How to foster psychological safety with your own manager.

By Jade Garratt

Psychological safety isn’t only the responsibility of those in leadership positions. We believe that if you have the power to destroy psychological safety for someone – if you can laugh at their ideas, embarrass them for asking a question, or roll your eyes when they make a mistake – then it’s also your responsibility to create it.

That said, in lots of the work we do around psychological safety, we talk about the role of leadership. Leaders matter a lot in psychological safety, because power gradients exist in leadership dynamics. It’s very hard to speak up against a power gradient, and thus it’s on the leader to help create conditions where people in their team can speak up. Also, at least in theory, as a leader you’re well placed to make changes and instigate the kinds of behavioural and cultural shifts needed to foster greater psychological safety. 

But, a question that frequently comes up, even in our leadership workshops is:

“How do I build psychological safety upwards?”

In other words, if psychological safety isn’t something your own manager is trying to work on, how can you create a space where you feel safe to speak up, potentially when you’re the one going against the power gradient. 

And we have to be honest about the challenge here. This is much harder. Psychological safety, as defined by Dr Amy Edmondson, is defined as the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It’s feeling like you’re in an environment that’s safe for interpersonal risk taking. But there are environments where it’s not safe to take those interpersonal risks. You may, for example, be working for a boss who is likely to punish or humiliate you for speaking up. And it’s not necessarily a great idea to “fake it til you make it” in this scenario. Those negative consequences can be very real. 

But that’s not to say that there’s nothing you can do to try to influence the environment you’re working in and improve your interpersonal relationships with those higher in the organisational hierarchy. The below are a list of suggestions and ideas. They should be applied with discretion and professional judgement, and not all will work in all contexts. The first ones are probably the lowest “risk”, working your way up to some towards the end which are bolder, and you might prefer only to try once you’ve built up some confidence in the relationship.

How to influence your manager to foster psychological safety

1. Find out what drives them. When you have a deeper understanding of your manager’s ambitions in and for the organisation, and the things that they fear (an accident, missing their targets, losing their job), you’ll be better placed to frame psychological safety as something that helps them achieve their goals and mitigate their fears.
2. Discuss with your boss what you’re doing with your own team. If you’ve instigated practices that are helping build psychological safety within your team and they’re going well, talk about that. Describe the positive impact you’re seeing, and any improvements you have noticed as a result, especially if you can make these really tangible, e.g. “Ben asked for help with this task, which it turned out the whole team were struggling with, so we were able to address it in the team meeting. I don’t think he’d have done that before we worked on our team charter,” or “In our Lean Coffee, Sara had a great idea to improve our QA process. It was a really productive way to run a meeting.”
3. Share interesting articles and resources on psychological safety to initiate a conversation. Depending on what interests them, you may want to share articles such as Paul O’Neill’s success at Alcoa, or disaster stories such as Chernobyl. Or point them towards excellent podcasts such as Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales, which could whet their appetite. In the Psych Safety Action Pack there’s a “Business Case for Psychological Safety” document which can also help you to communicate some of this.
4. Open up the communication channels. A good way to do this can be to use something like 15/5 reports with your own team, fill one in for yourself and your own week, then share it with your manager, explaining that you’ve done this for your own team but thought it might be useful for them to see. Don’t give up after week one – stick at it!
5. Design safe-to-fail experiments in speaking up. Sometimes we don’t speak up not because it isn’t safe, but because our past experiences and fears may cause us to assume it’s not. Have a think about a very small experiment you could make to test the water and see how it lands with your manager. Is there a new idea you could share, explaining that you don’t know whether it would work or not? Is there something small you could ask for help with? Is there even a small mistake you’ve made that you could be open about?
6. Talk about psychological safety openly. Explain that it’s something you’d like to feel more of, and ask whether you can work on that with your manager. 

And if this doesn’t work?

There are a few things to bear in mind. You can influence other people, but you can’t control them, and it may be that you’re working in an environment where psychological safety is really lacking and there’s little interest in doing anything about it from those who are more senior. In this case, you still have options (again from least to most scary):

1- Find an ally that you can speak more openly with. There is so much learning to be had from open conversations about mistakes, failures, experiments and concerns, and it would be a huge shame if you missed out on this altogether because your manager is not open to them. You may be able to find a peer, a coach, or an alternative mentor within your workplace, but if not, you might want to look beyond your workplace and to broader professional networks. We have a lovely, welcoming psychological safety community on Discord, where you can share questions, thoughts and ideas. 
2 – Find someone else who can influence your manager. Is there someone you could discuss this with who might be able to raise the issue on your behalf, or is better placed to advocate for positive change? This might be one of their peers, someone more senior, or someone outside the organisation, such as a psychological safety consultant or trainer. 
3 a) Leave. Working for a long time in an environment of low psychological safety is unlikely to do your professional development, career or wellbeing any good. It might be time to plan your exit strategy and find somewhere better. Indeed, you can make some very impactful changes whilst you’re working your notice period!
3 b) Make plans to leave, but stay. As a more positive variation on the point above – sometimes just knowing you have other options (and even an escape route ready!) can be very freeing – this can put you in a stronger position to take some of the risks that might just help to change the environment and ways of working. 

If your own manager isn’t fostering psychological safety, it may be intentional, or it may simply be that they don’t know there’s any other way. The lack of psychological safety your manager is creating for you may well be a reflection of what they’re experiencing from higher up. Just because you’re up against a power gradient, doesn’t mean they’re not as well. It can also be very difficult to unlearn the lessons we’ve learned from conventional management approaches, even more so the longer we’ve been in those environments.

Fostering psychological safety as a manager or leader can itself be a scary and uncomfortable thing to do; it will require them to move into uncomfortable spaces and make themselves somewhat more vulnerable. So cultivate curiosity, give it time, and if you can, make it safe for your boss to foster psychological safety. Crucially though, remember to look after yourself too.

Further reading

The Psychological Safety Action Pack
Paul O’Neill: A Psychological Safety Success Story
The HiPPO
Westrum’s Organisational Culture
Bad Management
Experiments, bets and probes
Power and Mary Parker Follett
Chernobyl: Safety Cultures and Secrecy

Psychological Safety in Practice

Running effective 1-1 meetings

I love this 1-1 question bank from Terry Brown. A fantastic resource that includes loads of questions to use in 1-1s, including some that get into psychological safety itself.

Stammering

The folks at Stamma UK do incredible work to raise awareness and provide support to those with stammers and stutters. This cartoon by Gareth Cowlin over on their instagram is excellent, and does a great job of showing how daily life, such as ordering a coffee or a snack can be impacted by having a stammer.

The Grenfell Inquiry

On Wednesday 4th September 2024, the final report of the 6-year public inquiry in the Grenfell disaster was published. The incubation period for the disaster that killed 72 people was over 25 years, when the government was warned about unsafe cladding in a 1992 tower block fire. Over the following 25 years, concerns about fire safety and cladding were dismissed, and failed safety tests covered up. Privatisation of advisory bodies, commercial pressures, a desire to “cut red tape”, as well as misleading claims by manufacturers all led to a normalisation of deviance, which alongside poor training and preparation by the fire service, led ultimately to the disaster in 2017. 

This “Grenfell Web of Blame” diagram, by Richard Millett KC shows how each party involved in the disaster, from manufacturers and architects to the government themselves, have attempted to point the finger of blame at others, rather than take accountability and implement change as a result.

It’s unacceptable to gamble with the lives of vulnerable people, and we need to ensure that we are creating conditions in all workplaces where safety is a priority, and where people can speak up about concerns and against dangerous practices, however normalised they are.

This week’s poem:

Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.

—Frida Kahlo