Coaching and Psychological Safety: listening, trust and letting go of control By Jade Garratt When I first trained as a coach, I realised there were two things I wasn’t very good at: I meant well, but I was uncomfortable with […]
In The Workplace
Emergence, substrate, succession, indicator species & ecotones. I started my career in ecology, as an experimentalist working in a research station’s wonderfully named “Weed Science” department – a title that sounds more like a kooky 80s film than a scientific […]
Are you at the Sharp End or the Blunt End? Most people who’ve been to school (and many who haven’t!) have strong opinions about education. Understandably so – education speaks to how we raise our children, what we value as […]
Part 2: Different people, different safety Continuing our reflections on the last five years. In part one, we explored the name psychological safety itself, and here in part two, we get into diversity, myths, the proliferation of bad advice, and […]
It’s here! The Psychological Safety Trainer Toolkit has officially launched. We’re incredibly excited to share this with you. Based on five years of delivering psychological safety training, workshops and consultancy, we’ve created the most complete resource available for anyone who […]
Part 1: The Power and Peril of Naming Over the past five years of our work in psychological safety, it has transformed from a little-known term, understood and explicitly practised by only a small group of researchers and practitioners, to […]
Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety There really is some bad advice and research around in respect to psychological safety, in particular how it relates to aspects of neurodiversity and culture. In this piece, we’re going to dive […]
Psychological Safety Is Necessary But Not Sufficient. We sometimes hear “But psychological safety isn’t enough!”, and well… Obviously. It’s rather like saying that having a fully functioning car isn’t enough to make a road trip – and of course it […]
Every year we hold Psych Safety Days and other events for our wonderful community to come together, share insights, learn new practices and examine emergent research and evidence. We’re currently putting together ideas for Psych Safety Day (or Week!) 2026, […]
There isn’t a “one-size-fits-all”, cookie-cutter, road map 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 […]
By Jade Garratt It will probably come as no great surprise to those of us who work with the concept of psychological safety that one of the earliest references to the term in academic and psychological literature comes from Carl […]
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2025 – the largest global survey on psychological safety ever! Psychological safety is the core ingredient behind high-performing, innovative, and happy teams. It shapes whether we feel safe speaking up, sharing ideas, […]
Barriers to Psychological Safety There are many team-level, organisation-level and broader barriers to speaking up, including (most significantly) steep power gradients, cultural norms (organisational or otherwise), and others. But in this research we wanted to examine the experiential barriers to […]
How you respond matters. “Everything you do is important to your organization. People are watching you. The people in your organization determine how to move forward after both successful work and how to recover after failure by watching how you […]
Practices that Foster Psychological Safety There are many behaviours that (depending on the context) can help to foster psychological safety, over 170 of which are listed in our big list of psychological safety behaviours. However, there are also many practices […]
Feedback in the workplace In our “Delivering Effective Feedback” workshops, we explore participants’ experiences of feedback, and we find, of all the feedback they’ve received so far in their career, roughly: So this seemed like an excellent avenue to explore […]
Psych Safety Day 2025 was wonderful! Malaga and Seville were gorgeous, very hot, and a fabulous way to wrap up 2025 and begin looking forward to what’s happening in Psych Safety for 2026. And if you’d like to have your […]
Job Security and Psychological Safety In a lot of “What Psychological Safety Is Not” articles, we often come across statements like “psychological safety is not job security”. And that’s true, to a degree. Psychological safety is not the same as […]
Psychological Safety Research Pulse Last week, we asked “Typically, how familiar are people in your workplace with the concept of psychological safety?”. 121 people responded, and the distribution across the whole sample looked like this. The most common responses were […]
Why do We Foster Psychological Safety? By Tom Geraghty and Jade Garratt It’s easy, when considering why we should work on psychological safety, to go straight to the organisational benefits: improved learning, greater innovation, higher quality products or services and […]
Why Just Culture Isn’t Sticking by Tom Geraghty What Do We Mean by “Just” Culture? The concept of a “Just Culture” was first developed in James Reason’s 1997 book Managing the Risks of Organisational Accidents. When we say “Just Culture”, […]
By Jade Garratt Have you ever found yourself reacting to something a colleague said as if you were a child being told off by their parents, even though you’re both adults and peers? Or ever said something to a teammate […]
Comfort vs Need by Tom Geraghty What do we do when the things that help some people in the team feel psychologically safer don’t work for everyone? Perhaps one person says they need time away from the main meeting group […]
Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) During my ecology degree, whilst studying ecosystem and habitat change, I learned about Self-Organised Criticality (SOC), and I was fascinated by how it explained the precursors to seemingly dramatic changes. We first discussed Self-Organised Criticality in this […]
We all are. Do only leaders influence psychological safety? Is psychological safety “done to us”? Well, yes and no. Leaders have a significant influence on psychological safety, but they’re not the only contributor, by a very long way. Firstly, psychological […]
Page 1 of 8
Sign up to our newsletter & get weekly insights and research
