New to psychological safety? Start here.

You may well have heard the phrase ‘psychological safety’ thrown around – perhaps referenced in a workshop title, mentioned as part of a training day or in an article someone forwarded you.

In the last few years, ‘psychological safety’ has become a term that a lot of people recognise but far fewer can actually define. This is a short read aimed at closing that gap, so that whatever brought you here, you get an accurate picture rather than the vague and sometimes contradictory version the phrase has picked up in circulation.

What psychological safety actually means

Psychological safety was defined by Harvard’s Amy Edmondson as the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking: that you can ask a question, admit a mistake, raise a concern or share an idea without being punished or humiliated for it. Put simply, it’s whether people feel it’s ok to speak up in that group. The speaking up doesn’t have to be verbal – it might be popping something in an email, writing it on a whiteboard or typing it in a chat, but the outcome is the same – they’re able to raise the thing they wanted or needed to do, without worrying that it will be held against them.

Note that we’ve said nothing here about people being ‘brave’. Someone feeling psychologically safe is about the conditions and context they find themselves in – and how safe they perceive themselves to be in those conditions. They don’t have to be braver than everyone else in the room; instead what we need is for the team around them to, over time, show them that it is genuinely safe to speak up in this group.

The “over time” part matters a lot here too. Nobody can decide once and for all that their team is safe to speak up in and mandate that everyone must therefore speak up without hesitation. Well, they could try (and some have!), but we wouldn’t recommend it.  Psychological safety is a felt experience, and one that gets worked out in the realities of everyday work: what when someone admits they’ve missed a deadline, or tells their manager an idea won’t work, or asks a question everyone else seems to already know the answer to. Each of those moments offers a tiny piece of data. With enough good data, people recognise it’s safe to bring their thinking to the table. Enough bad data, and they learn to keep their head down instead. Again, this is not a failure of courage, but a wholly sensible, and human, response to the risk of punishment or humiliation. 

The tacit mental calculus of voice

A helpful way to think about it is the idea that whenever we want to speak up, we run a quick, mostly unconscious calculation before we do: 

1. What’s the cost of saying this? And 
2. What’s the benefit?

If pointing out a flaw might get you labelled difficult, or asking a question might make you look stupid, then you may sensibly perceive the costs to outweigh the benefits and keep quiet. 

In order to foster greater psychological safety therefore, we have two main levers – we try to decrease the cost for people of speaking up, and increase the benefit. 

What psychological safety isn’t

The term gets stretched to cover things it was never meant to, so it’s worth being clear about where its edges lie.

• It isn’t the same as comfort. A psychologically safe team can still have conflicting views, which can mean hard, direct and difficult conversations. In fact, people feeling psychologically safe may make it more likely that we have those conversations, rather than suppressing any disagreement. 
• It isn’t a mental health intervention. Psychological safety is about how a team behaves and communicates at work: whether ideas, concerns and mistakes get heard. The two can certainly affect each other, but conflating psychological safety and mental health does neither any favours. Psychological safety isn’t a substitute for the wellbeing or mental health support someone might need.
• It isn’t a personality trait someone either has or lacks. It’s an emergent property of a specific group, on a specific topic, at a specific point in time. The same person can feel entirely safe to speak up in one team and stay completely silent in another.

What it actually looks like

It’s rarely anything very dramatic. In a psychologically safe team, we might notice someone junior correcting someone senior in a meeting without being reprimanded for it. Or maybe we hear someone say: “I don’t understand, would you mind going back a step?” when we’re in the thick of a presentation. Perhaps it’s as simple as someone sharing a few half-baked ideas in an email to kick off a brainstorming session. None of this looks remarkable from the outside, which is rather the point: the absence of psychological safety is usually invisible too, right up until it isn’t.

A team with very low psychological safety may well look like a well-behaved, low-friction team, where people are getting along quite nicely with each other. It’s often only once something goes wrong we realise that people have been holding back from saying things that were important, but felt too risky.

Why it’s worth knowing properly

We don’t see psychological safety as an optional extra for improving teamwork. We would primarily say that we work on psychological safety because it’s the right thing to do. It is important for people to have a voice at work, and to feel that they can speak up without fear of punishment or humiliation.

But beyond that, there are clear performance benefits for teams with greater psychological safety, and a large and growing body of research into how that manifests in all kinds of different workplaces. When Google’s Project Aristotle studied what actually made their best teams effective, psychological safety came out ahead of experience, seniority or how many ‘superstar players’ were on the team at all. 

Teams with psychological safety are more likely to catch errors earlier, surface problems so that they can address them and make better decisions. They’re also more likely to be able to do productive, constructive, creative work, because they can share ideas, work through challenges and learn together.

Where to go from here

This piece is deliberately short (ish). If you want to go further, three places to start:

• What is psychological safety? for the full definition, the nuance, and the most common misconceptions in more depth.
• The history of psychological safety for where the idea actually came from, long before it became a leadership buzzword.
• The field guide to psychological safety for more writing, ideas and explorations around what psychological safety is and how it works in practice 

And if this has piqued your interest and you’d like to dive deeper with us in one of our live online workshops, we’d love to have you join us.