Psychological Safety is fast becoming one of the hottest concepts in the leadership and workplace culture domains, yet it remains somewhat elusive, misunderstood and challenging to achieve.
The notion that a team or organisation should have “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” (Edmondson,1999) appears quite simple, but why is it so important, and how do we practically build and maintain it?
Being able to, respectfully and safely, share ideas, speak up, challenge issues, and show vulnerability is a critical part of a high performing workplace culture. It underpins creativity, innovation, safety and workplace mental health. In fact, in a 2015 study, Google found that psychological safety is the most important attribute of a successful team.
Working within a psychologically safe workplace means that employees feel they are "able to show and employ their self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career" (Kahn 1990). In these contexts, people can take interpersonal and professional risks, be authentic, and build trusting and robust interpersonal relationships.
The new ways of working we have all been subjected to are stretching our interpersonal skills. In order to build psychologically safe teams, people need to know how to respond to difficult emotions and experiences. Opening up to challenging and risky conversations, or volunteering ideas on different approaches to old problems, can be uncomfortable.
Knowing how to use curiosity to navigate these contexts is critical. Our aim is to enable people to become more comfortable with their discomfort – we like to use the term discomfortable – so that they can lean into difficult personal and interpersonal situations safely. We help people build key intra- and inter-personal competencies to create a psychologically safe culture where people can raise issues impacting on mental health, safety, conduct, and risk early and preventively.
We can deliver this program at level – separately to leaders vs. all of staff – or we can provide it to whole of teams. Each of these approaches would lead to a different emphasis to match the audience needs.