Psychological safety

Psychological safety, which is the degree to which individuals believe that they can speak up and freely voice their thoughts, ideas, questions and concerns, has been referred to by Google as the ‘secret ingredient’ of their highest performing teams in 2015.

So how do companies create psychological safety and how do leaders and teams know if they are working in a psychologically safe team? What role does the leader, team and organisation play in creating psychological safety?

The answer to this is that everyone plays a role! And, in a similar way to assessing and addressing psychosocial hazards across organisations, a systemic approach to diagnosing and developing psychological safety across the organisation is likely to yield the best outcomes.

In my years of researching and teaching psychological safety to leaders across a variety of organisations, I have found that simply having an awareness of what psychological safety is and its benefits to the teams (and how this differs to managing psychosocial hazards) through leadership training, can be a great place to start.

If you would like to know more about what psychological safety is and how to build it across your teams and organisation, please don’t hesitate to reach out.