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What is psychological safety?

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What is psychological safety?

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For many years, ‘safety at work’ was associated with
physical infrastructure and compliance practices to  Daring Leaders
manage bodily injury.  But safety isn’t just physical, and
 In The Company
people aren’t just bodies. People have feelings and
Podcast
emotions, thoughts, ideas and dreams. And those can be
injured too. Today, mental injury prevention is just as
 Sustainable
important as physical injury prevention.
Leadership

A key ingredient in mental injury prevention at work is

 The Leap Stories
the degree of psychological safety fostered by your team
and coworkers.  Harvard Business School professor Amy
Edmondson defines psychological safety as

‘a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated

for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or
mistakes, and that the team is safe for inter-personal
risk-taking.’

In her book  The Fearless Organisation, Edmondson

draws on her research to explore teams’ attitudes
toward risk and failure, capacity for tough
conversations, willingness to help and the degree of
inclusion and diversity. She looks at what happens when
team members make a mistake, take a risk or ask for
help. Is there a climate of candour or a climate of silence
and underperformance?

When you have a climate of good psychological safety,

people feel able to speak up and share their ideas
without negative consequences. There is a shared
understanding that they won’t be punished, shamed or
humiliated as a result.

In The Four Stages of Psychological Safety, Timothy R.

Clark defines psychological safety as ‘rewarded
vulnerability‘. In The Four Stages Model psychological
safety means you…

1. Feel included 
2. Feel safe to learn
3. Feel safe to contribute
4. Feel safe to challenge the status quo

…without fear of being embarrassed, marginalised or

punished in some way. 

Psychological safety is not…

Being ‘nice’
Touchy-feely
Abundant consensus
A license to whine
Oversharing
A guarantee that all your ideas will be applauded
Freedom from conflict
Permission to slack off
‘Anything goes!’
Lowering standards
 Giving up on accountability
Wrapping teams in cotton wool

High psychological safe environments hold dissent,

foster accountability and high performance while
maintaining human dignity and worthiness.

‘Psychological safety is often confused with a “safe

space,” when it’s actually nearly the opposite. A
psychologically safe culture is not free of conflict,
consequences, or accountability. These things exist
but are managed positively and constructively…
Think of psychological safety as an atmosphere of
healthy give-and-take, rather than an atmosphere of
tiptoeing around.’ – Amy Edmondson

Is vulnerability rewarded or
punished in your organisation?

Brené Brown defines vulnerability as ‘risk, uncertainty

and emotional exposure’, and every day we engage in
small acts of vulnerability with the people around us.
These deeply uncomfortable feelings are the birthplace
of courage, belonging and innovation. And as
advertising pioneer, Gay Gaddis says ‘When you shut
down vulnerability, you shut down opportunity.’

The degree of psychological safety to be vulnerable

within the team climate will impact how we show up
and speak up. We amend our behaviour depending on
the environment. We make an assessment of whether
acts of vulnerability are rewarded or punished. If we
sense that we’ll be punished, we don’t take the risk. 
 

Acts of vulnerability can

include: 

Asking a question
Admitting a mistake
Disagreeing
Saying “I don’t know”
Sharing an alternate point of view
Sharing something personal
Challenging the status quo
Giving feedback
Sharing your emotions
Sharing an idea
Asking for help
Doing something you’re not good at
Saying no

How can you assess if your

organisation has a culture of
psychological safety?

Edmondson’s research has identified four aspects that

help determine if an organisation has a culture where
people feel psychologically safe:

1. The attitude to risk and failure

Is it safe to take a risk?

Is it held against you if you take risks on this team?

2. Open conversations
 Are members of this team able to bring up tough
issues?

One participant in a workshop shared with me the

phrase ‘meeting silence, corridor violence‘, and we all
gasped knowing exactly what she meant. Back
channelling, the meeting-after-the-meeting and the
‘dirty yes’ (saying yes in a meeting but undermining the
agreement outside of the meeting) are indicators of low
psychological safety.

(Note: not all silence in meetings is negative – sometimes

it’s useful air time to think, reflect and discern. This is
not the intent of this phrase above. This phrase is a
deliberate holding back of speaking up, contributing or
challenging because it feels unwelcome or unsafe to do
so.)

3. Willingness to help

How easy is it to ask other team members for help?

Would anyone on this team deliberately act in a
way that undermines my efforts?
Are my unique skills and talents values and utilized
by this team?

4. Inclusion and Diversity

Are people on this team ever rejected for being

different?

The costs of a breach of

psychological safety

If you want to understand the price of a breach of

psychological safety, you can measure its knock-on
impact.
The Leader Factor measured the impacts of a breach of
psychological safety, this is what they found: 

48% Intentionally decrease their work effort 

47% Intentionally decrease time spent at work
38% Intentionally decreased the quality of their
work
80% Lost work time worrying about the incident
63% Lost time avoiding the offender
66% Said that their performance declined
78% Said their commitment to the organisation
declined
12% Said they lost their job because of the uncivil
treatment
25% Admitted to taking their frustration out on
customers 

A recent study found looking at what’s driving The Great

Resignation found that toxic work culture is 10.4 times
more likely to contribute to attrition than
compensation.

What does psychological safety

sound like?

In this great article by Amy Edmondson, she gives us an

idea of what it sounds like inside a psychologically safe
climate:

Team leader

This is totally new territory for us, so I’m going to

need everyone’s input.
There are many unknowns/things are changing
fast/this is complex stuff. So we will make mistakes.
Okay, that’s one side. Let’s hear some dissent/who’s
got something to add/let’s have some give-and-take.
 Lucy, you look concerned. Gilles, you haven’t said
much. Adrian, what are you hearing in the
warehouse/on the phones/on the road?
What assumptions are we making? What else could
this be/could we investigate/have we left out?
What are you up against? What help do you need?
What’s in your way?
Did everything go as smoothly as you would have
liked? What were the friction points? Are there
systems we should retool?
Thank you for that clear line of sight. (This was the
famous reaction of Ford’s Alan Mullaly to some
colossally bad news.)
I really appreciate your bringing this to me. I’m sure
it wasn’t easy.

Team member

We’ve got some new information we’d like to share.

Something’s been troubling me. Do you have ten
minutes to talk about it?
Some of this is not good news. Is this an okay time to
dig in?
I mentioned the problem to the team and we’ve got
some ideas.
I’ve hit a roadblock/I’ve got to go back to square
one/I’ve made a mistake.
We tried an experiment, and it didn’t go as expected.
The front desk says patients aren’t comfortable with
this new procedure.
There’s been an uptick in X, and we can’t explain it
just yet.
I’m not sure who to approach about this kind of
thing/the level of detail you like to hear/what’s the
best procedure for bringing up a concern.
Let me recheck that for you. It doesn’t sound right.
It’ll only take a minute.
We need another pair of eyes on this. Best to spend a
minute/hour/day/week on that now.
I don’t feel right about this. Can we do a hard stop
right here?
 

Getting intentional about

psychological safety

Psychological safety in a team doesn’t just happen. It is

an intentional choice by its leader and team members,
working at it together. It is also not a ‘set and forget’
initiative. Just like a garden, psychological safety needs
tending to, fertilising, seeding, weeding and composting
throughout the seasons.

In Clark’s Four Stages model, he offers a range of

behaviours for each stage of psychological safety. Here is
a small sample for each of the stages:

Inclusion safety

Teach inclusion as a human need and right

Introduce yourself at the first opportunity
Learn people’s names and how to correctly
pronounce them
Physically face people when you speak to them
Listen and pause
Ask twice as much as you tell

Learner safety

Learn together
Adopt a student mindset
Assess the learning style and temperament of each
person
Assign learning projects
Share past mistakes
Admit your own ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’

Contributor safety

Rotate the chairing of meetings

Clarify roles
Recognise accomplishment
 Don’t correct with anger, blame or shame
Set ground rules and boundaries
Identify stall points

Challenger safety

Assign dissent
Weigh in last
Display no pride of authorship
Model vulnerability
Reward shots on goal
Break before breakdowns

If you want to reap the benefits of a commitment and

high-performing workforce, psychological safety is an
important element to have in place.

What will you do with this knowledge and insight? How

will you bring this to life or start a conversation in your
workplace about psychological safety?

If you’d like to upskill your team in understanding

psychological safety and the behaviours that support it,
contact us to start a conversation about your options.

:: Read more

Five simple ways to start building psychological

safety in your team
 This is what is getting in your way of building a great
team culture. And what to do about it.

Go deeper into this topic with the following sources,

which were used to inform this journal entry:

https://www.leaderfactor.com/psychological-safety 
The Leader Factor, ebook 
https://amycedmondson.com/psychological-safety/
The Fearless Organisation, by Amy Edmonson 

By Kylie Lewis | June 16, 2022 | Sustainable Leadership | 0 Comments

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About the Author: Kylie Lewis

Kylie supports the development of creative,

curious and entrepreneurial businesses and
their teams interested in daring leadership,
humanising work, building brave cultures
and cultivating professional and personal courage.

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