What is psychological safety?

The higher you climb in an organisation, the funnier your jokes get. This is due to humans hard-wiring for self-protection, which can trigger what Julia Diamond calls the “rank reflex”. It leads people to self-censor and agree with authority figures.

However, consensus can result in preventable failures such as Blackberry losing half its market share in two years, the VW emissions scandal and the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster that claimed seven lives.

Research by Aristotle Performance found that 70% of leaders overestimate their teams’ psychological safety. Just consider the irony of leaders asking their teams if they feel safe to speak up: what response do you think they get? In my experience, this is compounded by leaders guessing and hypothesising about the barriers to speaking up, and of course, they are never the cause. However, a simple diagnostic tool can provide the answers, if managers and team leaders are willing to listen.

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological Safety is the ability to express ourselves without fear of reprisal, whether this is in a meeting or at the dinner table. It means sharing opinions without worrying about losing face or having those views used against us. It’s about being able to say in a meeting what you’d say in a WhatsApp group, albeit always professionally.

That said, I am noticing that as the term becomes more commonplace, its meaning is becoming distorted. Psychological safety is not about guaranteed applause for all ideas or everyone being nice. Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership at Harvard Business School, sums it up well, saying it is about “creating a candid energising environment” where debate, vulnerability, diverse thinking, and contributions are welcomed.

Is a Psychologically Safe Environment Useful?

Decades of research provides irrefutable evidence that psychological safety leads to increased engagement, better learning, improved innovation, more effective decision-making, and higher performance. While too many people feeling they can’t speak up, results in pretty much the opposite, with additional fall-out such as, a lack of diversity, missing out on insights, substandard creativity, less innovation, lower morale and increased staff turnover.

What can Leaders do about this?

Around 70% of leaders overestimate their teams’ psychological safety, while only 26% of leaders have the skills to create psychological safety McKinsey & Company. But, instead of guessing how the land lies, it is far more effective to use a simple diagnostic survey to get a real understanding of what drives or erodes people’s willingness and ability to speak up. Anonymous responses to questions built around Edmondson’s four domains of psychological safety will provide the insights managers and leaders need to rebalance the dynamic within their teams. For example:

Attitude to Risk/Failure: can we take calculated risks and learn from failure without penalties?
Open Conversations: can we discuss issues, provide and receive constructive feedback, and express disagreements during debates?
Inclusion & Diversity: do we feel accepted and is our uniqueness, including our diverse social identities, appreciated?
Willingness to Help: can we ask for help and be vulnerable?

(Please note this is not the diagnostic tool)

The resulting data, coupled with workshopping the content with your team, will give you the opportunity to double down on what’s working, and to address what’s not. It is important this is facilitated by an expert in coaching and behaviour change.

What Can Leaders Do Today to Build Psychological Safety?

As a leader it is up to you to set the stage and set simple rules of engagement. Instead of demanding input from everyone, express curiosity by saying, “I’d love to hear your perspective,” and show vulnerability by admitting, “I don’t have all the answers, I need your help.” No leader on the planet has all the answers to the complex challenges organisations face.

Listen actively, not just for data that supports your view, but to create genuine dialogue and debate that ensures inclusion and engagement. Respond appreciatively to your team. Acknowledge different perspectives and the personal risk someone may have taken to share their view.

Looking at how highly successful people do it, we know that Amazon Jeff Bezos speaks last in meetings to avoid influencing opinions and to gather diverse viewpoints. Eileen Fisher positions herself as a “don’t knower”, while former Pixar Animation Studios executive Ed Catmull cites candidness, frankness, and truth-telling as the powerful ingredients that led to a generation of box office hits.

It’s not Psychological Safety OR Accountability – it’s both