How to define psychological safety?
In an attempt to code human behavior, research was undertaken by Richard Hackman and Amy Edmondson in a medical environment. Teams were surveyed on their error making behavior and on their team effectiveness. A correlation was found between effective teams and the number of errors reported, but in the wrong direction. Were more effective teams making more mistakes?
A deeper delve into the data, the teams, and an additional study on interpersonal interactions showed that the more effective teams - were not simply making more mistakes ❌ - they were more willing to talk about them ✅. These teams were said to be characterized by an interpersonal climate known as team psychological safety (1).
Psychological safety refers to an interpersonal context, or a work environment, where there is a shared belief amongst individuals that it is safe to engage in interpersonal risk-taking. For example, disagreeing with a boss, speaking up with new ideas, asking questions and admitting mistakes. It is possible to, and that doing so is expected, desired, and acceptable. In this work environment, team members feel that their colleagues will not reject people for being themselves or saying what they think, respect each other's competence and are interested in each other as people, having positive intentions towards one another.
Why does psychological safety matter?
Psychological safety has been linked to organizational outcomes such as achievement of objectives, creativity, innovation and overall team effectiveness, in organizational behavior research, most notably through the work of Amy Edmondson and through the well known study of Google (2). Project Aristotle, run by Google to find what leads to effective teams, found that who was on the team was less important than how the team worked together.
Concepts that were not found to be significantly connected with team effectiveness at Google:
❌ Working in the same location
❌ Consensus-driven decision making
❌ Extroversion of team members
❌ Seniority of team members
What was most important:
🥇Psychological safety (safe to take risk in the team)
⒉ Dependability (members do not shirk responsibilities, they can trust in each other)
⒊ Meaning (people find a personal sense of purpose in their work)
⒋ Impact (subjective judgment that the work you do matters and creates change)
Whether it is increased learning mindset, engagement, stakeholder collaboration, improved satisfaction and task performance, psychological safety is found to be a key factor in these organizational outcomes (3).
Almost everyone is involved in work that involves judgment and decision-making. In order to perform well, we must be prepared to take interpersonal risks, ask for help, challenge another person's judgment, and be open to giving ideas. It is entirely possible for individuals to come off well if they remain silent, but teams and organizations do not advance when they do so.
A climate where team members feel they can contribute, are able to speak up, leads to ➡️ individuals who feel engaged and motivated.
A climate where voice can be used, leads ➡️ to a diverse range of perspectives, opinions and concerns, included in the decision making process resulting in ➡️ higher quality decisions.
A climate where team members feel comfortable owning failures and mistakes leads to ➡️ a culture of continuous learning, creativity and service innovation.
In today's world, teams must learn in order for organizations to learn as well.
What psychological safety is not:
❌ Just being nice
❌ Permission to slack off
❌ Freedom from conflict
❌ Accepting and using all ideas
❌ Persistently expressing any minor dissatisfaction
❌ Oversharing
❌ The only thing a team needs to be effective.
Aiming for the Learning Zone
The aim of leaders, their teams, and the organizations they serve is to operate in the learning zone. High performance, accountability, adherence to norms, and psychological safety are present here.
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Book a demoCreating psychological safety
Psychological safety is impacted by work design, workplace support, and positive leader relationship (3).
👉 The clarity that leaders bring to roles and objectives, the shared understanding of these objectives and the team's overall mission, creates awareness of what they should be doing, and why, leading to higher levels of psychological safety. Spend time clarifying these.
👉 Workplace support in terms of social relationships through mutual support, belonging and necessity of teamwork, have a favorable impact on safety perceptions. Even if the necessity of teamwork may not be appropriate in all work environments, psychological safety is more likely to occur when employees are dependent on one another to complete their tasks. Invest in teamwork activities and create work for teams. Recognize performance at team level.
👉 Evidence shows an important link between positive direct leader and team interactions in fostering psychological safety. This highlights the crucial role direct leaders have in fostering psychological safety and the importance of determining the workplace environment. Frame your approach in your team environment with a care, learning and humility mindset.
Approach with a Care Mindset
To reflect:
- Do we value the diversity of our team members (skills, training, ideas etc.)?
- Do we ask questions and explore the opinions of other members of our team in a candid way?
- Do we value the talents and skills of individual team members and clarify work and roles accordingly?
To implement:
➡️ Keep drawing attention to your shared goals, and the key skills and competences team members bring to these.
➡️ Be clear that you see different viewpoints and ways of working as a resource for collaborating to solve problems in support of that goal.
➡️ Create clear spaces and channels for team communication and interdependent work. Set clear norms of respectful, curious and welcoming behavior. Model this. This will build empathy and understanding among members.
Approach with a Learning Mindset
To reflect:
- Do we have a clear process, or dedicated time and place for reporting errors and failure?
- Do we replace a blame mindset with a curiosity mindset? By asking - what is it that you have learnt from this failure? By looking for solutions together?
- When and if a mistake is shared, do we respond with an expression of appreciation, destigmatizing failure, and sanctioning clear violations?
To implement:
➡️ Explicit to your teams that mistakes and failures are part of the process. Let them know how, when and to whom these can be reported.
➡️ Embrace those who come forward with mistakes and messengers of difficult news.
➡️ Value collective problem solving, growth mindset and learning through error management mindset.
Approach with a Humility Mindset
To reflect:
- Do we value asking for help in our team?
- Do we create an environment where people feel safe to ask questions?
- Do we know that it is ok to not have all the answers?
Wise people are people with - strong opinions weakly held - showing that you always need and you always welcome input.
To implement:
🤸 Balance: Your time spent speaking in statements versus in question, your time spent actively listening versus talking time.
Talking time vs. question time❓
Listening time vs. talking time 💬
🙋 Asking: What are we missing? What do others think? What do you see? What ideas do you have? Feel free to tell me what you think about this?
😊 Responding: With gratitude towards their contribution. With gentle elaboration questions. With acceptance of constructive feedback and an openness for change.
🏃 Acting: Take on feedback, ideas and communicate what is being used, what won’t and why. Remaining kind and factual.
Leaders should listen actively, demonstrate empathy, ask open-ended questions, and be responsive to concerns and suggestions. This builds trust and creates an environment where team members feel safe to speak up and take risks.
Though, leaders are key influencers in this change, any team player can adopt these behaviors to create and maintain psychological safety within their teams.
Measuring and creating psychological safety in your organizations
📊 Begin by measuring it ! Assessing psychological safety levels at boards, within teams, and across your organization, presents significant chances for introspection, learning, and development.
Everyone stands to gain significantly from the creation of safe spaces at the local team level and the organizational level.
At OpenDecide we help you measure the psychological safety of your team, provide support to talk about this with your team, and find the right tools and resources for your organization.
🧘♀️ The Fearless Organisation (4) does not yet exist, but organizations with numerous teams containing psychological safety do. Increase your organization's psychological safety, one team at a time.
Key references for this article:
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
- Google Project Aristotle https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/
- Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological Safety: A Meta-Analytic Review and Extension: PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183
- Edmondson, A. C. (2022). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.John Wiley & Sons.
