Psychological safety - key to building succesful and engaged teams

If you want to create a high performance team within your organization, you have to create an environment that is safe for your team to address their ambiguities, raise their concerns, share their ideas and opinion and take responsibility for their actions; good or bad.  

According to a survey conducted by McKinsey Global during the pandemic, only a trickle of businesses inculcate the climate pf psychological safety in their workforce.

But what exactly is psychological safety?

And what role does it play in creation of fearless and agile teams?

Psychological Safety

This term which was coined by professor Amy Edmondson as believing that one will not face humiliation or punishment for expressing questions, ideas, concerns or mistakes. And by no means does it imply that the organization’s leadership and management lower the performance standards and act nice at all times.

Why is psychological safety ignored?

It is not just the management and organization’s leadership who is responsible for ignorance towards provision of a psychologically safe environment but the employees too. Employees like to keep an impression of high intellect and high performance in front of the leadership as well as their peers. Asking questions or owning up to mistakes is often considered a sign of weakness and incompetence.  This leads to formation of weaker teams that tend to brush their concerns, questions and ideas under the rug and continue to do as they are told or what will make them look good in the eyes of the management and colleagues.

On the other hand, when employees themselves ignore the need for a psychologically safe environment, the management and leadership prefers to look the other way too.

How can psychological safety be created at work and how can it help?

• Prioritize and Orchestrate: Accept and talk about the importance of psychological safety at work as a priority. Talk about how it is connected to innovation, inclusion and engagement within the organization. Discuss about the risks, complexities and uncertainties involved and how speaking up can help.  
• Facilitate Engagement: To invite engagement, show that you are genuinely interested in knowing whether those are opinions, ideas or concerns. Ask questions so that an environment of inquisitiveness is established and others feel comfortable in asking questions as well as answering to others. It would help to break the ice.  
• Set norms for handling of failure: It is because of the serious repercussions such as humiliation or punishment attached to failure that discourages the people from owning up to their mistakes. Encourage taking risks and learning from the failure. When people own up to their mistakes, they become fearless and at the same time a discussion around mistakes and the learnings from those mistakes serve as knowledge for the others to learn too.  

Creating Psychological safety at work is a long process that requires patience but once established; it can bear great results for the individuals and the organizations.