For many years, ‘safety at work’ was associated with physical infrastructure and compliance practices to manage bodily injury.  But safety isn’t just physical, and people aren’t just bodies. People have feelings and emotions, thoughts, ideas and dreams. And those can be injured too. Today, mental injury prevention is just as important as physical injury prevention.

A key ingredient in mental injury prevention at work is the degree of psychological safety fostered by your team and coworkers.  Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as

‘a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes, and that the team is safe for inter-personal risk-taking.’

 

In her book  The Fearless Organisation, Edmondson draws on her research to explore teams’ attitudes toward risk and failure, capacity for tough conversations, willingness to help and the degree of inclusion and diversity. She looks at what happens when team members make a mistake, take a risk or ask for help. Is there a climate of candour or a climate of silence and underperformance?

 

When you have a climate of good psychological safety, people feel able to speak up and share their ideas without negative consequences. There is a shared understanding that they won’t be punished, shamed or humiliated as a result.

 

In The Four Stages of Psychological Safety, Timothy R. Clark defines psychological safety as ‘rewarded vulnerability‘. In The Four Stages Model psychological safety means you…

  1. Feel included 
  2. Feel safe to learn
  3. Feel safe to contribute
  4. Feel safe to challenge the status quo

…without fear of being embarrassed, marginalised or punished in some way. 

Psychological safety is not…

  • Being ‘nice’
  • Touchy-feely
  • Abundant consensus
  • A license to whine
  • Oversharing
  • A guarantee that all your ideas will be applauded
  • Freedom from conflict
  • Permission to slack off
  • ‘Anything goes!’
  • Lowering standards
  • Giving up on accountability
  • Wrapping teams in cotton wool

High psychological safe environments hold dissent, foster accountability and high performance while maintaining human dignity and worthiness.

‘Psychological safety is often confused with a “safe space,” when it’s actually nearly the opposite. A psychologically safe culture is not free of conflict, consequences, or accountability. These things exist but are managed positively and constructively… Think of psychological safety as an atmosphere of healthy give-and-take, rather than an atmosphere of tiptoeing around.’ – Amy Edmondson

 

Is vulnerability rewarded or punished in your organisation?

Brené Brown defines vulnerability as ‘risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure’, and every day we engage in small acts of vulnerability with the people around us. These deeply uncomfortable feelings are the birthplace of courage, belonging and innovation. And as advertising pioneer, Gay Gaddis says ‘When you shut down vulnerability, you shut down opportunity.’

 

The degree of psychological safety to be vulnerable within the team climate will impact how we show up and speak up. We amend our behaviour depending on the environment. We make an assessment of whether acts of vulnerability are rewarded or punished. If we sense that we’ll be punished, we don’t take the risk. 

 

Acts of vulnerability can include: 

  • Asking a question
  • Admitting a mistake
  • Disagreeing
  • Saying “I don’t know”
  • Sharing an alternate point of view
  • Sharing something personal
  • Challenging the status quo
  • Giving feedback
  • Sharing your emotions
  • Sharing an idea
  • Asking for help
  • Doing something you’re not good at
  • Saying no

 

How can you assess if your organisation has a culture of psychological safety?

Edmondson’s research has identified four aspects that help determine if an organisation has a culture where people feel psychologically safe:

1. The attitude to risk and failure

  • Is it safe to take a risk?
  • Is it held against you if you take risks on this team?

2. Open conversations

  • Are members of this team able to bring up tough issues?

One participant in a workshop shared with me the phrase ‘meeting silence, corridor violence‘, and we all gasped knowing exactly what she meant. Back channelling, the meeting-after-the-meeting and the ‘dirty yes’ (saying yes in a meeting but undermining the agreement outside of the meeting) are indicators of low psychological safety.

(Note: not all silence in meetings is negative – sometimes it’s useful air time to think, reflect and discern. This is not the intent of this phrase above. This phrase is a deliberate holding back of speaking up, contributing or challenging because it feels unwelcome or unsafe to do so.)

3. Willingness to help

  • How easy is it to ask other team members for help?
  • Would anyone on this team deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts?
  • Are my unique skills and talents values and utilized by this team?

4. Inclusion and Diversity

  • Are people on this team ever rejected for being different?

 

The costs of a breach of psychological safety

If you want to understand the price of a breach of psychological safety, you can measure its knock-on impact.

The Leader Factor measured the impacts of a breach of psychological safety, this is what they found: 

  • 48% Intentionally decrease their work effort 
  • 47% Intentionally decrease time spent at work
  • 38% Intentionally decreased the quality of their work
  • 80% Lost work time worrying about the incident
  • 63% Lost time avoiding the offender
  • 66% Said that their performance declined
  • 78% Said their commitment to the organisation declined
  • 12% Said they lost their job because of the uncivil treatment
  • 25% Admitted to taking their frustration out on customers 

A recent study found looking at what’s driving The Great Resignation found that toxic work culture is 10.4 times more likely to contribute to attrition than compensation.

 

What does psychological safety sound like?

In this great article by Amy Edmondson, she gives us an idea of what it sounds like inside a psychologically safe climate:

Team leader

  • This is totally new territory for us, so I’m going to need everyone’s input.
  • There are many unknowns/things are changing fast/this is complex stuff. So we will make mistakes.
  • Okay, that’s one side. Let’s hear some dissent/who’s got something to add/let’s have some give-and-take.
  • Lucy, you look concerned. Gilles, you haven’t said much. Adrian, what are you hearing in the warehouse/on the phones/on the road?
  • What assumptions are we making? What else could this be/could we investigate/have we left out?
  • What are you up against? What help do you need? What’s in your way?
  • Did everything go as smoothly as you would have liked? What were the friction points? Are there systems we should retool?
  • Thank you for that clear line of sight. (This was the famous reaction of Ford’s Alan Mullaly to some colossally bad news.)
  • I really appreciate your bringing this to me. I’m sure it wasn’t easy.

Team member

  • We’ve got some new information we’d like to share.
  • Something’s been troubling me. Do you have ten minutes to talk about it?
  • Some of this is not good news. Is this an okay time to dig in?
  • I mentioned the problem to the team and we’ve got some ideas.
  • I’ve hit a roadblock/I’ve got to go back to square one/I’ve made a mistake.
  • We tried an experiment, and it didn’t go as expected.
  • The front desk says patients aren’t comfortable with this new procedure.
  • There’s been an uptick in X, and we can’t explain it just yet.
  • I’m not sure who to approach about this kind of thing/the level of detail you like to hear/what’s the best procedure for bringing up a concern.
  • Let me recheck that for you. It doesn’t sound right. It’ll only take a minute.
  • We need another pair of eyes on this. Best to spend a minute/hour/day/week on that now.
  • I don’t feel right about this. Can we do a hard stop right here?

 

Getting intentional about psychological safety

Psychological safety in a team doesn’t just happen. It is an intentional choice by its leader and team members, working at it together. It is also not a ‘set and forget’ initiative. Just like a garden, psychological safety needs tending to, fertilising, seeding, weeding and composting throughout the seasons.

In Clark’s Four Stages model, he offers a range of behaviours for each stage of psychological safety. Here is a small sample for each of the stages:

Inclusion safety

  • Teach inclusion as a human need and right
  • Introduce yourself at the first opportunity
  • Learn people’s names and how to correctly pronounce them
  • Physically face people when you speak to them
  • Listen and pause
  • Ask twice as much as you tell
Learner safety
  • Learn together
  • Adopt a student mindset
  • Assess the learning style and temperament of each person
  • Assign learning projects
  • Share past mistakes
  • Admit your own ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’
Contributor safety
  • Rotate the chairing of meetings
  • Clarify roles
  • Recognise accomplishment
  • Don’t correct with anger, blame or shame
  • Set ground rules and boundaries
  • Identify stall points
Challenger safety
  • Assign dissent
  • Weigh in last
  • Display no pride of authorship
  • Model vulnerability
  • Reward shots on goal
  • Break before breakdowns

 

If you want to reap the benefits of a commitment and high-performing workforce, psychological safety is an important element to have in place.

 

What will you do with this knowledge and insight? How will you bring this to life or start a conversation in your workplace about psychological safety?

 

If you’d like to upskill your team in understanding psychological safety and the behaviours that support it, contact us to start a conversation about your options.

 

 

:: Read more

Five simple ways to start building psychological safety in your team

This is what is getting in your way of building a great team culture. And what to do about it.

Go deeper into this topic with the following sources, which were used to inform this journal entry: