Ways to Build Psychological Safety

There are loads of things that you can, and must, do as a leader or team member to build and maintain psychological safety in your teams – and here’s the big list of behaviours that foster psychological safety.

But it’s hard to remember millions of things, so here are three key points below that will help you create and improve psychological safety, whether you’re in charge of the team or not. And if you want to dive a bit deeper, here’s our top ten ways to build psychological safety.

Top ten ways to build psychological safety

1. Frame work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.

The primary outcome of work should be knowing how to do it even better next time. Make everything into an experiment: this means that failure isn’t a problem, it’s an opportunity to learn.

2. Acknowledge your own fallibility.

You might be an expert, but even you can make mistakes – if you admit it when you do, you allow others to do the same.

3. Model curiosity.

This creates a need for voice. Via asking questions, you create space for people to speak up.

Improve the psychological safety in your organisation with the Psychological Safety Action Pack