Psychological safety: what it is and how leaders build it

Think of the last meeting in which someone noticed a problem and stayed quiet. Maybe they thought it wasn't the right moment, that they would look unprepared or that the idea would be badly received. Multiply that silence by every meeting in a company and you get a good idea of what a lack of psychological safety costs. This article explains the concept, how to recognize the climate in your team and what a leader can do to change it.

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is a belief shared by the members of a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks there. An interpersonal risk is anything that might make a person look ignorant, incompetent, negative or disruptive: asking a basic question, admitting a mistake, asking for help, disagreeing or bringing bad news.

Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, defined the concept in a study published in 1999 with teams from a manufacturing company. She found that teams with more psychological safety showed more learning behaviors, such as seeking feedback, discussing errors and looking for information, and that this was linked to better performance.

The topic became popular after Google shared the results of Project Aristotle, an internal study of what makes teams effective. According to The New York Times coverage of the project, psychological safety emerged as the most important of the factors analyzed.

What is psychological safety not?

Three misunderstandings come up often.

Psychological safety does not mean being nice or avoiding conflict. It is what allows frank disagreement without anyone taking it personally. Teams in which everyone agrees with everything tend to have little psychological safety.

It does not mean lowering standards either. Edmondson describes four combinations of psychological safety and performance standards. High safety with low standards puts a team in the comfort zone. High standards with low safety put it in the anxiety zone. The learning zone, where high-performing teams are, combines both at a high level.

And psychological safety is not a personality trait. It is a group climate, which can vary a lot between teams in the same company, depending mostly on who leads them.

How can you tell whether your team has psychological safety?

A few signs help with a quick diagnosis:

In high-risk environments such as oil and gas operations, a lack of psychological safety has direct consequences: the operator who doesn't ask questions at shift handover, or who doesn't stop an unsafe task for fear of the supervisor's reaction.

How do leaders build psychological safety?

Leader behavior matters most, because the team is always watching what happens to people who speak up. Edmondson suggests three places to start.

Frame the work as a learning problem

When leaders make clear that the work involves uncertainty and that everyone's input is needed, speaking up becomes part of the job. A line such as "we've never done it this way, I need you to tell me what you're seeing" changes the tone of a meeting.

Acknowledge your own fallibility

A leader who says "I might be wrong" or "I got that decision wrong" gives others permission to do the same. Leaders who never admit mistakes teach their teams to hide theirs.

Be genuinely curious

Asking real questions, and listening to the answers, shows that the team's view matters. This is especially true of the reaction to the first piece of bad news: if the messenger is punished, nobody brings the second one.

Other practices that help

• Thank whoever raises a problem before discussing the solution.
• Keep the analysis of a mistake separate from the search for someone to blame.
• Make sure everyone speaks in meetings, not only the most outgoing people.
• Agree with the team on how disagreements will be handled.
• Give feedback often, in private and respectful conversations.

How does psychological safety relate to Brazil's NR-1?

The update to NR-1 requires psychosocial risk factors such as conflict, harassment, lack of support and poor communication to be part of occupational risk management. A team with psychological safety tends to identify and report these problems earlier. See our guide on NR-1 and psychosocial risks.

How do you develop psychological safety in practice?

Teams go through stages before they mature. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman described a sequence in 1965 that became known as forming, storming, norming and performing. Psychological safety is what lets a team get through the storming stage without breaking apart.

At Ativme, cohesion and trust are the first pillar of team development, and nonviolent, assertive and caring communication is one of the stages of the Leadership School.