After the success of our last Psychological Safety Day in Barcelona, we decided to do it again in 2024, in Seville! Last Friday, the bright open-plan area of a wonderful coworking space in Seville buzzed with lively debate, laughter, and […]
Psychological Safety In The Workplace
Non-Violent Communication (or “Giraffe Language”) I saw this great post by Robin Weinick on LinkedIn about her bowl of tiny giraffes, and it reminded me to share a photo of our own “Speak Up Giraffe”! This giraffe is passed around […]
The increase in awareness and popularity of psychological safety I thought it would be interesting to look at the frequency of the search term “psychological safety” over time, and map certain events onto that. If you head to Google Trends, […]
Leadership and Empathy One of the most powerful capabilities that leaders and managers can possess is empathy. Arguably, the same could be said for anyone – we can best understand and help others when we’re able to see the world […]
Hard to Say I’m Sorry: Apologies in the Workplace Guest post by Jonathan Cohen, MD It shouldn’t be a surprise that good apologies are not the norm. There are several reasons for this. Most of us have not undergone formal […]
Types of Silence The authors of this literature review “Silence in organizations and psychological safety” from 2015, describe a number of group dynamics that can lead to silence, and more interestingly, describe a few different types of silence, drawn from […]
Icebreakers If you’re anything like me, when you see “icebreakers” on an agenda or schedule for a meeting, you immediately become a little anxious. Ice breakers are intended to make us feel more comfortable and at ease, increasing the overall […]
Psychological safety is about creating a climate in which we feel able to take interpersonal risks in order to communicate our ideas, concerns and issues – and we want to be able to speak up in a way that we […]
Edited 2025: See our updated research on how socioeconomic background affects interpersonal risk taking and opportunities in the workplace. Research by KPMG shows that people from working class families took an average 19% longer to move up a grade in […]
In the real world, psychological safety is political. There are some who say that psychological safety isn’t political. We think it is. What does “political” mean? At its broadest level, politics determine the ways people in groups make decisions. This […]
How psychological safety captured the world’s attention For a while, from around 1999 to 2014, the term ‘psychological safety‘ was relatively well known in academia, but barely mentioned, let alone understood in the world of practice, the world of work […]
Psychological Safety in the World Soft SkillsWhilst I’m not really keen on the term “soft skills” (because really, the soft stuff is the hard stuff), this is a good article by Rebecca Knight on improving your soft skills as a remote […]
Psychological Capital: Foundations, Team Dynamics and the Role of Leadership, Culture, and Neurodiversity AbstractPsychological capital (PsyCap) has emerged as a pivotal construct in organisational research, encapsulating the positive psychological resources that individuals draw upon to navigate work-related challenges. This article […]
I can say whatever I want! When I met up with Amy Edmondson recently in Boston (yes, this is a humblebrag and I’m owning it!) we discussed one of the prevalent misconceptions around psychological safety: that it means we can say […]
Making it safe(r) to fail in teaching By Jade Garratt, Director of Education, Iterum Years ago, I was lucky enough to teach in an amazing secondary school English department. Teachers’ enthusiasm for developing their practice was infectious and there was […]
The psychological safety newsletter is now three years old! The first issue went out on February 19th, 2021 to just 139 people, and you can read it online here. And this is issue 150! Over these 150 issues we’ve evolved […]
Psychological Safety Case Study: The Sales Team One of the most popular requests from the newsletter feedback survey was for some case studies of psychological safety in practice, so here’s the first one! It’s an interesting case that illustrates why […]
Psychological Safety at Work Psychological Safety in Schools This is an excellent piece on the EdCan Network website on the importance and dynamics of psychological safety for students. The authors make a few key points – psychological safety and inclusion […]
Civility Saves Lives If you wanted to completely destroy any psychological safety in the group, what would you do? If you wanted to create a culture of fear, where nobody felt safe to speak up, suggest ideas, highlight concerns, or […]
In a word, yes. The importance of mental health and well-being is now being recognised in the workplace. Some would even argue it’s being respected. Though not universal in its reach, this new attitude is seeing employers investing in a […]
A few issues ago, we covered various kinds of retrospective – the practice of looking back and learning from work, as well as some of the conditions and requirements for effective retrospectives. One of those points was about the “weak […]
Psychological Safety at Work Lean and psychological safety Here’s a great analysis by Ben Hutchinson of a paper examining the relationship between Lean and psychological safety in construction projects in the US. This combines two of my favourite subjects so […]
John Boyd and The OODA Loop John Boyd’s OODA loops are more than just an esoteric strategic concept; they’ve earned a huge following online and around the world. In this article, I highlight key points about OODA loops along with a glimpse into […]
Telling the boss bad news twice. Soon after I graduated from university with my degree in ecology, I got a job as an Experimentalist at Jealott’s Hill Research Station, Berkshire. I worked in a department called “Weed Science” (yes, it does […]
Team performance isn’t the only reason that we foster psychological safety. We also do it because we want people to feel fulfilled in their jobs, we don’t want people to leave a team because they don’t feel included, we want people to experience less unnecessary stress and have greater mental wellbeing, we want to foster greater diversity and inclusion. Ultimately, we foster psychological safety because it’s fundamentally the right thing to do.
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