What is Psychological Safety?

How do I build psychological safety at work?

Creating psychological safety in the workplace is no easy task. In fact, learning how to create psychological safety as a leader, or how to promote psychological safety if you aren’t a leader, requires dedication, effort, and determination. Everyone has a role to play in this process.

Whether you’re a C-suite executive or making a difference on the ground floor, you contribute to the levels of psychological safety in your workplace environment. This means you can make your culture better, and you can make it worse. Understanding that you’re an intrinsic part of interaction, processes, and outcomes at work is key to promoting psychological safety.

Psychological safety in teams starts with a culture of rewarded vulnerability. Your team members, colleagues, and even your superiors need to feel safe to be their full selves at work. They need to know that they can do human things, like make mistakes, try something new, and utterly fail while innovating without being punished, shamed, or mocked. This kind of environment and culture can only be created through intentional and consistent behavior and action. Here are 4 ways to build psychological safety on your teams:

Teach inclusion as human need and right.

Inclusion isn’t something we earn; it’s something we’re owed. Teach your team members to approach each other with the understanding that we are entitled to the human need to be included.

Dedicate time and resources to learning.

If you talk about the importance of learning but don’t dedicate any time or resources to it, it’s really not a priority. Formally allocate consistent budget and dedicate time to learning.

Let them do it their way.

Human beings want to make a difference in their own unique way. Allow your team members the independence to approach things as they see fit. Micromanaging them, you will extinguish their motivation to contribute.

Weigh in last.

Speaking first when you hold positional power softly censors your team. Listen carefully, acknowledge the contributions of others, and then register your point of view.

Psychological Safety Frequently Asked Questions

How do I make someone feel psychological safe?

You’ll feel the difference in energy when you start rewarding, instead of punishing or ignoring, people’s vulnerabilities. It’s palpable. But rewarding the vulnerabilities of others is an active choice. Especially at the beginning of your cultural transformation journey (before psychological safety becomes a habit) deep introspection and careful interaction will be two of your best friends. Self-reflect often. Notice the unspoken norms of the space. Start open dialogues about your team’s vulnerabilities and talk about how those vulnerabilities are currently being punished. Then you can talk about what you’ll do to reward them instead.

Common instances of rewarded vulnerability include verbally acknowledging and actively respecting boundaries, expressing gratitude for candid emotions, giving people the space to process, making yourself available and interruptible, valuing honesty over correct answers, clarifying outcomes and expectations, and offering a way forward after a mistake.

Creating a culture of rewarded vulnerability requires both modeling and rewarding acts of vulnerability. It's not enough for you to reward acts of vulnerability that your colleagues are willing to commit, you actually have to be vulnerable yourself. Yes, you. Especially if you’re a leader with a lot of eyes on you. But even if you’re not, engaging in acts of vulnerability will help others see that they’re safe to follow suit.

What comes first, trust or psychological safety?

In the context of the workplace, psychological safety and trust are synonymous. Once members of your team are confident that they belong and feel safe to make mistakes, create value, and be candid about change, that trust will spread to all other aspects of work life. Trust builds across an organization when psychological safety is met with consistency. Don’t expect perfect, shatterproof trust to immediately come from day one of your culture initiative. Your teams will need confidence in the safeties that psychological safety provides, and the culture of rewarded vulnerability that it creates, before they’ll really start trusting each other. But once they do? You’ll be ready to leave innovation-stifling norms behind and start creating value exponentially.

What does a lack of psychological safety look like?

While some forms of punishing vulnerability are macroscopic and clearly against organizational policy, others are microscopic and almost indetectable. This is why it’s so easy for complacent cultures with fearful employees to allow their team members to suffer. In these organizations punished vulnerability becomes so routine and consistent that you assume it’s how it’s always been, and how it’ll always be.

Common instances of punished vulnerability include dismissing requests for help, reacting poorly to mistakes and failures, not taking “no” for an answer, asking someone to try something new without clear expectations, ignoring effort and expecting perfection, refusing to provide more resources for larger/new tasks, taking feedback poorly, and shutting down candor/challenges to the status quo.

Because your experiences with vulnerability are unique, you might not realize that your actions are punishing the vulnerabilities of your team members. You might not even know what their vulnerabilities are. But it’s not too late to change the way you interact, and it’s not too late to learn what makes the people around you feel vulnerable.

Crack yourself open and ask these questions: How do people react when I walk into a room? What kinds of barriers exist between me and my team members? Why? Do I naturally include, or exclude others? Do people feel safe to be their authentic selves around me? Are there patterns of unsuccessful interactions in my day-to-day life? What’s hard for my team members? Do I contribute to the difficulty?

What destroys psychological safety?

A lack of psychological safety in the workplace is more common than you’d think. Disengaged employees flee well-paying positions all the time because the environment isn’t psychologically safe. The ones who stay are often result in fearful, silent employees. These employees work hard to fly under the radar, they show up at work and do their job, hoping to make few (if any) mistakes so they don’t get punished. They rarely innovate but are amazing at executing exactly what’s asked of them. They may be consistently micromanaged, and thus can’t work autonomously or be passionate about their role.

In any case, these are all symptoms of a toxic culture, examples of lack of psychological safety that could be preventing your teams from reaching their full potential. Are you unsure how your employees are feeling? Teach them about the four stages of psychological safety and ask them how they think your organization is doing. Be warned, though, that ignoring their suggestions would make the whole situation worse. Once they speak up and voice their concerns, you have to listen.

What are the elements of psychological safety?

If you want to transform your culture across its four stages, start with building a foundation of respect and permission on your teams. Without it, any and all initiatives will crumble. They may never even start. So if it’s respect and permission that make participation in these initiatives possible, let’s start by defining the two:

Respect: The general level of regard and esteem we give each other. To respect someone is to value and appreciate them.

‍Permission: How we allow others to both influence us and participate in what we’re doing. Permission requires both autonomy and accountability.

An excess of one can’t compensate for lack of the other. People who are never given permission to create freely and work with autonomy get used to being told what to do. If a team member wants to learn, contribute, and innovate, it’s time to listen to, encourage, and empower that individual with permission to participate. When a team knows that they are respected as a human first, and valued as an employee second, they will want to learn, improve, contribute, and make things better.