-a-dont-knower-one-of-e_b_7242468.html

6. https://hbr.org/2014/07/the-fukushima-meltdown-that-didnt-happen

7. https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2018/05/how-to-improve-your-teams-conflict-competence-by-julia-whitney/

8. https://marcabraham.com/2018/03/12/book-review-the-no-asshole-rule/

https://hbr.org/2008/07/the-competitive-imperative-of-learning

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Book review: "The Fearless Organization" by Amy Edmondson

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Before you read this review of "The Fearless Organization" by Amy Edmondson, I'd encourage you to wach Amy's Tedx Talk in which she talks about how to build psychological safety. Edmondson is a management professor at Harvard Business School and has done a tremendous amount of work in the area of psychological safety.

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The Idea in Brief

Most managers believe that relentless execution-the efficient, timely production and delivery of offerings-is vital to corporate performance. Execution-as-efficiency is important. But focusing too narrowly on it can prevent your company from adapting effectively to change.

Consider General Motors: Managers' confidence in GM's famously efficient control systems blinded them to big shifts in the market, including customers' preferences for fuel-efficient cars. GM posted a $38.7 billion loss in 2007.

Edmondson recommends widening your lens to include execution-as-learning. Companies that use this approach focus not just on carrying out key processes more efficiently than rivals-but also on learning faster. To foster execution-as-learning, make it safe for employees to ask questions and fail. Then:

Provide process guidelines, using the best available knowledge.

Encourage collaborative decision-making.

Collect process data describing how work unfolds.

Use the data to identify process-improvement opportunities.

Through execution-as-learning, General Electric continually reinvents itself in multiple fields. Its 2007 profit? $22.5 billion.

The Idea in Practice

Edmondson provides these ideas for cultivating execution-as-learning in your firm:

Make It Safe. In psychologically safe environments, people offer ideas, questions, and concerns. They're willing to fail-and when they do, they learn. To create a safe environment:

Model openness, humility, and curiosity.

Explicitly acknowledge the lack of answers to the tough problems facing your group.

Ask questions showing that you genuinely want people's input.

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly's chief science officer introduced "failure parties" to honor intelligent experiments that failed.

Provide Process Guidelines. Even if you can't fully standardize knowledge work, you can provide process guidelines informed by best practices. Develop flexible guidelines, understanding that today's best practices won't be tomorrow's and won't work in every situation.

Intermountain Healthcare assembled teams of experts on different diseases to develop detailed guidelines for treating patients with those conditions. Derived from analysis and debate among diverse professionals, the guidelines reflected the current best practices in the medical literature.

Encourage Collaborative Decision Making. Knowledge work requires people to make decisions together in response to unforeseen, novel, or complex problems. Provide tools enabling them to collaborate in real time.

The Cleveland Clinic developed state-of-the-art IT systems that help dispersed caregivers who are participating in a patient's care to work together virtually. For instance, through an automated alert function, physicians learn of drugs others have prescribed. Medication decisions with interdependent consequences are thus made safely.

Collect Process Data. Gather data describing how work unfolds. Use it to determine what's going right and what's going wrong.

Intermountain Healthcare allows doctors to deviate from the process guidelines anytime they judge that good patient care requires it. But doctors who deviate must help the organization learn-by documenting what they did differently and why.

Identify Process-Improvement Opportunities. Analyze process data to improve the way activities are performed.

At the Cleveland Clinic, seven teams of physicians focusing on specific conditions (heart failure, stroke, diabetes) study process data to identify areas for improvement throughout the organization's many sites. For instance, data showed that stroke patients treated at various sites had not always received a blood thinner within the three-hour window that research had identified as the standard of care. Analysis of patient outcomes helped make blood-thinner treatment the new standard of stroke care for all Cleveland Clinic hospitals. Consequently, hospitals doubled their use of blood thinner and reduced complications from stroke by 50%.

Most executives believe that relentless execution-the efficient, timely, consistent production and delivery of goods or services-is the surefire path to customer satisfaction and financial results. Managers who let up on execution even briefly, the assumption goes, do so at their peril.

In fact, even flawless execution cannot guarantee enduring success in the knowledge economy. The influx of new knowledge in most fields makes it easy to fall behind. Consider General Motors-the largest, most profitable company in the world in the early 1970s. Confident of the wisdom of its approach, GM remained wedded to a well-developed competency in centralized control and high-volume execution. Despite this, the firm steadily lost ground in subsequent decades and posted a record $38.7 billion loss in 2007. Like many dominant companies in the industrial era, General Motors was slow to understand that great execution is difficult to sustain-not because people get tired of working hard, but because the managerial mind-set that enables efficient execution inhibits employees' ability to learn and innovate. A focus on getting things done, and done right, crowds out the experimentation and reflection vital to sustainable success.

My research identifies a different approach to execution-what I call execution-as-learning -that promotes success over the long haul. Think of General Electric, another powerhouse born in the industrial era. Since the 1980s, the company has constantly evaluated its activities, found ways to improve, and built the expectation that learning will be ongoing into management practices. As a result, GE has continued to reinvent itself with operations in every field from wind energy to medical diagnostics, and it posted a $22.5 billion profit in 2007.

From a distance, execution-as-learning looks a lot like execution-as-efficiency. There's the same discipline, respect for systems, and attention to detail. Look closer, however, and you find a radically different organizational mind-set, one that focuses not so much on making sure a process is carried out as on helping it evolve, building four unique approaches into day-to-day work.

Execution-as-Efficiency vs. Execution-as-Learning

First, organizations that focus on execution-as-learning use the best knowledge obtainable (which is understood to be a moving target) to inform the design of specific process guidelines. Second, they enable their employees to collaborate by making information available when and where it's needed. Third, they routinely capture process data to discover how work is really being done. Finally, they study these data in an effort to find ways to improve. These four practices form the basis of a learning infrastructure that runs through the fabric of the organization, making continual learning part of business as usual.

Having studied knowledge organizations-hospitals, in particular-for nearly 20 years, I'd like to offer a new definition of what successful execution looks like in the knowledge economy: The best organizations have figured out how to learn quickly while maintaining high quality standards.

What's Wrong with Execution?

Most management systems in use today date back to a manufacturing-dominated era in which firms were organized to execute as efficiently as possible. Throughout the twentieth century, the core challenge factory managers faced was controlling variability. In their approach to large-scale auto manufacturing, for example, pioneering thinkers like Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor sought to parcel out simple, repetitive tasks to people on an assembly line to reduce the likelihood of human error while producing as many cars as possible. Later, manufacturing managers adopted tools such as statistical process control to help make sure the job got done right, every time. For a long while and in many circumstances, management systems that were focused on execution-as-efficiency worked brilliantly, transforming unpredictable and expensive customized work into uniform, economical modes of mass production.

Underlying the notion of a simple, controllable production system was the notion of the simple, controllable employee. In the factory model of management, it was easy to monitor workers and measure their output. Because the work itself was not terribly interesting or motivating in its own right, managers intuitively relied on what Freud called "the pleasure principle," the idea that human beings are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Thus supervisors used a combination of carrots (more pay for more tasks completed) and sticks (reprimands or the threat of job loss) to motivate employees. These behavioral strategies were very successful, but they produced an unfortunate legacy that still characterizes many workplaces today-an undercurrent of fear.

With the rise of knowledge-based organizations in the information age, the old model no longer works, for a number of reasons. In such organizations, it's difficult, if not impossible, to monitor employee productivity or measure individual performance in simple ways, such as by hours worked. Performance is increasingly determined by factors that can't be overseen: intelligent experimentation, ingenuity, interpersonal skills, resilience in the face of adversity, for instance. Consider a hospital emergency room. At any moment, a patient with a previously unheard-of set of symptoms might walk in, and specialists from several departments-reception, nursing, medicine, laboratory, surgery, pharmacy-need to coordinate their efforts if the patient is to receive effective care. These people must resolve conflicting priorities and opinions quickly. As in most knowledge organizations, room to maneuver is extraordinarily high. People rely on their own and their colleagues' judgment and expertise, rather than on management direction, to decide what to do. When work is interdependent and in flux, as it is in this situation, interpersonal fear is not only unhelpful-it's downright counterproductive.

By continuing to think of execution in the old-fashioned, narrow sense, companies fall into predictable self-sabotaging traps:

Critical information and ideas fail to rise to the top.

When people get the message that speed, efficiency, and results are what matter, they become exceedingly reluctant to risk taking up managers' time with any but the most certain and positive of inputs. They don't offer ideas, concerns, or even questions. One study at a high-tech multinational found that over half the employees believed it was unsafe to say what was on their minds. Subsequent interviews revealed that employees withheld not only bad news but also new ideas; both seemed risky because of higher-ups' emphasis on superb and timely performance.

Consider the example of a team leader who tried to stimulate honest reflection about a large software-development project. He opened a post-project review by stating what he believed he himself could have done better. To his surprise, this honest self-assessment came back to haunt him when, during his next performance review, his manager noted, "I see you have made some mistakes this year," and used the data to lower his ratings. When employees feel they can't speak up about small failures, their organizations are at increased risk for large ones.

People don't have enough time to learn.

An exclusive focus on execution-as-efficiency leads companies to delay, discourage, or understaff investments in areas where learning is critical. It's a given that switching to a new approach can lower performance in the short run. The fastest hunt-and-peck typist must endure a short-term hit to performance while learning to touch-type, just as the tennis player suffers initially when shifting to a new, better serve. These are the costs of learning, which has its payoff in future performance. Managers who overemphasize results can subtly discourage technologies, skills, or practices that make new approaches viable.

When a major telecommunications firm launched the technologically new digital subscriber line (DSL) internet service in the late 1990s, it set ambitious production targets that failed to take the need for learning into account. The staff did not have sufficient time to work out how to implement new software and hardware that had to operate with customers' not always up-to-date personal computer equipment: The result was a customer service nightmare.

Unhealthy internal competition arises.

To motivate people to execute well, companies often reward those divisions or plants with the best performance. This can make people reluctant to share ideas or best practices with their colleagues in other groups. Following his successful turnaround of the Simmons Bedding Company in 2003, CEO Charlie Eitel said in an interview that the firm's 18 manufacturing plants-formerly competitors for a single annual award for best producer-had been individually hoarding successful practices for years. By adding incentives for absolute, rather than relative, quality and productivity, the company shifted its culture, encouraging people in different plants to share information-and saved $21 million through process improvements in the first year.

Companies think they can do no wrong.

When a successful business is wedded to its execution-as-efficiency approach, managers can fall prey to a classic attribution error: the conclusion that the company's success is evidence of its wisdom. General Motors' confidence in its centralized control systems blinded the company to major shifts in the automotive market, including customers' preference for smaller, fuel-efficient cars and the growing presence of foreign competitors in the U.S. market. Similarly, HBS professor Mary Tripsas has shown, Polaroid's confidence in its instant-film business model blocked senior executives' ability to appreciate the opportunities presented by digital imaging.

First, Make It Safe

While General Motors was placing its faith in its execution efficiencies, Toyota was taking a different route, focusing on bottom-up process improvements of much the sort we're discussing here, famously allowing any employee who saw a problem-small or large-to stop the line. Toyota has made no secret of its approach and invites executives the world over to come to its factories and see for themselves. And yet when visitors return to their own companies and try to put Toyota-like systems in place, many are disappointed, having failed to import the mind-set and culture that make the system work.

My research on why people withhold constructive ideas in the workplace suggests that before execution-as-learning can occur, organizations must fulfill one big prerequisite: They need to foster psychological safety. This means ensuring that no one is penalized if they ask for help or admit a mistake. Psychological safety is crucial, especially in organizations where knowledge constantly changes, where workers need to collaborate, and where those workers must make wise decisions without management intervention. It's built on the premise that no one can perform perfectly in every situation when knowledge and best practice are moving targets.

In her research on individual mind-set differences, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has shown that the way children view a task affects their persistence and performance over time. Some children think of human ability or intelligence as fixed and, consequently, think of school tasks as performance opportunities-moments of truth that prove whether or not they're smart. For these children, performing poorly on an assignment or a test would demonstrate that they lacked intelligence rather than indicating that they had more to learn. Believing that the point of execution is to demonstrate competence, they go out of their way to pick easier tasks. Of course, this means they lose out when it comes to learning. This same mind-set encourages managers to admire and expect to be rewarded for decisiveness, efficiency, and action rather than for reflection, inquiry, and collaboration, the uncertainty of which makes them uncomfortable. Like the children who have learned to shun new challenges, these managers avoid, and help others avoid, the risks of questions and experiments.

In psychologically safe environments, people are willing to offer up ideas, questions, concerns-they are even willing to fail-and when they do, they learn. In her studies, Dweck found that some children-those who early on were rewarded for effort and creativity more than for simply giving the right answer-see intelligence as something malleable that improves with attention and effort. Tasks are opportunities for learning; failure is just evidence that they haven't mastered the task yet. Driven by curiosity about what will and will not work, they experiment. When things don't pan out, they don't give up or see themselves as inadequate. They pay attention to what went wrong and try something different next time. In adults, such a mind-set allows managers to strike the right tone of openness, humility, curiosity, and humor in ways that encourage their teams to learn.

Some managers might argue that fostering psychological safety can make it difficult to hold people accountable. Certainly, if employees feel particularly close to one another and the managerial hand is relatively weak, performance standards can slip. But in general, psychological safety is independent from employee accountability, and healthy organizations foster both by setting high performance aspirations while acknowledging areas of uncertainty that require continued exploration or debate. Setting ambitious goals while conceding the limits of current knowledge encourages striving without shutting down inquiry. On the other hand, an undue focus on accountability without psychological safety can produce a variety of organizational dysfunctions. (For more on this, see the exhibit "Does Psychological Safety Hinder Performance?")

Psychological safety does not operate at the expense of employee accountability; the most effective organizations achieve high levels of both, as this matrix shows.

Psychological safety is not about being nice-or about lowering performance standards. Quite the opposite: It's about recognizing that high performance requires the openness, flexibility, and interdependence that can develop only in a psychologically safe environment, especially when the situation is changing or complex. Psychological safety makes it possible to give tough feedback and have difficult conversations-which demand trust and respect-without the need to tiptoe around the truth.

Not surprisingly, the most important influence on psychological safety is the nearest boss. Signals sent by people in power are critical to employees' ability and willingness to offer their ideas and observations. This means that levels of psychological safety vary strikingly from department to department and work group to work group, even in organizations known for having a powerful corporate culture. In a study of eight units in two teaching hospitals, for example, I found large differences in employees' beliefs about whether it was safe to report medication errors-and differences in error-reporting rates as high as tenfold. As a result, some units were identifying risks and coming up with ways to avoid future problems, while others were not because the people in them were terrified to speak up.

Such findings shine the spotlight, for better or worse, on middle managers. How can they help create psychological safety in the groups they lead? A couple of simple, if not always intuitive, steps appear to make an enormous difference.

The first is to explicitly acknowledge the lack of answers to the tough problems groups face. (Strange as it may seem, very few managers do this. It's not that they don't recognize the imperfect state of knowledge; they just fail to mention it.) Acknowledging uncertainty may seem like a weakness, but in fact it's usually an intelligent and accurate diagnosis of a murky situation. When supervisors admit that they don't know something or made a mistake, their genuine display of humility encourages others to do the same.

The second is to ask questions-real questions, not leading or rhetorical ones. Simply put, when people believe that their managers want to hear from them and value their input, they respond more. Indeed, one could feel awkward or foolish not speaking in response to a question.

This is especially so when lives are on the line. In one study of quality-improvement projects in intensive-care units at 23 hospitals, my colleagues and I showed that when medical directors asked questions, acknowledged their own fallibility or lack of knowledge, and appreciated others' contributions, the people in their units felt a higher degree of psychological safety than those in units whose leaders did not do so. As a result, these units more quickly adopted new practices that could reduce infection rates and lead to other improvements in patient care.

Senior executives, too, play an important role in building psychological safety. For instance, as CEO of Prudential Financial, Art Ryan instituted a series of training initiatives called "Safe to Say" to let employees know that their voices were not only welcome but required for success. Eli Lilly's chief science officer introduced "failure parties" to honor intelligent experiments that failed. Policy interventions like these work best when accompanied by a clear and credible rationale for why openness and directness are needed to achieve superb performance. Senior executives may be best positioned to convey this message.

Execution-as-Learning: Four Steps

Organizations that adopt an execution-as-learning model don't focus on getting things done more efficiently than competitors do. Instead, they focus on learning faster. The goal is to find out what works and what doesn't; employees must absorb new knowledge while executing, often sacrificing short-term efficiency to gain insight into and respond to novel problems. My research has revealed four steps for making this happen.

Step 1: Provide process guidelines.

Figuring out the best ways to accomplish different kinds of work in a rapidly changing environment starts with seeking out best practices gathered from experts, publications, and even competitors. The path to execution-as-learning is thus similar to the path to efficiency-it starts with establishing standard processes. But the goal of these processes is not so much to produce efficiency as to facilitate learning, because effective knowledge organizations recognize that today's best practices won't be tomorrow's and won't work in every situation.

For example, the renowned design firm IDEO adheres faithfully to a standard process for developing its many innovative products. Similarly, in a hospital, even though each patient is unique, standard protocols make it easier for medical specialists to think in real time about the individual features of the case because the steps common to all patients with a particular condition are prescribed in advance. Standard processes both simplify routine action and highlight discrepancies in specific cases that suggest the need for process innovation or refinement.

To understand how this works, let's look at an extraordinary health care organization called Intermountain Healthcare (IHC), an integrated system of over 100 facilities-including 21 hospitals, and numerous health centers, outpatient clinics, counseling centers, and group practices-located across Utah and southeastern Idaho. To increase employees' chances of making good decisions under pressure and reduce unwanted variability in patient care, senior management put together 60 teams of experts on different diseases to develop detailed process guidelines for treating patients with those conditions. The high quality of these guidelines-designed to reflect the current best practices in the medical literature-was the result of analysis and debate by professionals in nursing and medicine who held diverse points of view. Each team worked hard to develop a set of clinical-care processes outlining the way patient care should unfold on the front lines. Similarly, Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota convenes teams to review and standardize different types of care, using principles of lean manufacturing.

Step 2: Provide tools that enable employees to collaborate in real time.

No matter how much thought goes into advance planning, knowledge work often requires people to make concurrent collaborative decisions in response to unforeseen, novel, or complex problems. That is why another leading medical center, the Cleveland Clinic, developed its own state-of-the-art information technology systems that enable dispersed individuals participating in a particular patient's care to work together virtually. Dr. Martin Harris, the clinic's chief information officer, explains that the IT infrastructure "connects every caregiver in all of our facilities throughout Ohio and Florida into what is essentially a single medical practice. That means that all the vital medical information related to each patient is available to any caregiver in our health system whenever and wherever it is needed." When a patient sees several physicians, as is often the case, caregivers working in different locations at different times can coordinate effectively. For example, through an automated alert function, physicians learn of drugs others have prescribed, thereby ensuring that medication decisions with interdependent consequences are made safely.

Fostering face-to-face collaboration is also critical in the knowledge economy. The most effective organizations I studied provided forums to build networks and training in team skills, both of which bring critical areas of expertise and responsibility together. For example, Groupe Danone, the global food company, uses knowledge "marketplaces"-lively events that occur during company conferences-to encourage frontline managers to share best practices and to innovate by suggesting new processes and products. Simmons Bedding developed an extensive training system to develop employees' team skills, which helps them build relationships that foster collaboration within and across all of its plants.

Step 3: Collect process data.

Execution-as-efficiency focuses on performance data, which capture what happened. Execution-as-learning pays just as much attention to process data, which describe how work unfolds. IHC, for example, recognized that physicians, as highly educated experts, might resist process guidelines developed by a committee. For that reason and others, IHC does not discourage doctors from deviating from the guidelines. In fact, the organization invites them to, anytime they judge that good patient care requires it. The only condition: They have to help IHC learn by entering into the computer what they did differently-and why. This valuable feedback is captured in the system and periodically used by the expert teams to make updates or refinements. Most of the time, the deviations help identify ways the guidelines could be made more precise by taking relevant patient differences into account. The fact that protocols are not hard-and-fast rules but are instead flexible made them acceptable to physicians. Likewise, the Cleveland Clinic created a formal Quality Institute to standardize measures and supervise the collection and analysis of both process and outcome data to help identify and then spread best practices. At Minnesota Children's Hospitals, data on both adverse events and close calls are captured as inputs to the next stage of the learning process.

Step 4: Institutionalize disciplined reflection.

The goal of collecting process data is to understand what goes right and what goes wrong, and to prevent failures from recurring. At IHC, teams of experts periodically analyze data collected during clinical activities. Often, these analyses suggest improvements to the guidelines, which are then integrated into the design of future processes. At the Cleveland Clinic, teams of physicians drawn from hospitals all over the system study process data and identify areas for improvement throughout the organization's many sites. By 2006, the Clinic had seven such teams, including heart failure, stroke, diabetes, and orthopedic surgery. Process data showed, for instance, that stroke patients treated at various sites at the Clinic had not always received a blood thinner within the three-hour window that research identified as the standard of care. An analysis of patient outcomes helped to make the blood-thinner treatment the standard of stroke care for all Cleveland Clinic hospitals. As a result of this disciplined reflection, the hospitals doubled their use of the blood thinner and reduced complications from stroke by 50%. Similarly, at Children's, unit-based safety action teams meet regularly to reflect on what they are learning about identifying hazards that can pose risks to their vulnerable young patients.

It's not easy for a hospital, or any other organization facing cost constraints, to do this. Disciplined reflection takes productive resources off-line, and conventional management wisdom can't help but see this as lost productivity. Nonetheless, the only way to achieve and sustain excellence is for leaders to insist that their organizations invest in the slack time and resources that support this step.* * *

I do not mean to imply that old-style execution-as-efficiency must always go by the wayside. Obviously, there are workplaces-call centers, fast-food restaurants, manufacturing plants-where doing things better and faster than the competition is critical. But even in such organizations, employees must learn if they are to improve. In work environments characterized by fear, the four steps described above become difficult, if not impossible, to follow.

Fostering an atmosphere in which trust and respect thrive, and flexibility and innovation flourish, pays off in most settings, even the most deadline driven. When managers empower, rather than control; when they ask the right questions, rather than provide the right answers; and when they focus on flexibility, rather than insist on adherence, they move to a higher form of execution. And when people know their ideas are welcome, they will offer innovative ways to lower costs and improve quality-thus laying a more solid foundation for their organization's success.

A version of this article appeared in the July-August 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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The Idea in Brief Most managers believe that relentless execution-the efficient, timely production and delivery of offerings-is vital to corporate performance. Execution-as-efficiency is important. But focusing too narrowly on it can prevent your company from adapting effectively to change.

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Dennis Relojo-Howell, (2019, July 25). Here's Why Psychological Safety in the Workplace Is Important - And How to Foster It. Psychreg on Organisational Psychology. https://www.psychreg.org/psychological-safety-in-the-workplace/

How psychologically safe is your workplace? What do you think about staff making mistakes? And what is your view on employees being able to express their ideas? Do you believe mistakes are a good thing or are they to be avoided at all costs? Do you really listen to your employees or do you sweep their ideas under the carpet?

All of this and more is relevant to business culture and how psychologically safe employees feel when they are at work. What is becoming increasingly clear is that without psychological safety in the workplace, it's hard for employees to be at their best.

How psychologically safe employees feel when they are at work has implications for innovation, team interactions, productivity and ultimately business success.

Global business coach, Dominic Monkhouse says: 'Psychological safety is a must for any growing business. As the managing director of three fast-growing businesses, I've seen it with my own eyes. There's no doubt in my mind that it's a big factor in successful scale-ups.'

What is psychological safety and why is it important?

The concept of psychological safety in the workplace was first identified by organisational behavioural scientist, Amy Edmondson in 1999 in her paper entitled: ' Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams'. Her research found that companies with a trusting workplace performed better.

In an interview with Curt Nickisch of HBR, she elaborates on psychological safety: 'The term implies to people a sense of cosiness and that's not what it's really about. What it's about is candour; what it's about is being direct, taking risks, being willing to say, "I screwed that up." Being willing to ask for help when you're in over your head.'

Feeling safe, secure and being able to work without the fear of negative consequences, even when you make a mistake, relies on feeling psychologically safe. It means people are comfortable being themselves. In psychologically safe workplaces, diversity is respected and personal risk-taking is encouraged. Above all, team members respect each other and feel accepted. The feeling is like taking a leap and knowing you'll be caught.

Why psychological safety in the workplace is important

Humiliation, blame, criticism and bullying create workplaces where employees are filled with fear. This kind of psychologically unsafe environment doesn't get the best out of people. Workers are too busy watching their own backs and frightened of putting a foot wrong to make suggestions and help each other out. They dare not share ideas for fear of being shut down.

When we experience a lack of trust, respect or conflict we feel stressed. When we feel stressed our brain triggers hormones to support a fight-or-flight response. Continually being in that state is bad for our health. This state also has a negative impact on our ability to think strategically. It stifles creativity and teamwork, and that isn't good for business.

A psychologically safe workplace is the opposite. In an environment where people are encouraged to understand each other's points of view, understand each other's strengths and weaknesses, support each other, and feel confident to make suggestions and offer ideas, teams flourish. Mistakes ( essential for innovation) are made, chewed over and learned from.

Perhaps the biggest study supporting the importance of psychological safety in the workplace is Google's project Aristotle, which focused on how to build the perfect team. The study reviewed half a century of academic studies on how teams worked and looked at hundreds of Google's own teams to try and unlock the key as to why some teams soared and others failed.

Finding patterns proved difficult, because not all successful teams behaved in the same ways. Eventually, extensive research found that particular norms, such as clear goals and a culture of dependability, were vital for team success. Above all else it was found that psychological safety was critical to making a team work.

How to foster psychological safety at work

Creating a fearless environment isn't easy. It takes effort and hard work to build a trusting culture. Here are four simple ways to start building a more psychologically safe workplace:

Encourage radical candour. This is a new management philosophy based on two approaches - caring personally and challenging directly. The radical candour framework is used to guide conversations and not fall into the trap of supporting behaviours that are damaging to teams.

Promote respect. People don't always agree with each other, but discussion is vitally important in business. Encouraging mutual respect helps to improve communication and reduce workplace conflict and stress. Reducing pettiness in the workplace and encouraging respect helps to build psychological safety. The best way to promote respect at work is to 'walk the walk.'

Welcome curiosity. Part of psychological safety is being able to express oneself. Encouraging staff to be curious and ask questions is where real learning happens. Curiosity is vital to business performance. Ask for feedback from employees and encourage them to ask questions. Start by asking: 'What can we do better?'

Acknowledge ideas and the sharing of mistakes. Things do not always go to plan and making mistakes does not mean you are a failure. Mistakes offer helpful learnings and are often the source of major innovations in business. In psychologically safe environments, employees feel they can make a mistake and won't be penalised for it.

A manager promoting psychological safety will always state problems as observational facts in neutral language and engage with the team to explore the problem, ask for solutions and offer support. Encourage your team to share and discuss problems, errors and failures, and to ask for help.
Disclaimer: Psychreg is mainly for information purposes only. Materials on this website are not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, medical treatment, or therapy. Never disregard professional psychological or medical advice nor delay in seeking professional advice or treatment because of something you have read on this website. Read our full disclaimer here.
Dennis Relojo-Howell is the founder of Psychreg.

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Here's Why Psychological Safety in the Workplace Is Important - And How to Foster It

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Dennis Relojo-Howell, (2019, July 25). Here's Why Psychological Safety in the Workplace Is Important - And How to Foster It. Psychreg on Organisational Psychology. https://www.psychreg.org/psychological-safety-in-the-workplace/ How psychologically safe is your workplace? What do you think about staff making mistakes? And what is your view on employees being able to express their ideas?

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LeaderFactor | Psychological Safety Online Course

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This online course is a simple way to show your commitment to creating psychological safety no matter your workplace.

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The importance of psychological safety: Amy Edmondson

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How to turn a group of strangers into a team | Amy Edmondson

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What Psychological Safety Is Not: How Organizations Miss the Mark

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Psychological Safety is "a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes." High Psychological Safety opens the door for an inclusive, effective and high performing environment. Without it your best people will become silent and innovation will become unattainable.

The Fearless Organization Scan uses the body of work of Amy C. Edmondson to help organizations measure and improve psychological safety in their teams.

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Unlock the full potential of your team and organization

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The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety by Timothy R. Clark | Waterstones

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Buy The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety by Timothy R. Clark from Waterstones today! Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders over £25.

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Photo by Fancycrave on Unsplash

[ This text would not have been written without the support of Helen Sanderson (Twitter: @HelenWBTeam, a pragmatic and practical dreamer and founder of Wellbeing Teams, a revolutionary re-imagining of social care in England in the direction of humanity, hope, compassion and justice. I am grateful to Helen for her support to me and for her efforts to save us all in England from the indignities and suffering of the existing broken social care system. You can find more about Helen and Wellbeing Teams, at the end of this text. I am responsible for all mistakes and weaknesses in this text.]

1. Is your team at work psychologically safe?

Think for a moment about your work and the work team you are a part of. Ask yourself the following questions:

Do people feel comfortable in team meetings asking about things they do not know or they do not understand, or do they generally try to maintain an image of perfect knowledge about work matters?

Do people feel comfortable in team meetings raising difficult issues, concerns and reservations about specific pieces of work, about 'how things are done here' or about how well the team works together or do these conversations take place informally outside team meetings?

What happens when mistakes, near misses, failures and critical incidents happen? Is people's first reaction to distance themselves from them so they are not blamed or are they seen as opportunities for team learning?

How often do people give and receive feedback? Do people invite others who are not members of the team to give feedback on the team's work?

In team meetings, are all team members invited to contribute irrespective of their rank or job title?

Do you feel that your skills and talents are valued and utilised? Are you encouraged to contribute in any way you feel able to? Or do you feel you are you expected to stay strictly within the parameters of your role and to seek permission for doing anything else?

Have there been times when you felt that your contribution and efforts were compromised by others in the team?

Do people ask each other and the team for help when they need it?

In team meetings, do people feel comfortable expressing disagreement and offering dissenting views? Do team meetings include discussions and debates about work matters?

How much do you know of your team members as people outside work?

What picture do your answers to these questions paint of your team? How much would you say this picture relates to how happy you are with your team and your place in it, and to your team's performance?

2. What is psychological safety?

Researchers in academia and in business have found that these kinds of questions give us an insight into a very important dimension of teamwork: psychological safety. A team feels psychologically safe to its members when they share the belief that within the team they will not be exposed to interpersonal or social threats to their self or identity, their status or standing and to their career or employment, when engaging in learning behaviours such as asking for help, seeking feedback, admitting errors or lack of knowledge, trying something new or voicing work-related dissenting views. Interpersonal or social threats are things like: being branded negatively, e.g. as ignorant, incompetent, or disruptive; being responded to with ridicule, rejection, blame, disrespect, anger, intimidation, disregard; or, being punished e.g. with negative performance appraisals, unfavourable work assignments or reduced promotion prospects. Research has shown that the absence of such threats is strongly associated with team members bringing their whole self to work, expressing their creativity, talents and skills without self-censoring and self-silencing and learning actively on the job developing their capabilities and those of their team.

Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School and the most prominent academic researcher in this field, defines psychological safety as "the shared belief among team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking" [1] and explains that "team psychological safety involves but goes beyond interpersonal trust; it describes a team climate characterised by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves" [2]. In the simplest of terms, you feel psychologically safe in your team if you feel at ease with admitting to a mistake, pointing out a mistake made by a team member, speaking about work-related matters without censoring yourself and trying out new things.

[1 Page 350 in Edmondson, A. 1999. Psychological Safety and Learning Behaviour in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44 (2): 350-383

2 Page 354 in Edmondson, A. 1999 as above]
Why is psychological safety important? The business case for psychological safety
Described in this way, there seems to be a clear case for fostering and cultivating psychological safety in teams as a matter of employee wellbeing, welfare and job satisfaction and even a moral case on the basis of the values of employee freedom and empowerment. These should be adequate reasons for any organisation to take notice of psychological safety.

What Edmondson and others have demonstrated, however, is that there appears to also be a strong business case for promoting and cultivating psychological safety in work teams. The most widely advertised study that makes the business case for psychological safety was Project Aristotle by Google. Google's People Analytics found that psychological safety was both the aspect most reliably shared by high performing teams (amongst a set of five traits that separated high performing teams from the others with the remaining four being structure and clarity, dependability, meaning, and impact) and also the most foundational of these traits, that is, without psychological safety, you cannot have a high-performing team. Project Aristotle as well as other studies have found that psychological safety is strongly associated with objective (e.g. sales revenue) and subjective indicators of team performance (e.g. ratings of team performance by team members and managers, customer satisfaction with team products). The strongest effect of psychological safety on team performance appears to be through its beneficial effects on team learning with studies reporting psychological safety enabling the faster adoption of new technologies (process innovation), the faster adaptation to new market circumstances and customer requirements, the early identification of potentially catastrophic risks, and the faster development of innovative products.
2.1. A closer look at psychologically safe teams
Research across different industry sectors and teams of different configurations in different countries has found that teams with psychological safety are identified and distinguished from psychologically unsafe teams on the basis of: what team members say about how they present themselves at work; what team members believe and say about their colleagues in the team; team norms and culture, i.e. the ways people treat and interact with one another, their shared beliefs and attitudes, and their routine practices; and, finally, by team capabilities.
- how people present themselves at work
In teams that are psychologically safe, team members feel comfortable to be themselves and to actively learn on the job with their colleagues. Team members do not feel they have to wear a mask at work of flawless, self-sufficient, hard-nosed professionalism which they need to constantly maintain and protect. Instead, they can show up at work without feeling that they have to hide their vulnerabilities and imperfections.
- what team members say about their their team members
In psychologically safe teams, team members express mutual respect, trust and interest in each other as people. Team members do not attack each others' knowledge, competence, motivation, personality or character. Opinions and arguments are decoupled from the personality of the person expressing them.
- what team members say about their team's norms and culture
Psychologically safe teams are experienced as interpersonally riskless and liberating particularly with regards to collective, shared learning and collaboration. The most diagnostic topics of whether a team feels safe or threatening are: the handling of mistakes, near misses, failures and critical incidents; whether everyone's voice and input are encouraged, acknowledged and appreciated; whether information sharing and debate are open and not overly constrained by differences in rank, job title, seniority or other dimensions of power inequalities e.g. age, gender, race; whether dissent and difference are encouraged and appreciated; the team's attitude to controlled risk-taking, experimentation and failure; and, giving and receiving feedback.

Psychologically safe teams protect their members' learning efforts from the negative social responses learning behaviours and actions may be met with in different settings. Team members feel free to express themselves, ask questions, seek feedback, ask for help, critically scrutinise, discuss mistakes and everyday problems, experiment, fail in their experiments, offer dissenting views, raise difficult issues, concerns and problems, and propose 'crazy' ideas. They can do these things without feeling the threats of being negatively labelled, blamed, embarrassed or punished.

In more detail,

Errors, mistakes, everyday problems and 'niggles', near misses, critical incidents and failures are reported and recorded honestly and transparently. The time is taken for these to be discussed openly and candidly, viewed as opportunities for learning how to prevent their recurrence by improving work systems but also as potentially protective of potentially larger and more consequential failures or errors. The team takes the time and effort to engage in 'second order' problem solving. 'First order' problem solving is the quick fixing of issues as they appear so as to stop them disrupting normal workflow. 'Second order' problem solving involves identifying the root causes of problems and taking action to address these rather than their signs and symptoms. The team takes ownership of mistakes instead of blaming, accusing or scapegoating individual team members. The team proactively seeks to identify errors and problems it may have missed in its processes or outputs by seeking feedback and asking for help from external stakeholders, e.g. colleagues in other teams, customers, and also by engaging in frequent experimentation and testing.

The team protects a portion of its working time against production and efficiency pressures to engage in open, thoughtful and inclusive debate. Contributions are invited, encouraged and appreciated from all members irrespective of rank or job title. Psychologically safe teams practise free and open questioning in the sense of challenging current or established ways of working and of not accepting things as given or as being beyond careful, considered examination or critical inquiry. Teams value the critical examination of proposed plans and projects irrespective of who the originator of the proposed action is. Psychologically safe teams encourage the expression of dissenting views on work matters and harness their internal diversity and difference. Teams do not value conformity, passivity and self-censoring on work-related matters.

The team does not shy away from constructive 'task conflict' or 'creative abrasion' [3] i.e. "the productive disagreement over the content of one's decisions or ideas that leads to deeper cognitive understanding of an issue" [4]. Difficult and challenging issues are raised openly in team meetings rather than being discussed informally in corridors or around the water cooler. Members give voice to their doubts, anxieties, concerns, uncertainties and vulnerabilities. Individual, team and organisational fallibility are not taboos.

[3 Leonard, D. & Straus, S. 1997. Putting your company's whole brain to work. Harvard Business Review. [online]. Available at https://hbr.org/1997/07/putting-your-companys-whole-brain-to-work. (Accessed 27 June 2018)

4 Edmondson, A. C. 2002. Managing the risk of learning: psychological safety in work teams. In M. West (ed.). International Handbook of Organizational Teamwork. London: Blackwell]

The team encourages the identification and serious consideration of potential, early signs of ambiguous threats at a point where other teams might consider them as being of low priority. The team in this way tries to anticipate and fend off the possibility of catastrophic failures occurring.

Team members share information openly and often. Information is not used as a power or status instrument.

Team members learn on the job by experimenting, taking controlled risks and failing safely rather than in formal courses. Controlled, directed failure is not stigmatised or penalised.

The voice of all team members is heard and acknowledged and their skills and talents are valued and utilised. The 'person paid the most' does not have the monopoly of speaking or the final word. Differences of rank, status or job title are toned down so as not to obstruct the contribution of all team members. Accordingly, in psychologically safe teams 'image' and 'impression' management, office politics, one-upmanship and the 'rumour mill' are avoided.

Team members give feedback to one another frequently. The team frequently seeks the opinion and views of colleagues from other teams and of stakeholders external to the organisation e.g. customers and suppliers.

Team members are comfortable asking for help from one another and colleagues in other teams.

Table 1 below offers an illustration of the distinction between psychologically safe and unsafe teams through the words of people working in teams with and without psychological safety. Table 2 contrasts the team norms of psychologically safe teams to those of unsafe teams.

[1] Edmondson, A. C. 2004. Psychological Safety, Trust and Learning in Organizations: A Group-level Lens. In R. M. Kramer & K. S. Cook (eds.). Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Dilemmas and Approaches. Russell Sage
2.1.1. An unconventional image of the ideal employee
Tucker and Edmondson (2003 [5]) argue that psychological safety allows team members to show up at work in ways that would be considered troublesome for teams with low or no psychological safety. They argue that from the perspective of teams with low psychological safety, team members who prioritise shared, collective learning over maintaining the status quo will seem like:

- self-aware error makers, when it comes to their own mistakes, informing their team and others of any mistakes and errors they have made so that the consequences can be contained and that others learn from the situation. They invite and encourage others to let them know when they have made a mistake that they have not spotted themselves.

- nosy troublemakers, when it comes to the mistakes of others, letting team members know when they have made a mistake. They communicate without accusation or blame attributions.

- noisy complainers, when it comes to issues and problems with current work processes. Problems are 'patched' by the team member (first-order problem solving) but they are escalated to the people who can fix their causes (second-order problem solving).

- disruptive questioners, when it comes to performance improvement. Established ways of working are routinely and frequently interrogated for ways to improve them.

[5 Tucker, A. L. & Edmondson, A. C. 2003. Why hospitals don't learn from failures: organisational and psychological dynamics that inhibit system change. California Review of Management, 45 (2): 55-72]
Conclusion
Clearly, the picture of psychological safety painted in this text is idealised, without complications and difficult trade-offs and dilemmas. This was intentional as I wanted in this text to present clearly what it is that we are promised by the proponents and advocates of psychological safety. The difficulties, traps and downsides of working towards psychological safety merit their own consideration and exploration. However, given the counter-normativity of psychological safety not only in workplaces but also in other social institutions e.g. education, I thought that presenting an alternative vision of possible social relationships was worthwhile work in and by itself and a positive first step. Having said that the academic research on psychological safety suffers from severe conceptual and methodological weaknesses that are not fatal but they do need to be acknowledged and wherever possible addressed.

Wellbeing Teams

This work was undertaken as part of Helen Sanderson's vision for a new world of work and care in England. For a short introduction of the endeavour Helen and her colleagues have embarked on, see this:

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Psychological Safety At Work:what do psychologically safe work teams look like?

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This text would not have been written without the support of Helen Sanderson (Twitter: @HelenWBTeam, a pragmatic and practical dreamer and founder of Wellbeing Teams , a revolutionary re-imagining of social care in England in the direction of humanity, hope, compassion and justice.

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Of the five key dynamics of effective teams that the researchers identified, psychological safety was by far the most important. The Google researchers found that individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they're more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they're rated as effective twice as often by executives.

Organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson of Harvard first introduced the construct of "team psychological safety" and defined it as "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking." Taking a risk around your team members may sound simple. But asking a basic question like "what's the goal of this project?" may make you sound like you're out of the loop. It might feel easier to continue without getting clarification in order to avoid being perceived as ignorant.

To measure a team's level of psychological safety, Edmondson asked team members how strongly they agreed or disagreed with these statements:

1. If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.

2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.

3. People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.

4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.

5. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.

6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.

7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

In her TEDx talk, Edmondson offers three simple things individuals can do to foster team psychological safety:

1. Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.

2. Acknowledge your own fallibility.

3. Model curiosity and ask lots of questions.

In promoting the results of Google's research internally, the research team has been running workshops with teams. In the workshops, anonymized scenarios have been used to illustrate behaviors that can support and harm psychological safety. The scenarios are role-played and then the group debriefs. Here's an example scenario:

Psychological Safety Scenario | Ideas & Innovation

Uli is a long time manager known for his technical expertise. For the past two years he's worked as manager of team XYZ, which is responsible for running a large scale project. He upholds very high standards, but in the past few months Uli has become increasingly intolerant of mistakes, ideas he considers to be "underpar," and challenges to his way of thinking.

Recently, Uli publically "trounced" an idea offered by an experienced team member and spoke very negatively about that person to the wider team behind their back. Everyone else thought the idea was strong, well-researched, and worth exploring. Ideas have since dried up.

Uli's ideas drove the recent project proposal, but it was ultimately rejected by the executives because it lacked creativity and innovation.

Debriefing questions:

What behaviors do you see that reflect psychological safety?

What behaviors may signal that psychological safety is lacking in the scenario?

Why is psychological safety so important? What difference does it make in a team? What have you seen on your teams?

If you're a manager, consider these recommendations when coaching team members and teammates.

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re:Work - Guide: Understand team effectiveness

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Of the five key dynamics of effective teams that the researchers identified, psychological safety was by far the most important. The Google researchers found that individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they're more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they're rated as effective twice as often by executives.

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You may not know your staff aren't speaking up, meaning problems go unreported and unresolved

Abstract

Chances are you've had the experience at work of not asking a question you really wanted to. Maybe you had an idea to suggest but stayed quiet instead. No matter where you are in your organisation's hierarchy, research shows that such moments of silence are painfully common. Studies report that people frequently hold back - even when they believe what they have to say could be important for the organisation, the customer, or themselves. From an HR perspective the losses from this silence are as large as they are invisible. Those who fail to speak up often regret this and wish for more fulfilment in their jobs. Because silence is invisible problems go unreported, improvement opportunities are missed, and occasionally tragic failures occur that could have been avoided. I've spent my career investigating what it takes to create organisations where people can bring their ideas, concerns, and observations to work. I call it psychological safety - and it describes a climate in which speaking up is enabled and expected. Such a climate is worth building when learning, knowledge sharing, error reporting or innovation are crucial for a company's success.

What's new

Twenty years ago I published my findings about learning behaviours in hospital nursing teams to suggest that the best teams have a culture where workers feel able to speak up about medical errors, to learn from them and prevent harm to patients. In less effective teams nurses remained silent about the errors they saw. In the past two decades hundreds of academic studies about psychological safety have been conducted that measure the positive correlation between psychological safety and desired outcomes such as error reporting, quality improvement and high performance. Interest in psychological safety has recently grown dramatically in the popular media, especially since 2016 when The New York Times Magazine published an article about a four-year Google investigation that found psychological safety to be the single most important factor in high-performing teams.

The depth and breadth of the accumulated research convinced me it was time to write a comprehensive overview of psychological safety's role and reach. In addition to reviewing the literature, explaining the theory, and providing practical managerial advice gleaned from my years of teaching, consulting, and research, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth presents multiple case studies to demonstrate how failure to speak up or push back in an organisation contributes to headline-grabbing failures, such as those at Volkswagen, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Nokia to name a few. Other case studies in the book demonstrate how organisations that have worked hard to create psychological safety - such as filmmaker Pixar, clothing line Eileen Fisher, and global manufacturing supplier Barry-Wehmiller - thrive because employees feel they can speak up, offer ideas and ask questions without fear of punishment or embarrassment.

Key findings

Two decades of research on why employees fail to speak up at work and what issues they fail to raise has produced consistent results. Silence in hierarchies is instinctive and safe. The gravitational pull of silence - even when managers are well-meaning and don't think of themselves as intimidating - can be overwhelming. In other words, people at work are vulnerable to an implicit logic in which safe is better than sorry.

In one study New York University professors Frances Milliken and Elizabeth Morrison interviewed 40 full-time employees working in consulting, financial services, media, pharmaceuticals and advertising, and found the two most frequently-mentioned reasons for remaining silent were fear of being viewed or labelled negatively, and fear of damaging work relationships. Employees wanted to speak up about both organisational and personal issues. Some concerns were understandably difficult to raise: for example about harassment, a supervisor's competence, or having made a mistake. But more surprisingly they also held back on suggestions for improving a work process. My research with University of Virginia professor James Detert systematically demonstrated that people at work were not only failing to speak up with bad news or dissent, they were also withholding improvement ideas.

Detert and I analysed the thousands of pages of transcripts from our interviews with more than 230 employees in a large, multinational, high-tech company about instances in which they did and did not speak up to their managers or anyone else higher in the company. Interviewees spanned all levels, regions and functions. Ultimately we discovered a small set of common, largely taken-for-granted beliefs. We called them implicit theories of voice (see box-out opposite). It's an old truism that bad news doesn't travel up the hierarchy. But what we found is that people err so far on the side of caution at work that they routinely hold back not just bad news but also great ideas.

Employee engagement (defined as the extent to which an employee feels passionate about the job and committed to the organisation) is seen as an index of willingness to put discretionary effort into one's work. Recent studies find that psychological safety, which includes speaking up, predicts worker engagement. In a study of 170 research scientists working in six Irish research centres, researchers showed that psychological safety was fostered by trust in top management and in turn led to greater work engagement. Additionally, researchers studied Turkish immigrants employed in Germany and showed that psychological safety promoted work engagement, mental health, and lower turnover. The positive effects of psychological safety were greater for the immigrants than for the German employees in the same company. For those who start out feeling more vulnerable, the benefits of psychological safety are even greater it seems.

As you might expect, the more confident people are in their knowledge the more they might be willing to speak up with that knowledge. Of course confidence is not always correlated with quality, and an employee's confidence may be low even if their idea is valuable. In a particularly compelling study in several US manufacturing and service companies, then-University of Minnesota professor Enno Siemsen and his colleagues found that a psychologically-safe workplace helps people speak up despite a lack of confidence.

From research to reality

One of the most important things for any manager to keep in mind is that when an employee fails to speak up in a crucial moment it's invisible. This is true whether that employee is on the frontline of customer service or sitting next to you in the executive boardroom. And because not offering an idea cannot be seen, it's hard to engage in real-time course correction. This means that psychologically-safe workplaces have a powerful advantage in competitive industries.

One place where worker engagement matters greatly is healthcare delivery. Frontline staff confront high-stress and emotionally-laden work with life and death consequences. Disengaged employees who remain silent create safety risks and higher staff turnover. Turnover means higher recruiting and training costs as well as a higher percentage of less-experienced workers. Experts' concerns about staff turnover thus have given rise to interest in improving the healthcare work environment as a strategy for employee retention. In one recent study a survey of clinical staff at a large metropolitan hospital found that psychological safety was related both to commitment to the organisation and to patient safety.

Managers who appreciate the appeal of error-reporting, help-seeking, and other learning behaviours may be concerned that fostering psychological safety means relaxing performance standards. In fact the opposite is true. Because psychological safety replaces silence and fear with candour and openness it is conducive to setting ambitious goals. As depicted in the figure on page 44, psychological safety and performance standards can be seen as separate, equally important dimensions - both of which affect team and organisational performance in a complex interdependent environment.

When both psychological safety and performance standards are low (lower left in the above figure), the workplace becomes a kind of 'apathy zone'. People show up at work but their hearts and minds are elsewhere. They choose self-protective silence over exertion.

Next, in workplaces with high psychological safety but low performance standards (upper left), people generally enjoy working with one another but aren't challenged by the work. I call this the 'comfort zone'. When employees are comfortable being themselves but don't see a reason to seek additional challenge there won't be much learning or innovation - nor will there be much engagement or fulfilment.

When performance standards are high but psychological safety is low - a situation far too common in today's workplace - employees are anxious about speaking up, and both work quality and workplace safety suffer from the pervasive invisible silence. Managers in these organisations have unfortunately confused setting high standards with good management. High standards in a context where there is uncertainty or interdependence (or both) combined with a lack of psychological safety comprise a recipe for suboptimal performance. Sometimes it's a recipe for disaster. I call this the 'anxiety zone'. This is not anxiety about being able to accomplish a demanding goal or about the competitive business environment - but interpersonal anxiety that often manifests in silence.

Finally, when standards and psychological safety are both high (upper right in the figure) I call this the 'learning zone'. If the work is uncertain, interdependent, or both this is also the high-performance zone. Here people no longer feel bound by invisible silence. They speak up to question, voice concerns, report mistakes and suggest new ideas. Only by collaborating and learning from each other can we get the complex innovative work done that is necessary today.

Managers who understand the deeply unsatisfying experience of being unable to share a question or an idea because of taken-for-granted rules at work are on their way to recognising their organisation's speaking-up problem. By 'seeing' the invisible silence in your workplace you can begin to elicit the employee engagement, worker confidence, meaningful conversations, and valuable reports that contribute to a successful, fearless organisation.

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School and was ranked 12th on HR magazine's Most Influential Thinkers list 2018

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HR Magazine - The importance of psychological safety

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You may not know your staff aren't speaking up, meaning problems go unreported and unresolved Abstract Chances are you've had the experience at work of not asking a question you really wanted to. Maybe you had an idea to suggest but stayed quiet instead.

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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.

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Providing constructive feedback is one of the most powerful things you can do to help others achieve their goals, be happier in their work, create psychological safety and help your teams and organisations perform at their best.

However, it's really important to bear in mind how, why, and when feedback is delivered, or if it should be delivered at all. The effects of badly delivered feedback can be devastating. Poorly delivered feedback that is timed badly, delivered without concern for how it may be received, or feedback that is not actionable, can massively damage psychological safety.

Badly delivered feedback destroys psychological safety

Feedback must be actionable. When you receive feedback that isn't actionable, you may feel trapped, targeted, and criticised rather than empowered. Poorly delivered feedback may simply describe what is wrong, without a suggestion of how any improvements could be made. Without providing actions or changes, feedback is simply badly delivered criticism.

It's also worth bearing in mind that not all feedback is true or accurate, and it's important to remember that just because someone has given you some feedback, it doesn't mean you need to act upon it. Feedback may be the result of an opinion, or even delivered with an intent to manipulate. So when you're receiving feedback, consider:

Is this feedback specific and actionable?

Is it genuine and coming via positive intent?

Is the person delivering it doing so with care and concern for me?

Is the person delivering this feedback experienced or qualified enough to do so?

Is the feedback appropriately timed?

Is this feedback delivered in a suitable, possibly private, space?

If the answer to any of those questions is no, then you may wish to discard or ignore the feedback, and provide feedback in return.

How to deliver feedback and improve psychological safety

Good feedback must be:

Well intended

Solicited (i.e. ask for permission beforehand)

Actionable

Timely (delivered as soon as possible)

Specific

Private

Delivered from your perspective

Limited to only one or two points

Combined with positive encouragement

A conversation, not a statement

A two-way street (be open to receiving feedback in return)

Focussed on behaviours and performance, not personalities

When delivering feedback, try providing actions in the form of experiments, such as "Next time, maybe you could try doing X instead of Y, and seeing if that works better." By making everything an experiment, the risk of "failing" is significantly reduced.

When to refrain from giving feedback

Bear in mind that sometimes no feedback might be the better option - if someone simply needs encouragement, is finding life or work very challenging, the best thing to do may be to simply say " Well done, keep going. " Feedback can wait until they're in a psychologically suitable place to receive it.

The danger of really badly delivered feedback, or feedback delivered at a time when the subject is not able to accept it, may be that their performance suffers, or they simply quit - they give up and stop. It's better that someone keeps going and doing "ok", than they just stop completely.

Feedback and psychological safety

Great feedback can enhance an already high performing, psychologically safe team, but poorly delivered feedback can destroy psychological safety, so be careful, empathetic and mindful when delivering it.

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Giving Feedback with Psychological Safety

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Providing constructive feedback is one of the most powerful things you can do to help others achieve their goals, be happier in their work, create psychological safety and help your teams and organisations perform at their best. However, it's really important to bear in mind how, why, and when feedback is delivered, or if it should be delivered at all.

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Dive into IDEO's curated resources and activities to foster collaboration on your team.

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Tips for achieving psychological safety by @lizandmollie (from fab Emotions at Work book)

💡Don’t make people feel stupid for asking questions 
💡Be engaged
💡Respect others’ views

💡Also: see guide to creating psychological safety by @HorizonsNHS et al 
https://t.co/Y3l4d5jAoh

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
Tips for achieving psychological safety by @lizandmollie (from fab Emotions at Work book)

💡Don’t make people feel stupid for asking questions 
💡Be engaged
💡Respect others’ views

💡Also: see guide to creating psychological safety by @HorizonsNHS et al 
https://t.co/Y3l4d5jAoh https://t.co/793G7Z5S41

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Tips for achieving psychological safety by @lizandmollie (from fab Emotions at Work book)

💡Don’t make people feel stupid for asking questions
💡Be engaged
💡Respect others’ views

💡Also: see guide to creating psychological safety by @HorizonsNHS et al https://t.co/Y3l4d5jAoh pic.twitter.com/793G7Z5S41
— Leigh Kendall FRSA 💙 (@LeighAKendall) July 7, 2021

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Tips for achieving psychological safety by @lizandmollie (from fab Emotions at Work book)

💡Don’t make people feel stupid for asking questions 
💡Be engaged
💡Respect others’ views

💡Also: see guide to creating psychological safety by @HorizonsNHS et al 
https://t.co/Y3l4d5jAoh https://t.co/793G7Z5S41

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Tips for achieving psychological safety by @lizandmollie (from fab Emotions at Work book)

💡Don’t make people feel stupid for asking questions 
💡Be engaged
💡Respect others’ views

💡Also: see guide to creating psychological safety by @HorizonsNHS et al 
https://t.co/Y3l4d5jAoh https://t.co/793G7Z5S41

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Tips for achieving psychological safety by @lizandmollie (from fab Emotions at Work book)

💡Don’t make people feel stupid for asking questions 
💡Be engaged
💡Respect others’ views

💡Also: see guide to creating psychological safety by @HorizonsNHS et al 
https://t.co/Y3l4d5jAoh