A few years ago, a friend approached her boss to discuss an upcoming vacation.
She was planning ahead and gave several months notice, to which her boss replied, “I wish I could take vacations like you, but I have a business to run,” in a biting caustic tone.
Staff meetings were filled with angry lectures about the tight budget, and staff members responded with cautious silence.
“Everyone walked on eggshells because you never knew what mood our leader was in.”
When especially stressed, the boss would vent frustrations to some team members about the others.
It was a medical setting, and every last patient was squeezed into the schedule in order to maximize profit. When mistakes happened on this tight schedule, the boss exploded, sometimes openly humiliating team members in front of patients and office staff.
The employees that complained the loudest got paid the most, and gossip about salary inequity was often a major source of team tension.
Have you ever had a boss where you felt completely unsafe to speak up?
Ever had a job where you felt you could not tell your boss about an upcoming problem you could see on the horizon?
Have you ever made a mistake and felt the sense of dread when anticipating your leader’s response?
If you have, you have experienced a workplace that was likely missing a key organizational cornerstone of success—psychological safety.
The topic of psychological safety has received a ton of attention in recent years, and research shows that it is a basic and essential component of any successful team.
After all, when you don’t feel safe, you can’t trust other’s reactions and you keep information to yourself, you go into survival mode which dramatically limits creativity and innovation.
And when you don’t have trust in the team or leader, you don’t have a team.
A definition of psychological safety and what it looks like in practice
Read any article on psychological safety and you will find the name Amy Edmondson pretty quickly, a professor at Harvard Business School with a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior. She is the author of the 2018 bestselling book The Fearless Organization, Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.
Edmondson began her research in hospitals, and found that teams with higher psychological safety had lower error rates. This makes sense. The teams with less errors didn’t fear the leader, reviewed mistakes without blame, and spoke up whenever they had concerns—so that they could fix things earlier in the process.
This is especially important in medical settings where you should probably tell the surgeon they are about to mistakenly amputate the wrong leg. Or informing the nurse they are about to give the wrong patient a medication.
But psychological safety is vital in the business world too. You can see how teams that fear the leader might not share important information or feel free to be creative in their approach to problem solving. A lack of psychological safety shuts down innovation and team engagement.
Edmonson defines psychological safety most basically as, “felt permission for candor” on a team. A more detailed definition might be a shared belief that it is okay express ideas or concerns openly, ask questions, take risks, and admit mistakes—without fear of the leader or one’s teammates.
Psychological safety is often created or eliminated in the context of one-on-one meetings with team members or group meetings with a team.
The leaders’ responses, along with their behavioral cues, play a huge role in creating the psychological climate.
Let’s look at two examples. Let’s say a team has a high-stakes issue they need to discuss in a meeting.
If the leader responses with:
- Closed body posture
- Distractions with a phone or computer
- Dirty looks
- Irritable tone
- Being in a hurry or tense
- Poor listening or interrupting
- Shutting down new ideas
- Leaving people out of the discussion
- Tolerating toxic remarks
- Talking too much
- Defending their own ideas
- Trying to be right
- Searching for blame
These behaviors are likely to lead people to shut down and be hesitant to share.
On the other hand, if the leader responds with:
- “Hey Mark, you’ve been silent on this issue, I’d like to hear your input.”
- “You make a good point, let’s hear from others too.”
- “What ideas have we not considered?”
- Asks good questions and facilitates instead of talking
- Encourages others to speak
- Invites healthy debate
- Summarizes what’s been said
- Actively solicits diverse perspectives
- Does not tolerate disrespect
- Shows empathy for team distress
- Follows up on issues the team raised
- Takes action when they say they will
- Apologizes
- Says “I don’t know” when they don’t know the answer
- Schedules one to one meetings with team
Leaders that practice this pattern will encourage healthy debate, create safety, and gain team trust. All of this will lead to a higher quality decision.
Why it matters
MIT recently posted an article stating that teams with toxic culture have 10x the turnover of healthy teams. And team health is often directly linked to the level of psychological safety.
Furthermore, a lack of psychological safety also likely drives the recent phenomenon of quiet quitting—quietly doing the minimum required of one’s job while looking for other work.
It’s important to clarify that psychological safety is not simply about being nice or feeling comfortable. In fact, it might often look like the opposite. It should look like a respectful but spirited debate or healthy disagreement, stretching others to share how they really feel or challenge existing practices. It is not comfortable or placating.
The literature also supports the idea that creating psychological safety is one of the best ways to ensure you create a culture where diversity is valued and encouraged.
It’s also worth mentioning that improving psychological safety with your partner or children also pays huge dividends. Want to make sure your teenager shares that they tried drugs at a party or your partner made a significant financial mistake?
Improving the way you behave and react will also improve your personal relationships significantly.
Take action now
Don’t just consume content and move on to your next article—begin taking steps now to create more psychological safety at work and home.
Whether you’re a CEO or a front-line worker, there are steps everyone can take to improve psychological safety.
You can’t fix a problem you never identify, so I created a free team assessment informed by research that you can access here. Use this with your team, make sure it is anonymous, and begin working on a behavior.
Have a great weekend!
Parker
*AI is never used for the creation of this blog. Every article is completely human generated.
