When employees feel comfortable sharing suggestions or challenging the status quo, they are more likely to innovate and adapt to change. This excerpt from the new book, Deliberate Calm, offers insights on fostering psychological safety in your workplace. |
“Psychological safety” is a term popularized by Amy Edmondson, an American scholar of organizational learning, to describe a shared belief that a team is a safe place for interpersonal risk taking. Psychological safety is a precursor to adaptive, innovative team performance.
When we feel comfortable asking for help, sharing suggestions informally or challenging the status quo without fear of negative consequences, our teams are more likely to innovate quickly, unlock the benefits of diversity and adapt well to change.
In 2012, Google embarked on an initiative with the code name Project Aristotle to study hundreds of teams and find out what led some to succeed more than others. They found that the number one predictor of team performance was psychological safety. The key word here is “safety.” On teams lacking psychological safety, people feel at risk of being blamed or shamed for our mistakes and sense that it is risky to disagree or admit failures. This implicit feeling of being under threat leads us to shift into protection and revert to reactive behaviors.
In a psychologically safe environment, however, we know our identities and relationships are safe and secure if we make a mistake and open up about it. This feeling of safety allows us to shift into learning both individually and as a whole, even when under stress and pressure.
In this state of learning, we can develop a new relationship with failure. Of course, we do not want to make mistakes or fail, and we must be held accountable for finding solutions. But when we are trying to innovate in a dynamic, uncertain environment in which we need to learn and master entirely new skills, errors and missteps are inevitable. In fact, if we do not encounter hiccups in an adaptive environment, it often means that we havent set our sights high enough. By learning from those failures in a psychologically safe environment, we can continuously adapt and improve in a dynamic environment.
Feeling psychologically safe at work is crucial for teams to thrive. When team members feel comfortable taking risks speaking up and being vulnerable with each other, they are more engaged, innovative, and productive.
As a leader, you play a critical role in cultivating psychological safety on your team. Here are 12 researched-backed tips for making your team feel safe to collaborate, experiment, and voice their perspectives without fear of negative consequences.
1. Make Psychological Safety an Explicit Priority
Don’t assume psychological safety will happen organically. You have to intentionally create conditions for team members to feel safe. Discuss the importance of psychological safety during team meetings. Make it clear through your words and actions that you want people to feel comfortable voicing concerns, asking for help, or proposing unconventional ideas without fear of embarrassment or retribution. Model openness yourself by admitting mistakes and being vulnerable about your own development areas.
2. Facilitate Everyone Speaking Up
Give each person opportunities to speak during meetings. Go around the room and ask for each team member’s perspective on key issues. Send out agendas ahead of time so everyone can prepare. Set expectations that the team values contributions from each person. Curb dominating team members and amplify quieter voices. Listen attentively and provide affirmation when people share ideas.
3. Establish Norms for How Failure is Handled
Teams need to agree on how setbacks, mistakes, and failures will be handled. Make it clear through your norms that failure is part of growth and innovation, not something to be ashamed of or punished for. Frame mistakes as valuable learning opportunities, not signs of personal incompetence. When a setback does occur, lead a thoughtful debrief where the team reflects on lessons learned rather than calling out blame or deficiencies.
4. Create Space for New Ideas (Even Wild Ones)
Encourage your team to think big and get creative. Let people know that no ideas are off limits at brainstorming sessions Resist the urge to be critical when people surface bold or unproven concepts Instead, use techniques like “yes, and…” to build on suggestions. Give new perspectives your full attention and explore how they might work. Make it safe to experiment with outside-the-box initiatives.
5. Embrace Productive Conflict
Teams need to engage in vigorous debate and challenge each other’s assumptions to arrive at the best solutions Set the expectation that constructive disagreement and truth-seeking are valued on the team Teach people how to critique ideas without getting personal. Be receptive to pushback on your own positions. Model how to debate issues passionately while maintaining mutual respect and understanding across perspectives.
6. Pay Close Attention and Look for Patterns
Carefully observe team dynamics and how people interact. Notice if certain individuals seem reticent while others dominate discussion. Watch for non-verbal cues that indicate discomfort, such as folded arms or averted gaze. Track who participates most and whose voice is missing. These patterns can reveal areas where psychological safety could improve.
7. Solicit Regular Feedback
Check in regularly with the team to assess how safe they feel. You can take the group’s temperature through anonymous surveys or one-on-one conversations. Ask open-ended questions like “Do you feel comfortable speaking up in meetings?” and “Does the team make it easy to take smart risks without fear of failure?” Really listen and probe for honest input about department dynamics.
8. Address Power Imbalances
Hierarchy, tenure, demographic differences, and social capital can all contribute to power imbalances that stifle psychological safety on teams. Counteract uneven influence by drawing out perspectives from those lower in the pecking order. Discourage deferring automatically to positions of authority. Build people’s confidence to contribute meaningfully regardless of title or tenure.
9. Make Inclusion a Daily Habit
Consciously practice behaviors that signal inclusion on a daily basis: greeting new team members, making personal connections, inviting input in meetings, reaching out across different groups. Take mental note of cliques forming and try to draw outliers into the fold. Hold others accountable for excluding behaviors. An inclusive culture starts with each person demonstrating appreciation for diversity.
10. Respond Productively to Conflict
Disagreements and interpersonal issues are inevitable. Don’t ignore mounting tensions in hopes that things will blow over. Address conflict directly through mediated conversations that humanize both sides. Focus on understanding not just the what, but the why behind disagreements. Train the group in de-escalation, non-violent communication and reconciliation practices.
11. Role Model Fallibility
You set the tone for how failure is handled. Adopting an infallible persona as the leader actually impedes psychological safety. Demonstrate that you don’t have all the answers and are growing just like everyone else. Admit when you’ve made a poor decision. Share stories of times you took a chance and it didn’t pan out as expected. Making yourself human, approachable and able to learn will inspire the team to take smart risks.
12. Celebrate Small Wins
Positive reinforcement builds psychological safety momentum. Notice when people take small steps outside their comfort zone, like speaking up at a crowded meeting for the first time. Recognize the use of healthy discussion norms during tense debates. Call out growth mindsets, creativity and teamwork. Find diverse ways to celebrate progress so people feel affirmed in stretching themselves.
The level of psychological safety on a team can make or break its success. By being intentional about establishing a psychologically safe environment, leaders empower teams to thrive. People who feel respected, included and valued will contribute their best thinking and efforts to pursuing shared goals together. A sense of belonging and trust is the foundation for teams to build upon as they navigate complex challenges in the modern working world. What steps will you take today to cultivate it on your team?
What is ‘Double-Loop’ Learning?
Most of us got to where we are because we are good at one kind of learning: single-loop learning, which involves solving hard problems with known methods and approaches. We tend to shift into protection and react by relying on known methods that simply wont work in this new situation.
There is, however, a second form of learning, called double-loop learning or adaptive learning. For example, a thermostat set to 68 degrees that turns the heat on anytime the room drops below 68 is engaging in single-loop learning. A thermostat engaging in double-loop learning would explore the most economical way to heat the room, asking, “Why am I set to 68 degrees?”
With double-loop learning, we explore and discover new methods and solutions by modifying our goals and decision-making rules in light of our experience. The only way to create a new reality is to move into the unknown and change our orientation, and failure will almost certainly be a part of the journey. This means that we can only engage in double loop learning in a psychologically safe environment, where we make learning from experience (and therefore mistakes) part of the adaptive solution-finding process.
We integrate this learning when we are able to fail without facing disastrous consequences and keep going. If we fail and are punished or demeaned for it, we learn that we should avoid taking risks that might make us look bad or cause others to think less of us, so we play it safe and limit our potential to learn and grow.
The Role of Leaders
Leaders play an important role in fostering psychological safety within their teams. In fact, as leaders our emotions often have a multiplier effect on our teams and organizations. When a leader is impatient, fearful, commanding or frustrated, it can shut down certain kinds of conversations. If a team is facing an adaptive challenge, this can really kill the creativity and learning that we need to engage in to find new solutions. When a leader demonstrates deliberate calm and is hopeful, calm, open and curious, the group can face challenges more creatively.
When leaders provide a foundation of trust, support, and psychological safety, it allows them to challenge and push their teams to do more than they initially think they can. This form of challenging leadership grounded in their trust in the capabilities of the team strengthens team performance and can lead employees to express creativity, feel empowered to make changes, and seek to learn and improve, but only when a positive, supportive team climate with psychological safety is already in place.
How To Create Psychological Safety On Teams
How do you create psychological safety at work?
Try using these nine strategies to create psychological safety at work. 1. Promote self-awareness. To create psychological safety in the workplace, start by building self-awareness in your team.
Why do people feel psychologically safer in teams?
People who feel psychologically safer work better in teams because they can share information and be transparent. And the very act of being productive—just doing the work together—becomes a feedback loop that can bond a team and help create the conditions for psychological safety. “Uncertainty and interdependence are attributes of most work today.”
How to promote psychological safety in your organization?
In this article, you’ll find 9 actionable exercises to start promoting psychological safety in your organization (additional resources at the end). 1. Facilitate a Check-In Round to Promote Psychological Safety The mindset that a team brings to a meeting will shape the outcome.
How do you foster psychological safety in a team?
Encourage all team members to raise problems or tough issues that may be on their minds. Applaud thoughtful risk taking and demonstrate it yourself. Publicly recognize and celebrate the unique skills and talents brought by each member of the teams you lead. Train leaders and managers on concrete steps for fostering psychological safety.
