How to Foster Psychological Safety: Behaviours

Psychological Safety Behaviours: The Big List

(Updated Oct 2025)

Psychological safety is a belief that the group is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999). There are many ways we can help to foster these environments, but it’s important to remember that we must walk the walk as well as talk the talk! Here, we look comprehensively at behaviours that build psychological safety and enhance group performance, inclusion, resilience and happiness.

Behaviours and Practices that build psychological safety

First, let’s distinguish behaviours from practices: in this context, behaviours are aspects of how we work and interact, whilst practices are what we do. Practices are defined activities that may have a name, structure, and outcome. For example, a practice might be “The Andon Cord” whereas a behaviour might be “welcoming incomplete ideas”. It’s not a clear binary though, and many of the items in this list may qualify as both a behaviour and a practice. An easy way to tell the difference is that practices almost always have a name.

Through our workshops and training with teams and organisations all over the world, we continuously identify new tools, practices and behaviours that help to foster greater psychological safety and performance. We’re currently at over 170 behaviours in the below list (we started at 35!)

We’ve categorised these behaviours for ease of readability and use, although many of these could exist in more than one category. If you’re looking for a higher level guide, here’s our top ten ways to build psychological safety in the workplace.

Continuous Improvement Behaviours

• Take dedicated time to improve work processes, tools and practices
• Reframe challenges and threats as opportunities
• Provide feedback
• Ask for feedback
• Graciously accept feedback and act upon it
• Make work visible
• Move authority to where the knowledge is, not the other way around
• Accept that it takes time to learn new things
• Celebrate operational and non-visible work that “keeps the lights on”
• Elevate the importance of learning and training
• Specify the goal, not the method
• Deviate on purpose (if you must deviate)
• Ask for dissenting opinions
• Focus on quality over speed
• Avoid micro-managing
• Identify and elevate bottlenecks
• Automate repeatable tasks
• Create and maintain useful and usable checklists
• Create technological safety nets and mechanisms to prevent failure and mitigate mistakes
• Try to maximise the overlap of “work as done” and “work as imagined”
• Build a coaching habit
• Mentor other (particularly junior) team members
• Introduce an empty chair to meetings to represent “the organisation”
• Share your own learning goals and anything you’re working on improving

Learning Behaviours

• Encourage experimentation and reframe deliverables as experiments
• Strive to be blameless or blame-aware
• Normalise failure: accept that it will happen
• Try running HOP “Learning Teams” to understand normal work
• Understand Local Rationality
• Avoid a “zero mistakes” culture
• Admit mistakes
• Don’t punish or humiliate people for mistakes
• Share learning from mistakes with other people
• Share your past mistakes and failures
• Praise people for admitting mistakes
• Reject human error as a cause of failure
• Distinguish the three types of error: slips & lapses, mistakes, violations
• Reflect on past failures
• Discuss risks and the possibility of failure in the future
• Run Futurespectives, pre-mortems or TRIZ
• Create opportunities to safely fail at something
• Thank people for raising concerns (e.g. through an Andon Cord mechanism)
• Celebrate failure and learn from it
• Celebrate success and learn from it
• Establish Communities of Practice, book clubs, and lunch & learn sessions
• Identify groupthink and normalisation of deviance
• Identify and discuss your deformation professionelle
• Act on it when people do speak up

Innovation Behaviours

• Articulate your vision and strategy
• Involve everyone in strategy work
• Welcome incomplete ideas
• Set high aspirational goals
• Don’t be afraid to pivot
• Identify the HiPPO
• Find the balance between challenge and skill to find flow
• Work in increments rather than “big bangs” (i.e. Agile)
• Intentionally share “bad” or incomplete ideas 
• Define what is “safe to fail” and therefore “safe to try”
• Define “done” – what finished looks like
• Encourage intelligent risk taking
• Create “no-judgement” spaces for generating creative new ideas
• Iterate on ideas to improve them
• Focus on outcomes, not outputs or inputs
• Manage team and individual cognitive load
• Avoid management by metrics
• Have effective prioritisation discussions and frequently reprioritise
• Identify and address technical and operational debt
• Limit individual and team utilisation: ensure people and teams have slack time

Communication Behaviours

• Introduce yourself and others by given names, avoiding job titles or levels
• Adopt the Ladder of Participation
• Run regular “stand up” meetings – “What I did yesterday, What I’ll do today, What’s in my way”
• Ask open questions
• Say “I don’t know”
• Hold randomised coffee chats
• Assume low context: make your assumptions explicit.
• Think out loud
• Check and improve how you respond to people speaking up
• Thank people for sharing a dissenting or diverging point of view
• Use the Chatham House Rule for meetings
• Show instead of tell
• Cultivate curiosity: ask “tell me more”
• Adopt “graded assertiveness”: Probe, Alert, Challenge, Emergency (PACE)
• Thank people for bringing bad news
• Build psychological safety upwards as well
• Assume good intentions – or at least, enquire further before assuming negative intent
• Practise active listening
• Try to be as clear as possible
• Strive for compassionate candour
• Practise Humble Inquiry
• Echo back to people what they said, in order to confirm understanding
• Check in to confirm whether people understand what you’ve said
• Take notes to help aid recall of important information
• Share information: default to open
• State intention over asking permission
• Encourage open & constructive debate
• Encourage questioning authority
• Amplify weak signals
• Practise Non-Violent Communication
• Practise empathy
• Be conscious of, and manage, speaking time and share of voice in the group
• Always explain acronyms or unfamiliar terms

Inclusion Behaviours

• Share your pronouns so people feel safe to share theirs
• Remember people’s names
• Ask how to pronounce people’s names
• Practise pronunciation
• Be inclusive in decision making
• Be more approachable
• Try out different ways of meeting and communicating
• Adopt the Pac-Man Principle
• Schedule social events for work time so as to include carers and parents
• Provide opportunities and facilities for people to practise their religious observations
• Avoid alcohol being a focus of social events
• Ask for different perspectives and viewpoints
• Acknowledge our own privilege
• Think about “culture add” rather than “culture fit”
• Bring new people and ideas to the team
• Appreciate and thank people for big and small things
• Discuss and acknowledge different cultures, languages and backgrounds
• Use inclusive icebreakers
• Adopt inclusive and democratic meeting practices (such as Lean Coffee)
• Build constructive structures over oppressive hierarchies
• Check the “power gradients” in the group: the gap between those with most and least power
• Empower those with less power
• Identify the types of power present in the group
• Chair meetings well, ideally by someone who isn’t the boss
• Ensure there are meeting protocols to enable speaking up 
• Surface, acknowledge and address unconscious biases
• Sit with silence, to give people time to think and plan what they want to say

Team Cohesion Behaviours

• Co-create a social contract
• Talk about psychological safety
• Use “we” instead of “they”
• Define your team’s values and write them down in a living document
• Set ground rules and define expectations of each other
• Give it time instead of forcing vulnerability
• Take intentional breaks and allow time to relax and reflect
• Prioritise team success over individual success
• Avoid incentives that create individual competition within a team
• Set behavioural standards for civility
• Create and maintain team rituals and ceremonies
• Intelligently structure teams to align with the work (i.e. observe Conway’s Law)
• Give credit for success (and also for effort, regardless of success)
• Be firm with negative or harmful behaviours in the group
• Create and encourage communities of practice and interest
• Laugh, joke, and play
• Be courteous and respectful
• Be punctual
• Avoid cliques and gossip
• Break down silos
• Build cross-functional teams
• Practise the Johari Window exercise, while recognising its limitations
• Encourage broad skillsets as well as deep expertise
• Establish clear work boundaries of time and space (e.g. with Team Charters)
• Praise and value “glue” activities where team members help others succeed
• Hold dedicated time for 1-1 meetings
• Check in, not up
• Reward constructive, positive behaviours

Individual Behaviours

• Ask for help
• Think about your Ikigai
• Nourish your body as well as your mind
• Share with other people the signs that you may be anxious, stressed, or tired
• Acknowledge when things are difficult
• Practice self-reflection
• Show humility
• Check your body language
• Manage your reaction when someone tells you bad news
• Eye contact can be good, but remember it’s not easy or desirable for everyone in all contexts
• Get a coach, or provide coaching to others
• Get a mentor
• Give people your full attention and don’t check your phone & email during conversations
• Resist defensiveness and the fight or flight response: remember to pause and reflect on what is said
• Apologise and try to repair when you get it wrong
• Treat people as they prefer to be treated (e.g. with personal user manuals)
• Show vulnerability
• Find time to read, or listen to audiobooks
• Write a journal
• Meditate
• Breathe

This list of behaviours has grown and evolved over years of practice, reflection and study. Special thanks go to the following (non-exhaustive and unordered) list of folks for highlighting constructive practices in their respective works: Amy Edmondson, Ed Schein, Dominica DeGrandis, Sam Goodman, Peter Drucker, Ruchika Tulshyan, Warren Bennis, Brene Brown, Stephen Covey, Tom Peter, Nora Jones, Clayton Christensen, Jim Collins, John Willis, Sharon Bowman, Patrick Lencioni, Vidya Heisel, John Cutler, Daniel Pink, Stephen Shedletzky, Gerald Weinberg, Tim Clark, John Kotter, Atul Gawande, Jeff Sutherland, Minette Norman and Karolin Helbig, David Marquet, Sidney Dekker, John Allspaw, Kim Scott, W E Deming, Patrick Lencioni, Eli Goldratt, Jim Whitehurst, Mary Parker Follett and more.

If you think of any more to add, let us know!