Can a team be too psychologically safe?

Can a team be too psychologically safe?

A question I get asked in many (maybe even most) workshops is “Can a team be too psychologically safe?” Or sometimes framed, “What’s the impact of a team being too safe?“

My short answer, just as with physical safety, is that a team cannot be “too” safe. It’s a little more complex than that though, so let’s dive into it here.

Numerous articles and studies claim that excessive psychological safety in a team can lead to underperformance, suggesting that teams with very high levels of psychological safety may not perform as well. These are sometimes called “boundary effects” or “non-linear” effects of psychological safety.

However, these studies usually misinterpret or misrepresent what psychological safety actually is, overlooking the vital point that psychological safety alone is insufficient to attain high team performance.

Psychological safety is “The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking“

Amy Edmondson, 1999

It’s crucial to make the point that psychological safety is not about lowering standards, avoiding conflict, or coddling people. It’s not ruinous empathy or a space where anything goes. It’s not taking unwarranted risks, or not following procedure.

For instance, a team that is highly psychologically safe but lacks discipline is not underperforming due to their psychological safety; their lackluster performance is due to a lack of high standards, clear objectives, or ambition. The ability for team members to freely express ideas, questions, concerns, or acknowledge mistakes is always essential.

Taking the example of Cockpit Resource Management (CRM) training in aviation, where the focus is on fostering an environment where individuals can openly and confidently address issues even in high power differentials and to those higher up in hierarchies, there is no suggestion that there should be a limit to encouraging open communication about ideas, questions, concerns, or errors. CRM stands as one of the most effective safety programs in history, with a proven track record across millions of flights over several decades.

Once we remove the constraint of interpersonal risk, other constraints become evident. Without good standards of behaviour, high ambition, clear structure or goals, high psychological safety simply means that those limitations become evident.

The value of psychological safety extends beyond just team performance.

Psychological safety is crucial not only for team performance but also as a fundamental aspect of allowing individuals to express their true selves at work. As Amy Edmondson says, psychological safety enables people to fully represent their identity at work, including their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, background, family status, and other aspects of their identity, without fear of judgment.

Even if psychological safety had no impact on team performance, fostering it remains the right thing to do.

Behaviour standards and discipline.

In a team without high expectations of behaviour, discipline and strong values, problematic behaviour can emerge, whether or not there exists an environment of psychological safety. “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept” is as true in workplace teams as it is in the military. The behaviour in the team will only be as “good” as the standards that the team implicitly or explicitly holds itself to. This includes the way team members communicate with each other and with folks outside the team. I’ve found that teams that are seemingly very psychologically safe but have poorly defined values and standards may in some cases feel it’s acceptable to engage in inappropriate and exclusionary behaviour towards those outside the team, for instance through racist, homophobic or transphobic jokes or comments.

If we put a group of racists in a room and increase their psychological safety together, they’re likely to say racist things. That’s not psychological safety at fault, it’s that the group deem that behaviour to be acceptable.

A group with low standards of acceptable behaviour are also more likely to work to lower quality standards, deliver value slowly, or display other team dysfunctions. As we’ve discussed previously, psychological safety is not a license to say what you wish or behave as you wish without fear of consequence.
 

It’s important to recognise that in safe but dysfunctional teams, it’s not high psychological safety that’s the problem – it’s the lack of disciplined drive and/or behavioural standards in the group.

A psychologically safe team with high standards will challenge inappropriate behaviour when it occurs by intention or by mistake, in kind, compassionate, candid ways that address the problem, not the person. This means that standards continue to drive towards the highest possible bar, in contrast to “low discipline” teams, where standards can sink to the lowest possible bar. 
 

Psychological vs Physical or “Real World” Safety.

We must also be careful not to confuse psychological safety with physical or “real-world” safety. A mountaineering team climbing K2, such as Nims Dai’s team of sherpas and mountaineers, are in incredible danger, but are very psychologically safe. Indeed, it’s that psychological safety that enables them to face such existential danger. In order to summit the mountain and make it back down safely, everyone in the team must feel safe to highlight risks, suggest alternative routes, and admit mistakes or concerns. Psychological safety is part of the essential foundation that allows us to face danger confidently and succeed in challenging environments. It is a prerequisite of physical safety.

When it’s suggested to me that a team is “too” safe, it can be from a sense, a sticky belief, that psychological safety means overly sheltering the team from challenges. It’s a valid concern, but in fact a misinterpretation of what psychological safety actually means. It’s certainly part of a manager’s role to protect a team from noise that prevents them getting their jobs done, and prioritise what information the team receives and has to consume (we can’t receive *all* of it: we’d never stop reading announcement emails). But that doesn’t mean wrapping the team in cotton wool, or hiding very real challenges from them. Again, it’s actually high psychological safety in a team that allows them to have honest discussions about those challenges and face them effectively.

Psychological safety is not just about Performance.

And of course, we foster psychological safety not only to improve “performance”, but also to help improve retention, reduce stress and sickness, foster inclusion and diversity, and because it’s fundamentally the right thing to do.


An Absence of Interpersonal Fear

Psychological safety is an absence of interpersonal fear. This does not mean an absence of all fear; many fears are natural, and useful. The fear of an avalanche, the fear of missing an important deadline, or the fear of the competition stealing your customers can all be helpful in context, maybe even necessary. But interpersonal fear is never useful: when is is ever useful to be afraid of the consequences of admitting a mistake, suggesting an idea, or raising a legitimate concern? 

TL;DR: Where teams exhibit harmful behaviours in psychologically safe teams, it’s usually due to an absence of high behavioural standards, not high psychological safety. I believe that there is no such thing as “too much” psychological safety on a team.

More recently, a paper by Liat Eldor, Michal Hodor and Peter Cappelli was published: “The limits of psychological safety: Nonlinear relationships with performance”, and a series of HBR articles spun off it that fundamentally misrepresent what psychological safety is, and how it works in practice. Read our response and critique at Can Workplaces Have Too Much Psychological Safety?

This newsletter is sponsored by Candor.

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Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

This Women in the Workplace study from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company shows that Latinas and Black women tend to feel less psychological safety in the workplace: for example, less than half of Latinas and Black women say people on their team aren’t penalised for mistakes. The study is excellent, and comprehensively shows that there remain large differences in how people experience the workplace – particularly with respect to feeling psychologically safe, and particularly so for more marginalised folks such as black women, and women with disabilities.

Here’s a great episode of the Google Cloud Security Podcast: Special: Sharing The Mic In Cyber with STMIC Hosts Lauren and Christina: Representation, Psychological Safety, Security, with Lauren Zabierek (@lzxdc), and Christina Morillo (@divinetechygirl). They discuss representation in cyber security, and the importance of psychological safety in infosec and cyber. If you’re interested in this topic, I’ve also written about psychological safety and information security.

I consider retrospectives to be one of the core practices of fostering psychological safety and continuous improvement. This article from Gregory Witek dives deep into How to run an effective Retrospective, and is worth a read. Gregory highlights some really important points about format, frequency, duration, and practice. 

This is a good article by Isabel Nyo, on the signs that psychological safety is missing in a team. Isabel makes some great points, such as noting if the team usually agree with what leaders have to say, rather than (at least occasionally) disagreeing. Her point about how much PTO (paid time off) people take is an interesting one – I’d definitely take increased leave as a signal, but I feel it could be as much of a signal of increased psychological safety, as it could be of decreased psychological safety.

Things to do and try:

Back when I was studying for my MBA, I debated with one of my lecturers about the use of “smileys”, such as 🙂 or 🙁 in work communications and emails. I insisted that they were useful to convey intent, whilst he insisted they were unprofessional. That was 20 years ago, and a lot has changed!

I’m still a huge advocate of the use of emojis and gifs in written communications to help contextualise and clarify intent and meaning, which helps to foster psychological safety. Most of us overthink emails that we send at work, for fear that it may be interpreted wrongly, or our intent might be misconstrued, and I advocate for emojis and gifs that can help us demonstrate our positive intent. It’s also fun! 

This is a great article from Eleanor Hawkins about how emoji are interpreted and used differently in the workplace, and highlights how quickly the meaning of emojis can change – some folks feel that the use of a thumbs up emoji can be passive aggressive, or rude.

I’m also interested in your use of emojis in the workplace – do different industries and cultures use them in different ways, or disapprove of their use entirely? 

And what about gifs? How appropriate are gifs in workplace communication? 

This week’s poem:

Is This Thing Working, by Todd Snider

Is this thing working? Is this thing on?

In the hallway of a high school, anywhere USA
There was a bully that would pick on a different kid,
and it seemed like every day
He had this pack of back slapping buddies,
that would laugh and back him up all the way
And this screaming girlfriend who would make believe in everything he’d say

Is this thing working? Is this thing on?

Because then one day this kid, that he’d beat up a couple time before
Realized, to even his own surprise, that he probably could indeed take more
And with that he hatched an evil plan to make that devil pay
He walked up to him, in the middle of the gym,
and he found the nerve to say
“you gonna hit somebody, today? You gonna hit me too.
In fact, you’re gonna hit me every day, because now I’m picking on you”
And as crazy as it all might sound right now,
I’m not stopping until I’m through
It’s too late to beg for mercy

Is this thing working? Is this thing on?

Because that bully he just laughed and laughed,
of course, and so did all of his friends
And he beat that poor kid unmercifully, for days and days on end
Only slightly less impressively each time,
to that pretty girl, and all of his friends
Who would eventually, secretly, start hoping for that kid to win

So, it this thing working? Is this thing on?

You know, you’ll never hear him say this now,
because he thinks we still don’t know
But winning this battle every day cost our bully the war a long time ago
And of all the scars he’s got to show, for every blow that kid sneaks in
The worst one is probably knowing that tomorrow he’s
going to have to get up
And fight that kid again

Is this thing working? Is this thing on?


Listen to Todd Snider perform “Is This Thing Working”.

Mission statement

The mission of this newsletter is to make the world of work a better, safer, more inclusive and equitable place. We work towards this by sharing, as widely as possible, new research and opinion, case studies, news, practices and methods related to psychological safety. 

This includes topics such as inclusion, human factors, facilitation, safety critical environments, systems thinking, leadership and management, diversity and equity, mental health, organisational dynamics, culture, ethics, and more. 

A core goal is to amplify the voices of minoritised groups and those who are less represented in this field. This includes (but is not limited to) voices of people of colour, neurodiverse people, LGBTQ+ people, women in leadership and tech, and more.

Another goal is to share insights and best practices across different domains: for example, so that those of us in tech may learn from healthcare, and those of us in education can learn from aviation.

I believe knowledge is worthless unless it’s accessible. A key principle of this newsletter is to only share content that everyone can access. This excludes content behind paywalls, research papers that are not open-access, and proprietary tools that don’t open source their algorithms (preventing us from observing how systems make decisions about us). There may be some exceptions to this principle in practice, for example, where authors are able to share original texts of papers.

Whilst this statement will evolve this over time, the core principles of equity, amplification, and progressive & humanistic leadership shouldn’t change.