You’ve hired an excellent team, set lofty but realistic goals, and implemented efficient processes—so why aren’t your employees reaching their full potential?
It could be that they’re afraid to make mistakes or contribute new ideas.
“Overcoming challenges requires a strong sense of psychological safety and disciplined learning practices,” says Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson in the online course Dynamic Teaming, one of seven courses in the Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB). “This is where you come in. As a leader, it’s your job to unlock the potential of your team and create the best possible chance for breakthrough performance.”
Here’s a primer on psychological safety, why it’s important in the workplace, and how to build it in your organization.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhat Is Psychological Safety?
Psychological safety is a phenomenon that allows and sparks interpersonal risk-taking within teams. It encourages group members to offer opinions, suggest ideas, ask questions, raise concerns, speak up, and admit mistakes without fearing negative consequences.
According to Dynamic Teaming, psychological safety has four dimensions:
- Willingness to help: Employees believe asking for help is appropriate and their colleagues are willing to provide it.
- Inclusion and diversity: Employees feel included and that their diverse experiences and expertise matter.
- Attitude to risk and failure: Employees view mistakes and failures as acceptable in favor of learning.
- Open conversation: Employees perceive conversations as open, candid, and safe to contribute to.
For a workplace to be psychologically safe, it must meet all four dimensions.
Why Is Psychological Safety Important at Work?
By definition, psychological safety makes employees feel safe speaking up, taking risks, and making mistakes at work—all of which can increase their satisfaction, innovation, and performance.
Yet, psychological safety’s importance extends further. In Dynamic Teaming, Edmondson explains that it’s critical to managing dynamic teams.
Dynamic teams have fluid membership and may gather in the moment across industries, functions, time zones, and languages without proper preparation to navigate ever-shifting circumstances and tasks.
As the world becomes more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA), dynamic teaming is crucial to responding to new challenges.
“To move from traditional management to managing in a VUCA world requires adopting a new mindset,” Edmondson says in the course. “Today’s world requires cross-functional and dynamic teaming. It’s your job—the leader’s job—to move your team and organization toward that mindset.”
One key attribute of dynamic teams is their ability to experiment, leverage diverse backgrounds and expertise, and work creatively to find innovative solutions.
In the course, Edmondson explains that while diversity and an inclusive leadership style are key to dynamic teams’ success, psychological safety is the underlying factor. Without it, diverse teams can underperform compared to their homogenous counterparts.
To help unlock your team’s potential, here are five ways to create a culture of psychological safety.
5 Ways to Create Psychological Safety in the Workplace
1. Talk About It
While it may seem simple, the first step to creating psychological safety is talking about it. The term has become a buzzword and can trigger defensive reactions that imply talking about improving it labels your current culture as “unsafe.”
By openly prioritizing psychological safety as a leader, you can define and dispel misconceptions about it.
For instance, in the Harvard Business Review, Edmondson cautions against the myth that in a psychologically safe workplace, everyone is always “nice” and “comfortable.”
“Too many people think that it’s about feeling comfortable all the time,” Edmondson says, “and that you can’t say anything that makes someone else uncomfortable or you’re violating psychological safety. Anything hard to achieve requires being uncomfortable along the way.”
Being transparent about goals and your new workplace culture’s impact requires buy-in from your team and can set the stage for a successful transition.
2. Use the Psychological Safety Scale
Before making changes, assess your organization’s psychological safety performance.
One tool you can use is the psychological safety scale. Created by Edmondson, it’s a series of statements that employees indicate to what extent they agree.
For instance, for the statement, “I am comfortable asking other members of my team for help,” the employee checks off their answer on a scale of “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”
Once all employees have filled out the scale, average the score for each question to identify which areas the team is strongest in and which need improvement.
The scale is useful not only for assessing what to work on but also for gaining visibility into the improvement process and measuring progress toward goals quantitatively.
3. Request Input
A critical part of fostering psychological safety is requesting employee input. Until it becomes an ingrained part of your team’s culture, they may hesitate to provide feedback unless explicitly asked.
When soliciting their opinions, explain why doing so matters. Make it clear that a team in which they share their thoughts—on everything from strategic decisions to brainstorming new ideas—provides a diversity of perspectives, opportunities for discussion, and chances to innovate and break from the status quo.
Once your team provides thoughts, respond productively. Even if you don’t agree or like someone’s idea, ensure they know you appreciate that they shared it. Refrain from shutting down ideas right away; instead, use them as starting points for group discussion and new ideas.
4. Admit Your Mistakes
If you want your employees to feel safe making mistakes, you must be transparent about yours and frame missteps as learning opportunities.
According to a Deloitte study, leaders in high-performing organizations are 28 times more likely to model learning from mistakes than their low-performing counterparts.
Doing so can encourage your employees to be forthcoming with their missteps, secure in knowing they won’t receive punishment but rather a debrief about what went wrong and what to do differently next time.
5. Continually Reassess
Finally, remember that psychological safety requires consistent work.
Dynamic Teaming likens an organization’s psychological safety to muscular strength in the body—just as you must work to maintain strength over time, you need to put in effort to keep your organization psychologically safe.
If you use the psychological safety scale, revisit it periodically to track whether your efforts are yielding the culture you want. You can also regularly solicit feedback from employees in a one-on-one setting about how they feel about the team culture and adjust accordingly.
Unleash Your Team’s Potential
Creating a psychologically safe workplace takes time, effort, and vulnerability—making some leaders shy away from it.
If you’re courageous enough, you can unleash your team’s full potential by cultivating a culture that values open communication, sharing ideas, supportive discussions, and growing from mistakes.
Are you interested in building psychological safety at your organization? Explore our yearlong Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB) program, which comprises seven courses for leading in the modern business world. Download our CLIMB brochure to learn more about the curriculum, admissions requirements, and benefits.
