The Psychological Safety Core Principles

1. Psychological Safety Is Different For Everyone

There is no one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to psychological safety. There are some foundational practices and principles, but the experience of psychological safety, and how it manifests, is different for everyone. Our background, culture, neurodiversities, abilities, needs and preferences all affect what psychological safety looks like to us. And the stakes for speaking up are higher for some than others.

For some, it may be the space to stutter and stammer, for others, not feeling the need to maintain eye contact or sit still. “Speaking up” doesn’t just mean verbally either. We may speak up via text, email, written note, sign language, drawing, or a different language to the dominant one of the group.

2. A Team Is Only As Safe As The Least Safe Person

Many tools, metrics, surveys and measurement practices provide average “scores” that can hide outliers. In fact, it’s the outliers – those people in the group who feel least safe – who we need to support and address the needs of most. A team of 10 people who score high may be hiding one or two members who are feeling excluded or unsafe – and that’s a team with a problem.

And in practice, there is no such thing as too much psychological safety. There are no cases where it’s useful for someone to be afraid to speak up, not least because those who are least likely to speak up are likely to already be under-represented or disenfranchised.

3. We Are All Responsible For Fostering Psychological Safety

We all possess the capacity to diminish or destroy psychological safety for those around us, and as such, we all have a responsibility to foster it. This applies to the teams and groups we’re in as well as things like the social platforms that we use.

It’s easy to damage psychological safety, whether by blaming for a mistake or simply abrasively telling someone we’re too busy to deal with their question right now. It’s harder to take care about the spaces we create and how we respond when someone tells us something we’d rather not hear. And remember: the observer effect is very strong in psychological safety.

4. We Fix Systems and Coach People

The inner belief of psychological safety arises from past and present outer conditions. When we focus only on the people, we risk individualising what is often a systemic issue. When we focus only on systems, we risk overlooking the responsibility and accountability of people, including ourselves, within the system. It’s both, not one or the other.

5. We Work On Psychological Safety Because It’s The Right Thing To Do.

Whilst psychological safety improves outcomes – safety, quality, speed, innovation, and many other work related outcomes, it is also fundamentally a moral and ethical right. We all deserve to feel safe to speak up in the workplace, classroom, community and elsewhere in our lives – it’s simply an added bonus that psychological safety also leads to better outcomes.