Psychological Safety: The Collective EQ of a Team

Psychological safety is the collective emotional intelligence of a group. That relationship between emotional intelligence and psychological safety is the anatomy of culture in an organization, and both should be at the foundation of all development efforts.

An organization that cannot recognize the relationship between psychological safety and emotional intelligence will struggle to (1) gather cultural data that can be used tactically, (2) target the root cause of cultural distress, and (3) program meaningful, effective intervention.

Take inventory of your curriculum as it stands today. Your leadership development curriculum, your talent management curriculum, your onboarding curriculum, are they built on top of a foundation of emotional intelligence and psychological safety? Are you measuring these two things? Are they at the core of who you are as team members, as leaders and managers, and as an organization?

Recognizing that psychological safety is the collective EQ of a group has been a crucial “aha-moment” for many L&D and HR professionals we’ve worked with. But while the theory behind the concept may be fascinating, theory itself leaves practitioners with questions:

• Do I have to approach PS and EQ in concert? What’s their relationship?
• How do I sequence our training and measurement?
• How should I measure these two things?
• Which one should I start with? Should one get priority over the other?

Let’s start with definitions.

Emotional intelligence and psychological safety, side by side

	Emotional Intelligence	Psychological Safety
Definition	The ability to interact effectively with other people	A culture of rewarded, not punished, vulnerability
Level of measurement	An individual-focused metric, measured through a self- or multi-rater assessment. EQ refers to the effectiveness of one individual’s beliefs, perceptions, and actions on those they interact with	Inherently a group metric. Psychological safety data comes from multi-rater feedback targeting the team itself, measuring the aggregate experiences of that team
The core verb	Interact effectively — awareness (what you can perceive about yourself and others), motivation (how you regard yourself and others), and behavior (the skills you bring to social interactions)	Reward vulnerability — identify the act of vulnerability, validate the person’s unique experience, and encourage with rewarding behaviors
How you improve it	Learn to interact more effectively: improve your perception, your intent, and your skills in your interactions	Increase the instances of rewarded vulnerability in your interactions to grow inclusion, learning, contribution, and candor

What makes programming these initiatives so difficult

We’ve found that organizations make a few common mistakes:

1. They experience symptoms of a deficiency in human interaction. Organizations are usually good at identifying the symptoms of interpersonal problems on their teams. They will, eventually, notice the silence, non-performance, disengagement, and low morale. And they’ll decide that they want to mitigate it.

2. They don’t take a synergistic approach or target the root cause of their cultural distress. When this happens, organizations develop intervention strategies to tackle the symptoms they’re seeing without doing the work to uncover and resolve the underlying problems. These symptoms will always indicate deeper issues related to emotional intelligence and psychological safety, problems that stem from the fundamental ways that people interact.

3. They attempt to reduce the symptoms with haphazard intervention and nonspecific data. Why does this happen? Poor (or nonexistent) data sets are often the culprit. Culture data is delicate and complex, nuanced and dynamic. If you rely on aggregated, self-reported EQ data to inform your intervention strategies, then you’re essentially flying blind in a bell curve. If you assume that your single question about psychological safety in your engagement survey will tell you what you need to know, then you’re using a blunt instrument that doesn’t account for unique team culture and diverse management styles. You need tactical data, gathered and displayed for the purpose of taking action.

The rest of the guide turns theory into intervention at three levels: the L.I.V.E. model (look, identify, validate, encourage) individuals can use to reward vulnerability in everyday interactions, the measure-model-monitor cycle for leaders and managers, a programming playbook for organizations (which assessments to run, how to sequence targeted EQ training and broad PS training, and how to monitor longitudinally), plus a direct answer to the question every practitioner asks: PS or EQ, which gets priority?