Psychological Safety

Successful teams are those where dissenting views can be expressed appropriately, and where people can challenge ideas and practices respectfully.

Psychological safety, therefore, is complex. It concerns group-level expected norms. For example, a person may assess a workplace setting—consciously or at some subconscious level—in these terms:

• Do I feel safe and free to be myself?

• Do I feel safe to bring my whole human self to work? Or, do I feel as though I need to squash myself into a box?

• Do I feel safe and welcome to speak up and question when issues arise, to challenge ingrained norms, to raise issues and ideas? Or, is it much easier to be silent and compliant?

Lack of trust and psychological safety can lead to:

• Stifled creativity and innovation
• Unnecessary mistakes
• Bullying
• Harassment
• Discrimination

Moreover, it can make employees feel that it is not safe to raise these issues—that when bullying and harassment occurs, it will not be appropriately dealt with and responded to. The risk of this behaviour continuing and affecting others is therefore very real.

When trust and psychological safety are high, people are more likely to collaborate, share information, be innovative and contribute ideas. They are willing to assist others when needed. Employees perform better when they feel safe.

How do you build trust and psychological safety in your team and your wider organisation? It takes deliberate attention and action:

• Consider the voices you engage with
  • How are you actively seeking to engage those in your team with whom you don’t share common experiences?
  • Are you at risk of primarily hearing the voice of, and considering the contributions of, people who have the same interests and perspectives as yourself?
  • How are you seeking the contributions of others and actively listening to different voices?
•  Manage your emotions
  • It means creating the safety to have challenging conversations—to hear dissenting voices and to still stay connected with people rather than disconnecting and dismissing views different from our own.
• Practice curiosity
  • Being curious about what things we react to, what decisions we make, why we make those decisions, and our thoughts and behaviours.
• Develop relationships
  • This means building appropriate, respectful relationships with whole people in our teams, not the caricatures or stereotypes we might have created for them.