Demystifying Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety is a terrible term.

I feel like that’s one thing that people agree on when it comes to the topic. Even Amy Edmondson, the very brilliant Harvard Professor who’s led on much of the groundbreaking research in this field, recently shared that if she could rewind the clocks, she would call it something different. It’s overly clinical, it is unclear as to what it’s getting at and – as a result – often misunderstood.

In this article, we share learning from our work with clients over the past 7 years in relation to psychological safety. This includes our ongoing 5 year partnership with an £8bn Consulting firm to culturally embed psychological safety across their company globally. We look at what it is, why it matters, the common misconceptions, how you measure it and – importantly – how you build it.

And if you want to know what Amy Edmondson would call it, if she were to start again, you’ll have to keep reading!

What is Psychological Safety?

There are several definitions out there but the one we like best comes from Edmondson.

By interpersonal risk taking we mean team members having the confidence to speak up in meetings – to voice a concern, suggest a new approach, challenge an idea, disagree with someone more senior than you, ask for help, share that you are struggling or admit to a mistake you have made. All these things require psychological safety and essentially people are asking themselves whether if they speak up, will they be given the benefit of the doubt?

There’s a clear link to trust here; you won’t create psychological safety without trust so it is a key ingredient. But trust is about how one person views another; Psychological Safety is about the climate, the environment, the feel you get when you enter a room or join a meeting.  To what extent do you feel able to speak up?

Why does it matter?

If the problems you’re grappling with are increasingly complex, big knotty challenges with multiple interdependencies, it is crucial people are able to come together and learn at speed. A key part of this is that people feel safe enough to take these interpersonal risks.

And the cost of fear is significant: problems don’t get addressed, debate is avoided, ideas aren’t aired, help isn’t asked for, needs remain unmet and trust doesn’t develop.

As Margaret Heffernan (CEO, author, keynote speaker and friend of CoCreate) puts so eloquently, ‘in high performing teams, conflict is frequent because candour is safe.’ If you want to accelerate performance, drive innovation and create agility, you need to create the conditions where people’s potential is unleashed. And this isn’t going to happen when there is a climate of fear.

Evaluation of client work we carried out demonstrated that focused effort to build psychological safety in their multi-disciplinary case teams had the following benefits:

• 95% improvement in comms and knowledge sharing.
• 83% boosting of learning behaviours.
• 70% improvement in performance, creativity and innovation.

What are the common misconceptions?

There’s lots here but 4 that we think are most prevalent and need dispelling:

1) It’s about being nice to one another – no, this is not cosy or easy, rather it’s about having a sense of responsibility to have difficult conversations and to speak up with confidence. If a team’s overly nice to one another it’s probably a sign that there is a lack of psych safety.

2) We only need it (or need to work on it) when we’re struggling – it becomes more important when a team is struggling and more evident that it is lacking, which means you need to build it at the outset before you hit pressure points. This is about creating an environment where people respond to pressure in ways that doesn’t damage cohesion and effectiveness. 

3) Everyone impacts psychological safety equally – it’s just not the case. Leaders, people in positions of power & authority have a disproportionate impact on psych safety. They  set the tone for what’s acceptable.

4) We just need to ask people to speak up – this is a common one and perhaps the most important. In a recent study carried out by US Organisational Psychologist Adam Grant, managers asking for feedback led to only good for short term gains on Psych Safety. Whereas when managers role modelled candour, failure and learning, it had much more significant, long-term impact on Psych Safety. That’s because if you ask the team to take all the risks without taking any yourself then people are not going to feel any safer as a result. Role modelling the right behaviours is crucial.

How do you measure it?

This feels like an easy question to answer as in her book ‘The Fearless Organisation’ Amy Edmondson offers a useful set of 7 statements that invite individuals to assess their personal experience of being a member of the team, function, division or organisation. Very quickly you can get a really helpful picture of the overall level of a team’s experience and – more importantly – clearly identify where further attention is needed.

The act of measuring this is in itself helpful. It sets the intention that this is something we want to work on. It invites people to take an interpersonal risk in answering the questions honestly. And if you gives you the opportunity – which we would strongly encourage – to open up a conversation with the team about the results. We recently supported a team that went through this process themselves and they shared that the conversation about the results was the most open, honest and constructive conversation they have ever had and it significantly increased the willingness of team members to continue to speak up. What it also led to was a series of commitments from the team in terms of actions to build the level of safety within the team.

The beauty of Amy Edmondson’s 7 point questionnaire is that a) it is anonymous, b) it’s quick to administer and c) you can run it multiple times, giving you a clear sense of distance travelled. The reality is that the level of psychological safety fluctuates and there are multiple factors that impact it positively or negatively. The survey gives you a regular temperature check for where the team is at and data with which to make informed decisions around action.

How do you build it?

Again there is good news here as what we’ve noticed is that a small amount of ongoing, discretionary effort can have a significant impact on the level of psychological safety people experience. We partnered with a client to create a framework to signal 4 key domains that leaders need to pay attention to.

The domains are summarised in the graphic below and there are 3 things to note:

1) Pay attention to the diagonal links – the top two domains are ‘task related’, the bottom two are ‘people related’ and there’s a clear correlation between them, by which we mean you’re not going to create learning agility if people are unwilling to open up. You’re much more likely to get effective direct communication when people feel valued.

2) All 4 domains matters – neglect one and you’ll undermine the effort in another.

3) Think frequency & skill – when we ask people to assess themselves against each, we invite them to think about the frequency with which they do these things as well as how skillfully they do them. Just because you do ‘direct communication’ a lot, it doesn’t mean you do it in a way that encourages others to speak up.

If you’d like to know more, then please download our full ‘4 domains of psychological safety’ toolkit, which provides a more detailed explanation of each domain, how they inter-relate, our experience of working with each and – importantly – recommended rituals, linked to each of the domains, that you can experiment with.

And finally, for those who stuck with this, Amy Edmondson said that if she could rewind the clock, she’d call it ‘learning communities’ or something similar. She acknowledged that this might not have been so catchy, might not have led to so many book sales yet it perhaps does a better job of pointing to what this is all about. Given the challenges we face, the operating environment in which leadership is called for, we need to bring people together in a way in which enables them to learn quickly. And that is why this matters.