Harvard Business Review: What Is Psychological Safety?

Featured article for this week's Brief

Read time: 3 min

Big Idea

Team psychological safety is an essential shared belief that encourages risk-taking, open communication, and learning from mistakes all of which enhances team innovation and effectiveness.

Top Thoughts

• Psychological safety is the shared belief within a team that the team is a safe place to take risks, express ideas, speak up, and admit mistakes without fear of negative consequences.

• Experiencing psychological safety within a team leads to increased levels of engagement, motivation, better decision-making, and a culture of continuous learning and improvement. This leads to better team performance, innovation, and resilience.

• Research by Amy Edmondson and studies like Google’s Project Aristotle highlight that the most important factor leading to team effectiveness is psychological safety, outweighing factors like team structure or which individual members are on a team. “Who was on a team mattered less than how the team worked together.”

• Psychological safety is not about being perpetually nice or comfortable, but rather being candid and open to discomfort in the process of learning and improvement.

• Create psychological safety by implementing good management practices like establishing clear norms, encouraging open communication, supporting team members, showing appreciation, and specific tactics like emphasizing the importance of employees' voices, admitting leader's fallibility, inviting input, and responding productively.

• Use a 7-item questionnaire to assess the team members' perception of their psychological safety:

  • If you make a mistake on this team, it is not held against you.

  • Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.

  • People on this team accept others for being different.

  • It is safe to take a risk on this team.

  • It isn’t difficult to ask other members of this team for help.

  • No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.

  • Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

Quick Quotes

• "(Instead of asking) “What went wrong?” or “How could we have prevented this?”... (My manager) asked a simple question: What did you learn? I now understand that what she was doing was building psychological safety. She understood that learning was key — my (and her team’s) future performance depended on it. Psychological safety is a critical concept for teams and the people that lead them."

• "Edmondson… set out to study the relationship between error making and teamwork in hospitals, expecting to find that more effective teams made fewer mistakes. But what she found was that the teams who reported better teamwork seemed to experience more errors."

• "The 'team' in team psychological safety is important. 'This is a group-level phenomenon — it shapes the learning behavior of the group and in turn affects team performance and therefore organizational performance.'"

• "Psychological safety leads to team members feeling more engaged and motivated, because they feel that their contributions matter and that they’re able to speak up without fear of retribution."

• "A lot of what goes into creating a psychologically safe environment are good management practices — things like establishing clear norms and expectations so there is a sense of predictability and fairness; encouraging open communication and actively listening to employees; making sure team members feel supported; and showing appreciation and humility when people do speak up."

• "Creating a psychologically safe environment isn’t about being 'nice.' In fact, there are many polite workplaces that don’t have psychological safety because there’s no candor, and people feel silenced by the enforced politeness."

• "Learning and messing up and pointing out mistakes is usually uncomfortable. Being vulnerable will feel risky. The key is to take risks in a safe environment – one without negative interpersonal consequences. 'Anything hard to achieve requires being uncomfortable along the way.'"

Actionable Advice

1. Foster open communication - Encourage team members to voice their opinions, ideas, and concerns freely. This will create an environment where diverse perspectives are heard and valued, leading to better decision-making.

2. Be vulnerable - Leaders should openly admit to and learn from their own mistakes to set a precedent for their team and normalize the idea that making mistakes is a part of the learning process.

3. Seeking input - Make an active effort to ask for inputs from team members and value their contributions. Pose open-ended questions that encourage discussion and expression of diverse viewpoints.

4. Respond well to feedback - Ensure that the response to team members' inputs is appreciative and forward-thinking. Replace blame with curiosity to create a more open and constructive dialogue and team environment.

5. Clear norms and expectations - Create clear, transparent norms and expectations within the team to provide a sense of predictability and fairness and promote psychological safety.

6. Value team members' voices - Explicitly communicate to team members why their voices matter. Highlight how their contributions affect outcomes and decision-making processes.

7. Promote continuous improvement - Emphasize the importance of continuous learning and improvement within the team. Encourage sharing of mistakes and learning from them as a part of the team’s growth and development process.

Source(s)

Gallo, A. (2023, Feb 15). What Is Psychological Safety? [Web Article]. Harvard Business Review. (Link)