Back to: Psychological Safety
The modern workplace is demanding…
Consider your last six months and ask yourself if you’ve used any of these words to describe any of the work you’re involved in… Collaboration. Teamwork. Creativity. Innovation. Problem solving. Agility. Complexity. Uncertainty. Decision-making. These all require mental effort and are best supported by a Psychologically Safe environment.
In a survey of 3000 knowledge economy workers, people just like you that is, Workhuman found that a decidedly low 26% of employees felt psychologically safe during Covid. They also experienced more burnout, stress and loneliness. Further, when employees rate their manager’s skills as a 9 or a 10, they have an average psychological safety score of a hefty 84%. In contrast, those whose overall skills are rated a 6 or lower have an average psychological safety rating of a paltry 36%.
The impact of the interpersonal skills of managers and leaders is profound, and so they carry more responsibility for creating Psychological Safety. That said, everyone has a role in creating a better environment.
Let’s start with some key definitions.
Psychological Safety
Psychological Safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.
It’s a deliberately constructed context and culture that facilitates learning and higher performance.
You’ll recognise it as the feeling we can speak up, take risks, ask questions (including hard questions), debate, identify problems, suggest improvements, ask for help, say you don’t know, and make mistakes, without fear of humiliation, censorship and embarrassment.
What Psychological Safety does is provide an environment in which people flourish and deliver their best. It’s not something you do to an organisation, nor is it something you can tick the box on. It’s a way of operating that becomes the norm.
Psychological Safety is the key enabler of high performance.
Below is an excellent overview by Amy Edmondson. Video is 11m26s.
And here’s a handy little summary of the behaviours that identify how safe your team or organisation’s culture might be, courtesy of Adam Grant.
What it isn’t
It isn’t simply being nice all the time. It’s not about safe spaces and never disagreeing. It’s not about avoiding conflict. On the contrary, it facilitates challenge and debate, allows discussion and feedback, works with failure, and helps improvement.
Psychological Safety is often confused with Emotional Safety, and also often misrepresented as Trust.
Emotional safety has more to do with creating safe spaces, freedom from threat or harm, and can manifest in an unwillingness to be candid, or have challenging conversations, to prevent people being upset or hurting their feelings. Emotional safety can be very comfortable, but also unproductive, and creates different tensions.
Psychological Safety allows, and might even initiaite discomfort and friction, to encourage innovation, growth and performance. They key is that these are norms a group has established, they are built on the foundations of solid relationships, and expectations around how people will treat each other are clearly articulated and understood.
Trust is the beliefs you hold about another person, while Psychological Safety is the belief you have of how the group sees you. Psychological Safety incorporates trust and operates at group, not individual, level.
Some caveats
Psychological Safety isn’t a panacea.
It enables learning and high performance, but you still need good policies, processes and structures, clear strategy and tactics, measurement, accountability, quality, marketing, products and services, and everything else that goes into a good business.
And it isn’t a quick fix. It takes effort and you may make mistakes. That’s ok! Mistakes are a necessary part of how we learn. (We just get more averse to them as we get older…).
We’ll look at some case studies, then get into the nuts and bolts of what to do.
A refresher
Click the Take Quiz button for a quick and easy refresher of where we are so far.