The Fearless Organisation: Creating Psychological Safety At The Workplace

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 stra...

What a leader needs to do to invite participation:

• Demonstrate situational humility – Acknowledge gaps
• Practice inquiry – Ask good questions and model intense listening
• Set up structures and processes – Create forum...

An appropriate, empathetic and powerful question has the following attributes:

• Generates curiosity in the listener
• Stimulates reflective conversation
• Is thought-provoking
• Surfaces underlying assumptions
• Invites creativity and new possibilities
...

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

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 ...

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 ...

What a leader needs to do to garner productive response:

• Express appreciation – Listen, acknowledge and thank
• Destigmatize failure – Look forward, offer help. Discuss, consider and brainstorm the next steps
• Sanction clear violat...

What the leader needs to do for setting up the stage:

• Frame the work – Set expectations about failure, and interdependence to clarify the need for voice
• Emphasise the purpose – Identify what’s at stake, why it matters, and for whom

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 organizationa...

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 o...