How to Build The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™

We define psychological safety first as a culture of rewarded vulnerability. Vulnerability is an inherently human experience, meaning that every person experiences vulnerability, although they might experience it differently than you do. Every time you do something that exposes your insecurity, makes you feel uncertain, or otherwise pushes you out of your comfort zone, you’re committing an act of vulnerability.

Organizations who can master the art of recognizing, acknowledging, modeling, and rewarding the micro forms of inclusion, learning, contribution, and challenging amongst themselves will build high-performing, efficient, and innovative teams.

Model and reward acts of vulnerability

Some common acts of vulnerability include making a mistake, giving an incorrect answer, accepting more responsibility, receiving feedback, contributing to a discussion, clarifying expectations, asking for more resources, raising a concern, being your authentic self, expressing your emotions, sharing something personal, connecting with your team, asking for help, admitting you don’t know, and trying something new.

Modeling and rewarding vulnerability doesn’t happen at the theoretical level. It happens at the behavioral level.

Creating a culture of rewarded vulnerability requires both modeling and rewarding acts of vulnerability. Rewarding the acts your colleagues are willing to commit isn’t enough on its own — you actually have to be vulnerable yourself. Engaging in acts of vulnerability will help others see that they’re safe to follow suit.

You’ll feel the difference in energy when you start rewarding, instead of punishing or ignoring, people’s vulnerabilities. This guide shares twelve practical suggestions to do just that, each based on one of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is built in four progressive stages, and we call this framework The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety. It acknowledges that we’re humans first and employees second and follows a universal pattern that reflects the natural progression of human needs in social settings. These needs exist across demographics, psychographics, nations, and cultures.

Just like humans need water, food, and shelter to survive, teams that want to innovate need four things in order to thrive: they need to feel included and safe to learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo. Teams progress through these stages as they intentionally create cultures of rewarded vulnerability:

Stage	Definition of respect	Definition of permission	Social exchange
1. Inclusion Safety — can I be my authentic self?	Respect for the individual’s innate need to be included, accepted, and gain a sense of belonging	Permission for the individual to interact and be their true and authentic self	Inclusion in exchange for human status and the absence of harm
2. Learner Safety — can I grow?	Respect for the individual’s innate need to learn, grow, and develop mastery	Permission for the individual to engage in the learning process and make mistakes	Encouragement in exchange for engagement
3. Contributor Safety — can I create value?	Respect for the individual’s innate need for autonomy, contribution, and recognition	Permission for the individual to work with appropriate autonomy and independence	Autonomy with guidance in exchange for performance and results
4. Challenger Safety — can I be candid about change?	Respect for the individual’s innate need to innovate and improve the status quo	Permission for the individual to make challenges to the status quo in good faith	Air cover in exchange for candor

Diversity is not inclusion

Diversity is a matter of make-up and composition. Inclusion is a matter of intent and behavior.

If you deprive your organization of demographically and psychographically diverse human capital, you dedicate yourself to a calcified status quo. You may well die of self-inflicted wounds because you’ve become isolated, insulated, and willfully blind. What you need is a group of diverse people excited to explore, monitor the periphery, and extend the field of vision. Diversity offers potential value. The question is whether you can tap it and move from potential value to realized value.

Diversity benefits no one unless we can unleash its power; simply putting diverse people together doesn’t tap their creative potential. Inclusion does that through psychological safety. Inclusion releases talent and activates a cooperative system to harvest that talent. Without inclusion, we stall, sputter, and break down. Yet many organizations declare victory after becoming more diverse. That’s a premature and uncritical celebration. Becoming more diverse is the first step in a two-step transformation.

The causal chain goes like this: diversity, activated by inclusion, produces divergent thinking, then innovation, then competitive advantage. When it comes to innovation, inclusion regulates the speed of discovery. It de-bottlenecks the organization to release its innovative potential.

How to build Inclusion Safety

Can you be your authentic self on your team? Inclusion Safety satisfies the basic human need to connect and belong. When it comes to Inclusion Safety, worth proceeds worthiness. You’re worthy of inclusion just because you exist. As the first of the four stages of psychological safety, it serves as a foundation for the rest of the framework.

Without Inclusion Safety, teams can’t learn and grow, contribute and perform, or speak up and challenge the status quo. Team members who don’t feel that they belong won’t risk making a mistake or challenging the status quo. They won’t step outside of their comfort zones, volunteer to take on more responsibility, or be vulnerable with their team.

Three ways to move from theory to practice:

1. Share your story, hear their story. Build rapport by sharing appropriate background and experiences about your life. Be the first to expose yourself emotionally. Then invite the other person: “Tell me your story.”
2. Ask twice as much as you tell. When you ask someone a question, it’s an invitation to engage and a form of validation. Telling can be fine too, but if you tell too much, it’s self-serving and it signals selfishness, arrogance, and dominance, all of which are off-putting.
3. Express gratitude and appreciation. Your team members aren’t included and excluded as members of your team on the basis of success and failure. When team members perform well, express genuine gratitude and appreciation. When they try hard, but fail to meet their goals, recognize their efforts with empathy.

That’s the first stage. The full guide continues through the other three, each with its own trio of theory-to-practice moves: Learner Safety (share what you learn, take notes, identify and share what you unlearn), Contributor Safety (communicate tradeoffs, give people the why, let them do it their way), and Challenger Safety (respond constructively to dissent and bad news, reward shots on goal, weigh in last).