Amy Edmondson is a management professor at Harvard Business School and has done a tremendous amount of work in the area of psychological safety. 
In her Tedx Talk, she describes psychological safety as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” Psychological safety is a critical yet often overlooked concept, and one which underpins Edmondson’s latest book, The Fearless Organization – Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.

The Fearless Organisation: Creating Psychological Safety At The Workplace

Psychological safety is not a personality difference but rather a feature of the workplace that leaders can and must help create.
Most companies do not pay adequate attention to the need for psychological safety to help people cope with the uncertainty and anxiety of organizational change. Psychological safety at any company is vital for helping people overcome the defensiveness and “learning anxiety” they face at work, especially when something doesn’t go as they’d hoped or expected.

Coping with Anxiety And Uncertainty

Company strategy can be viewed as a hypothesis, to be tested continuously, rather than a plan. 
Organisational learning – championed by company leaders but enacted by everyone – requires actively seeking deviations that challenge the assumptions underpinning a current strategy.

Adopting An Agile Approach

Being able to say that you don’t know and driving participation through inquiry are two strong tenets of psychological safety. 
Amy Edmondson shares some rules of thumb for asking a good question: One, you don’t know the answer; two, you ask questions that don’t limit responses to Yes or No, and three, you phrase the question in a way that helps others share their thinking in a focused way.

Inquiring With Employees Proactively

Working in a psychologically safe environment doesn’t mean that people always agree with one another for the sake of being nice. It also doesn’t mean that people offer unequivocal praise or unconditional support for everything you have to say. 
Psychological safety is about candour, about making it possible for productive disagreement and free exchange of ideas. Conflict inevitably arises in any workplace. Psychological safety enables people on different sides of a conflict to speak candidly about what’s bothering them.

Psychological Safety Isn’t About Being Nice

Psychological safety isn’t about personalities and refers to the work climate, and climate affects people with different personality traits in roughly similar ways. 
In a psychologically safe climate, people will offer ideas and voice their concerns regardless of whether they tend toward introversion or extroversion.

Psychological Safety Isn’t A Personality Factor

Although trust and psychological safety have much in common, they aren’t interchangeable concepts. 
A key difference is that psychological safety is experienced at a group level. Further, psychological safety describes a temporally immediate experience

Not Just Trust

Psychological safety is not an “anything goes” environment where people aren’t expected to adhere to high standards or meet deadlines. It isn’t about becoming “comfortable” at work.
Psychological safety enables candour and openness and, as such, thrives in an environment of mutual respect.

Performance Standards

An appropriate, empathetic and powerful question has the following attributes:
<ul>
<li>Generates curiosity in the listener</li>
<li>Stimulates reflective conversation</li>
<li>Is thought-provoking</li>
<li>Surfaces underlying assumptions</li>
<li>Invites creativity and new possibilities</li>
<li>Generates energy and forward movement</li>
<li>Channels attention and focuses inquiry</li>
<li>Stays with participants</li>
<li>Touches a deep meaning</li>
<li>Evokes more questions.</li>
</ul>

Powerful Questions

What the leader needs to do for setting up the stage:
<ul>
<li>Frame the work – Set expectations about failure, and interdependence to clarify the need for voice</li>
<li>Emphasise the purpose – Identify what’s at stake, why it matters, and for whom</li>
</ul>
This accomplishes shared expectations and meaning.

Leaders Toolkit For Building Psychological Safety

What a leader needs to do to invite participation:
<ul>
<li>Demonstrate situational humility – Acknowledge gaps</li>
<li>Practice inquiry – Ask good questions and model intense listening</li>
<li>Set up structures and processes – Create forums for input and provide guidelines for discussion.</li>
</ul>
This accomplishes confidence in the team that voices are welcome.

Leaders Toolkit: Inviting Participation

What a leader needs to do to garner productive response: <ul><li>Express appreciation – Listen, acknowledge and thank</li><li>Destigmatize failure – Look forward, offer help. Discuss, consider and brainstorm the next steps</li><li>Sanction clear violations</li></ul>This creates a shared learning environment with mutual respect.

Leaders Toolkit: Productive Response

An overlooked factor at an organization: The climate of psychological safety

Conquer the most essential adaptation to the knowledge economy The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent—but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of “fitting in” and “going along” spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, and yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process. People must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions from left field, and brainstorm out loud; it creates a culture in which a minor flub or momentary lapse is no big deal, and where actual mistakes are owned and corrected, and where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing. This book explores this culture of psychological safety, and provides a blueprint for bringing it to life. The road is sometimes bumpy, but succinct and informative scenario-based explanations provide a clear path forward to constant learning and healthy innovation. Explore the link between psychological safety and high performance Create a culture where it’s “safe” to express ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes Nurture the level of engagement and candor required in today’s knowledge economy Follow a step-by-step framework for establishing psychological safety in your team or organization Shed the “yes-men” approach and step into real performance. Fertilize creativity, clarify goals, achieve accountability, redefine leadership, and much more. The Fearless Organization helps you bring about this most critical transformation.

The Fearless Organization

It means an absence of interpersonal fear. When psychological safety is present, people are able to speak up with work-relevant content.
For many people during the pandemic, the explicitness of the physical lack of safety has been experienced as a shared fear, which has allowed them to be more open and intimate and more able to voice their thoughts and concerns with colleagues.
This collective fear thus becomes a potential driver of collaboration and innovation, further contributing to an open environment for producing and sharing ideas that under normal conditions may have remained unshared.

Psychological safety

Even though face-to-face interactions allow for a level of intimacy and understanding that may be lost online, with video formats you can still pick up cues and detect whether someone’s in some period of mild distress.Leaping into task orientation too quickly may almost feel like a violation to the person on the other end of the call. Taking a pause to acknowledge where the person is and what they need can build trust over time and make the shared interaction emotionally less risky. Yet this might also make the exchanges themselves even more draining as you pause to doubt the interactions.

Building trust and confidence

What makes management by wandering around so successful is the ability to make a genuine link between a task or job and a larger overarching purpose.
Although not as spontaneous as walking around, video calls and chats, when kept to relatively small sizes, can still develop the connective tissue linking actions to a shared vision for the future.

Management by wandering

With tools like Zoom, communications have become more explicit and structured; leaders must ask direct questions about what’s working and what isn’t.

The degree to which leaders can manage their own stress and feelings, and the reason why emotional self-awareness and mindfulness are so important in times of crisis, is because leaders become emotional contagions, inflicting positive or negative feelings on others.And, although sometimes leaders may want to induce some stress into a situation to insert new energy and momentum, most of the time it’s better to engage people in positive pursuits to retain a higher level of creativity, productiveness, and engagement.

Emotional contagion in the workplace

We can’t be positively infectious with others unless we’re feeling inspired and sustained ourselves first. That’s what leaders managing high-stress positions need to do to take care of themselves and to then involve and take care of others.

As a leader in this point in time, you don’t want to be faking your emotions. There is an enormous need for genuineness and transparency. And that means some leaders might have to actually train themselves to be caring, curious, and positive, which is hard to do when you’re in a state of threat or fear when self-protection becomes an overwhelming instinct.
There is a strong temptation to just dive right into business without acknowledging what others might be up against. Best practice is therefore to stop, pause, breathe, and remind yourself to be interested in what’s going on for others.

The need for genuineness

A shared vision or shared sense of purpose is the strongest predictor of organizational-leadership effectiveness, engagement, organizational citizenship, and even product innovation. This is a time for leaders to try to invoke or provoke a degree of reflection, spending the time to talk about a shared sense of purpose and core values while also spending the time to emotionally check-in. Purpose and vision are critical today, but only to the extent that both are recognized as updatable, and reflective of a continuous learning process.

A shared sense of purpose

Psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and leadership in a time of flux

During the last 20 years, the agile movement that originated from the Agile Manifesto has gained momentum, even outside of software development.
Most organizations report that their agile efforts have paid off in terms of speed, quality, value, and long-term growth. However, about half of organizations that undertake agile transformations fail in their attempts.
If your team has yet to reap the rewards of agile, you need to understand what’s preventing you from delivering fast, frictionless and scalable solutions.

Successful agile teams

While agile processes and tools provide support, the primary mechanism is how team members interact.
Can team members interact with conflicting ideas, talk and listen, give and take, question and answer, analyse and solve? Or do they censor one another and end up withdrawing themselves?
If you drop agile tools and processes into a legacy culture where individuals are criticised, embarrassed, discouraged, or intimidated, they stop being agile.

Processes and tools are scaffolding

When organisations implement agile, they often revert to technical processes and tools because cultural considerations are difficult to put into practice. It's easier only to pay lip service to the human side and then move to processes with measurable and observable indicators that give the illusion of agile.
Start by framing agile as a cultural rather than a technical or mechanical implementation. Be careful not to approach culture as the completion of tasks. Culture can't be completed.

Frame agile as a cultural implementation

Meet with your team to identify vulnerable behaviours they think are vital to success. For example, asking questions, giving feedback or expressing different viewpoints. Then, identify positive response patterns for each behaviour, such as thanking someone for pointing out vulnerable behaviour. Document the behaviour and response pairing and display them in your meeting room. Create a printed job aid of the list that team members can carry with them.

Develop, document, and display vulnerable behavior/response pairings.

When you've jointly created a list of vulnerable behaviour/response pairings, pick one to practice. If a gap appears between the vulnerable behaviour, the response it should receive and the team leader's own behaviour, the dissonance will breed cynicism and lessen credibility. If a leader tries to model the behaviours and publicly acknowledges mistakes, the team will make progress.

Focus on one behavior and practice cultural accountability

Set time aside in a meeting to review what went well and what could be improved. <ul><li>Discuss the quality of the team's interactions.</li><li>Identify potential threats to openness.</li><li>Ask if they felt included in the process.</li><li>What was the most vulnerable behaviour they engaged in?</li><li>How did the team react to it?</li><li>Did you hold back on anything because you didn't feel safe?</li></ul>

Formally evaluate your dialogic process

Scrum meetings are daily coordination meetings where team members review the backlog, identify problems, and prioritize tasks. They are short meetings used for reflection.
For example, if a team faces a complex issue, they pose a question about the problem and ask the team to come prepared to the next scrum meeting to discuss it. This allows the team to clarify their thoughts and encourages divergent thinking.

Conclude your scrum with a “question/reflection"

Scrums and kanbans can’t help you if you’ve got a legacy culture that punishes vulnerability.

Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety

Team intelligence exists when team members eschew self-interest, move beyond the individualized concept of emotional intelligence and take up a think-together operating mode that embraces the collective good—reaching optimal team performance. 
Teams built on a solid foundation of positive culture, who work in sync as a cohesive unit, irrespective of hierarchy position, will achieve better results —if they can think systemically through inter-connectedness of multiple viewpoints. With strong leadership, a team can adopt a think-together mode and view only through that lens.

Team Intelligence

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Knowing what makes the team successful is a prerequisite for harnessing team intelligence. Small team inter-connectedness efforts can seem insignificant, yet their impacts on your organization at large can be huge (the Butterfly Effect).
We can harness team intelligence for business success when we capture what makes us unique in skill set, personality, and drive and bring together emotional and cultural intelligence with empathetic managers orchestrating team synergy.

Harnessing Team Intelligence For Success

When you place an intentional focus on the concept of team intelligence, you realize benefits across teams, through to clients. You gain the following benefits:<ul><li>An understanding of employee's style, strengths, and development needs</li><li>Promotes diversity, inclusion, and belonging </li><li>Gives the responsibility of a connections planner to each team member </li><li>Creates accountability for achieving higher standards of team behaviors and delivery of work</li><li>Drives sustained business performance through improved communications</li><li>More efficiency and effectiveness in capitalizing on business opportunities.</li></ul>

Benefits Of Cultivating Team Intelligence

One method of preemptively addressing issues is through the collective intelligence of your employees. Collective intelligence helps create organizational trust, access diversity of thought, and ultimately respect the basic human right to be heard. It also helps deliver the best solutions.
Team Intelligence is fluid and will continue to evolve as patterns within teams change. That said, if you have strong leadership and effective team interaction, you could replace one of the metaphoric cogs of your business, and the wheels should continue to turn.

Handling Friction: Team Breakdown

The common goal should be clear and absorbed by all —regularly. Aligning the goal among teams gives your employees the feeling that everyone contributes to your goals together, forming stronger team bonds.One tip to help with reinforcing alignment at the team level is to start each meeting with a reminder of the goal for that meeting. Weaving in constant reminders will reinforce the end goal of supporting a shared vision.

Managing Team Intelligence: One Goal

To cultivate a culture of transparency and support, specifically in remote or hybrid working environments, it’s imperative that all team members feel they can openly express their opinions.
Three ways you can do to build a psychologically safe workplace:
<ul>
<li>frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.</li>
<li>acknowledge your fallibility.</li>
<li>model curiosity.</li>
</ul>
People are happiest and most productive when they have a sense of psychological safety. To create an environment where people are comfortable being themselves, they need interpersonal trust and mutual respect.

Managing Team Intelligence: A Psychologically Safe Environment

Employees need to feel like they have a comfortable direct line to their manager and a connection to one another. Frequent check-ins to seek everyone’s opinions can help build all team members’ confidence and comfort level, allowing introverts the opportunity to speak up and not hold back. 
Employees like to feel heard, validated, and connected. Managers must create the right environment for engagement to exist organically and effectively.

Managing Team Intelligence: Employee Engagement and Retention

Often the smallest gestures leave the biggest imprint. With abrupt changes to the corporate world in the past 18 months, many are experiencing greater workloads and responsibilities.
Taking time out from writing a business response to send personal praise or show of appreciation can go a long way in nurturing positive emotions and enhancing performance. Appreciation plays a major role in reducing burnout, boosting morale, and greatly impacting employee retention by increasing employee satisfaction.

Managing Team Intelligence: Frequent and Genuine Recognition

Do you have people on your team that keep too much to themselves? This behavior can negatively impact the overall team effort. Non-team-players are often misunderstood as arrogant when they feel out of place and awkward in many cases.For every strength a team has, there is equal weakness. Identifying and addressing weaknesses on your team leads to a stronger, more successful unit. Taking time to understand individuals’ strengths and weaknesses and developing a strategy to overcome, is key to progression.

Managing Team Intelligence: Know The Weaknesses

Team intelligence explores the concept of team unity across all aspects of team dynamics and uncovers the keys to optimal performance.

What is Team Intelligence and How to Manage It

Research shows that the brain responds more strongly to bad experiences than good ones — and our memories retain them longer. Five positive experiences are about equal to one negative one. This five-to-one ratio, discovered by psychologist and relationship researcher John Gottman in the 1970s, still applies to our present-day workplace.

How our brains respond to bad experiences

We are all naturally wired to blame other people or circumstances when things go wrong. These propensities are partially psychological, driven by something called the fundamental attribution bias. We tend to believe that what people do is a reflection of who they are, rather than considering there may be other factors (social or environmental) influencing their behavior.

Humans are wired to blame

We don’t even notice how often we do it. And our brains interpret blame the same way they interpret a physical attack. When we’re blamed, our prefrontal cortices effectively shut down and direct all our energy to defending ourselves, which, ironically, sabotages our ability to solve the problem for which we are being blamed.
Blame also kills healthy, accountable behaviors. Nobody will take accountability for problems if they think they’ll be punished for doing so.

We blame more than we think

Switch your mindset to “We’re all still learning,” and share your mistakes.<ul><li>We all make mistakes from time to time. It’s what makes us human. No good comes from blaming and shaming each other for our imperfect nature. </li><li>You benefited from learning from your mistakes, so allow others to do the same. Use problems and mistakes as teaching moments, not shaming moments. </li><li>If you’re a manager, discuss your own mistakes and the lessons learned from them. Doing so creates a psychological safe space that will encourage others to follow suit.</li></ul>

Eliminate blame culture on your team

Blame Culture Is Toxic. Here’s How to Stop It.

Dr. Amy Edmondson (who coined the term psychological safety), defines it as, "a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes."
This is a critical factor for high-performing teams.
Teams with strong psychological safety are less afraid of the negative consequences that may result from:
<ul>
<li>Taking smart risks</li>
<li>Making mistakes</li>
<li>Sharing their opinions within their team</li>
<li>Being candid with one another.</li>
</ul>

Psychological safety in the workplace

<ul>
<li>Teams that feel empowered to share their perspectives with each other, especially when their opinions differ from the rest of the group.</li>
<li>These teams are more likely to take initiative and consider the full picture of each situation. This in turn enables the team to innovate and find effective solutions.</li>
<li>Psychological safety is also critical to a team's ability to give and receive candid, respectful feedback. </li>
<li>Google's research on characteristics of high-performing teams identified psychological safety as their top indicator of the performance of a team.</li>
</ul>

Why does psychological safety matter?

One way to measure psychological safety in your organization is through employee surveys. Consider asking questions that measure employees' perceptions of psychological safety both at work and within their team.
When reviewing your results, focus your data analysis at the team-level, rather than within the organization overall. While it's valuable to have an understanding of the level psychological safety throughout your organization, any action that you take to improve psychological safety will be most effective within teams.

How to measure psychological safety

<ul>
<li>Build self-awareness in your team (recognizing how you prefer to think and behave)</li>
<li>Demonstrate concern for team members as people.</li>
<li>Ask for questions, different viewpoints, and considerations that have not yet been voiced.</li>
<li>Provide multiple ways for employees to share their thoughts.</li>
<li>Show appreciation for ideas.</li>
<li>Encourage team members to use positive language to inspire honest conversations.</li>
<li>Be precise with information, expectations, and commitments.</li>
<li>Be clear about what changed and why and give your team members time to process the change.</li>
<li>Own up to mistakes and celebrate failures as learnings.</li>
</ul>

How to create psychological safety at work

When it comes to performance, a trusting environment is essential. Here are nine strategies to help you create psychological safety in the workplace.

Strategies to Create Psychological Safety at Work

Want to build a high-performing team? Start with creating a safer work evironment

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your career

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Fostering Psychological Safety In The Workplace

The Fearless Organization

Psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and leadership in a time of flux

Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety

What is Team Intelligence and How to Manage It

Blame Culture Is Toxic. Here’s How to Stop It.

Strategies to Create Psychological Safety at Work

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

🤝Fostering Psychological Safety In The Workplace

The Fearless Organization

Psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and leadership in a time of flux

Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety

What is Team Intelligence and How to Manage It

Blame Culture Is Toxic. Here’s How to Stop It.

Strategies to Create Psychological Safety at Work

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

🤝
Fostering Psychological Safety In The Workplace