Behaviours that Foster Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety Behaviours: The Big List

Psychological safety is a belief that the group is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999). There are many ways we can help to foster these environments, but it’s important to remember that we must walk the walk as well as talk the talk! Here, we look comprehensively at behaviours that build psychological safety and enhance group performance, inclusion, resilience and happiness.

Behaviours and Practices that build psychological safety

First, let’s distinguish behaviours from practices: in this context, behaviours are aspects of how we work and interact, whilst practices are what we do. Practices are defined activities that may have a name, structure, and outcome. For example, a practice might be “After Action Reviews” whereas a behaviour might be “welcoming incomplete ideas”. It’s not a binary though, and some of the items in this list may qualify as both a behaviour and a practice. An easy way to tell the difference is that practices almost always have a name.

Through our workshops and training with teams and organisations all over the world, we continuously identify new tools, practices and behaviours that help to foster greater psychological safety and performance. We’re currently at 161 behaviours in the below list (we started at 35!)

We’ve categorised these behaviours for ease of readability and use, although many of these could exist in more than one category. If you’re looking for a shorter list, here’s our top ten ways to build psychological safety in the workplace.

Continuous Improvement Behaviours

• Take dedicated time to improve work processes, tools and practices
• Reframe challenges and threats as opportunities
• Provide feedback
• Ask for feedback
• Graciously accept feedback and act upon it
• Make work visible
• Move authority to where the knowledge is, not the other way around
• Accept that it takes time to learn new things
• Celebrate operational and non-visible work that “keeps the lights on”
• Elevate the importance of learning and training
• Specify the goal, not the method
• Deviate on purpose (if you must deviate)
• Ask for dissenting opinions
• Focus on quality over speed
• Avoid micro-managing
• Identify and elevate bottlenecks
• Automate repeatable tasks
• Create and maintain useful and usable checklists
• Create technological safety nets and mechanisms to prevent failure and mitigate mistakes
• Try to maximise the overlap of “work as done” and “work as imagined”
• Coach and mentor other (particularly junior) team members
• Share your own learning goals and anything you’re working on improving

Learning Behaviours

• Encourage experimentation and reframe deliverables as experiments
• Normalise failure: accept that it will happen
• Understand Local Rationality
• Avoid a “zero mistakes” culture
• Admit mistakes
• Don’t punish or humiliate people for mistakes
• Share learning from mistakes with other people
• Share your past mistakes and failures
• Praise people for admitting mistakes
• Reject human error as a cause of failure
• Distinguish the three types of error: slips & lapses, mistakes, violations
• Reflect on past failures
• Discuss risks and the possibility of failure in the future
• Run Futurespectives, pre-mortems or TRIZ
• Create opportunities to safely fail at something
• Thank people for raising concerns (e.g. through an Andon Cord mechanism)
• Celebrate failure and learn from it
• Celebrate success and learn from it
• Establish Communities of Practice, book clubs, and lunch & learn sessions
• Identify groupthink and normalisation of deviance

Innovation Behaviours

• Articulate your vision and strategy
• Involve everyone in strategy work
• Welcome incomplete ideas
• Set high aspirational goals
• Don’t be afraid to pivot
• Identify the HiPPO
• Find the balance between challenge and skill to find flow
• Work in increments rather than “big bangs” (i.e. Agile)
• Intentionally share “bad” or incomplete ideas 
• Define what is “safe to fail” and therefore “safe to try”
• Define “done” – what finished looks like.
• Encourage intelligent risk taking
• Iterate on ideas to improve them
• Focus on outcomes, not outputs or inputs
• Manage team and individual cognitive load
• Avoid management by metrics
• Have effective prioritisation discussions and frequently reprioritise
• Identify and address technical and operational debt
• Limit individual and team utilisation: ensure people and teams have slack time

Communication Behaviours

• Introduce yourself and others by given names, avoiding job titles or levels
• Run regular “stand up” meetings – “What I did yesterday, What I’ll do today, What’s in my way”
• Ask open questions
• Say “I don’t know”
• Think out loud
• Show instead of tell
• Cultivate curiosity: ask “tell me more”
• Adopt “graded assertiveness”: Probe, Alert, Challenge, Emergency (PACE)
• Thank people for bringing bad news
• Assume good intentions – or at least, enquire further before assuming negative intent
• Practise active listening
• Try to be as clear as possible
• Strive for compassionate candour
• Practise Humble Inquiry
• Echo back to people what they said, in order to confirm understanding
• Check in to confirm whether people understand what you’ve said
• Take notes to help aid recall of important information
• Share information: default to open
• State intention over asking permission
• Encourage open & constructive debate
• Encourage questioning authority
• Amplify weak signals
• Practise Non-Violent Communication
• Practise empathy
• Be conscious of, and manage, speaking time and share of voice in the group
• Always explain acronyms or unfamiliar terms

Inclusion Behaviours

• Ask for and use people’s pronouns, and sharing your own
• Remember people’s names
• Ask how to pronounce people’s names
• Practise pronunciation
• Be inclusive in decision making
• Try out different ways of meeting and communicating
• Adopt the Pac-Man Principle
• Schedule social events for work time so as to include carers and parents
• Provide opportunities and facilities for people to practise their religious observations
• Avoid alcohol being a focus of social events
• Ask for different perspectives and viewpoints
• Acknowledge our own privilege
• Think about “culture add” rather than “culture fit”
• Bring new people and ideas to the team
• Appreciate and thank people for big and small things
• Discuss and acknowledge different cultures, languages and backgrounds
• Use icebreakers and inclusive meeting practices (such as Lean Coffee)
• Build constructive structures over oppressive hierarchies
• Check the “power distance” in the group: the gap between those with most and least power
• Empower those with less power
• Chair meetings well, ideally by someone who isn’t the boss
• Ensure there are meeting protocols to enable speaking up 
• Surface, acknowledge and address unconscious biases
• Sit with silence, to give people time to think and plan what they want to say

Team Cohesion Behaviours

• Talk about psychological safety
• Use “we” instead of “they”
• Define your team’s values and write them down in a living document
• Set ground rules and define expectations of each other
• Take intentional breaks and allow time to relax and reflect
• Prioritise team success over individual success
• Avoid incentives that create individual competition within a team
• Create and maintain team rituals and ceremonies
• Intelligently structure teams to align with the work (i.e. observe Conway’s Law)
• Give credit for success (and also for effort, regardless of success)
• Be firm with negative or harmful behaviours in the group
• Create and encourage communities of practice and interest
• Laugh, joke, and play
• Be courteous and respectful
• Be punctual
• Avoid cliques and gossip
• Break down silos
• Build cross-functional teams
• Practise the Johari Window exercise
• Encourage broad skillsets as well as deep expertise
• Establish clear work boundaries of time and space (e.g. with Team Charters)
• Praise and value “glue” activities where team members help others succeed
• Hold dedicated time for 1-1 meetings
• Reward constructive, positive behaviours

Individual Behaviours

• Ask for help
• Share with other people the signs that you may be anxious, stressed, or tired
• Practice self-reflection
• Show humility
• Check your body language
• Manage your reactions when someone tells you bad news
• Eye contact is good, but bear in mind not everyone (particularly neurodiverse folks) is comfortable or capable of it.
• Get a coach
• Get a mentor
• Give people your full attention and don’t check your phone & email during conversations
• Resist defensiveness and the fight or flight response: remember to pause and reflect on what is said
• Treat people as they prefer to be treated (e.g. with personal user manuals)
• Show vulnerability
• Find time to read, or listen to audiobooks
• Write a journal
• Meditate
• Breathe

This list of behaviours has grown and evolved over years of practice, reflection and study. Special thanks go to the following (non-exhaustive and unordered) list of folks for highlighting constructive practices in their respective works: Amy Edmondson, Ed Schein, Dominica DeGrandis, Peter Drucker, Ruchika Tulshyan, Warren Bennis, Brene Brown, Stephen Covey, Tom Peter, Nora Jones, Clayton Christensen, Jim Collins, John Willis, Sharon Bowman, Patrick Lencioni, Vidya Heisel, John Cutler, Daniel Pink, Stephen Shedletzky, Gerald Weinberg, Tim Clark, John Kotter, Atul Gawande, Jeff Sutherland, Minette Norman and Karolin Helbig, David Marquet, Sidney Dekker, John Allspaw, Kim Scott, W E Deming, Patrick Lencioni, Eli Goldratt, Jim Whitehurst, Mary Parker Follett and more.

If you think of any more to add, let us know!

Psychological safety at work:

I love this piece in Fortune Magazine by Erin Grau: “Flexible work is feminist–and women won’t return to a system that hasn’t served them well to spare the feelings of powerful men”. Erin makes the rather disturbing but important point that women (and particularly women of color, LGBTQ+ women, and women with disabilities) benefit from remote and flexible working and experience greater psychological safety in part because they are less subject to microaggressions in the workplace. Also crucially, “…for opposite-sex couples with two wage earners, remote work supports gender equality at home by increasing a mother’s paid labor and increasing a father’s domestic labor.” 

Here’s a brilliant article in Nature: “In space, failure is an option — often the only one”. Sometimes I encounter objections to the idea that we must embrace the possibility of failure: that a marketing campaign, a product launch, a project, or an operation on a patient, might fail. What’s interesting is that the closer we get to huge endeavours where failure might be considered “not an option”, the more, in reality, it is. This article shows how even multi-billion dollar space projects are considered experiments to learn how to do it better next time. “Humans live in a culture in which it seems as if everything must go right the first time we try it, but that is not how successful products are developed, nor how science unfolds — especially in space.” 

This is awesome: a Problem Framing Canvas by Ingrid Burkett and the fantastic folks at the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation. As Ingrid says, “Too often we find ourselves in situations where people start brainstorming ideas or even falling in love with particular solutions before they’ve really made sense of the problem (or uncovered the multiple opportunities!).“

Here’s a great podcast episode from the Anaesthesia Patient Safety Podcast that dives into the triad of Safety Culture, Just Culture and Psychological Safety. Psychological safety is a necessary prerequisite and component of both safety cultures and Just Cultures.

And another fab healthcare podcast episode, this is the Mind Full Medic with Cheryl Martin talking to Amy Edmondson about psychological safety, local leadership and clinician wellbeing.

I love this illustration from Robert Ferraro. Not only do we learn more from practice than we do from theory, but we learn even more from mistakes. I also appreciate how Roberto shows that a good theoretical understanding is essential to practice, and both are essential for learning from mistakes.

“People Differ Widely in Their Understanding of Even a Simple Concept Such as the Word ‘Penguin'” – This is a fantastic piece in Scientific American examining how and why communicating is actually just really hard: even for such a simple word and concept as “penguin”, we still hold very different individual ideas about what that actually means.

Finally, last week I shared a management and leadership graphic I created a few years ago, and this week I found out that the amazing Elita Silva has translated it into Portuguese! 
 

This week’s poem:

“Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” by Mary Schmich


Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97
Wear sunscreen

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it
A long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists
Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable
Than my own meandering experience, I will dispense this advice now
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth, oh, never mind
You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth
Until they’ve faded, but trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back
At photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now
How much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked
You are not as fat as you imagine
Don’t worry about the future
Or worry, but know that worrying
Is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing Bubble gum
The real troubles in your life
Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind
The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday
Do one thing every day that scares you
Saying, don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts
Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours

Floss

Don’t waste your time on jealousy
Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind
The race is long and in the end, it’s only with yourself
Remember compliments you receive, forget the insults
If you succeed in doing this, tell me how
Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements

Stretch

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life
The most interesting people I know
Didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives
Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t
Get plenty of calcium
Be kind to your knees
You’ll miss them when they’re gone
Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t
Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t
Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the ‘Funky Chicken’
On your 75th wedding anniversary
Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much
Or berate yourself either
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s

Enjoy your body, use it every way you can
Don’t be afraid of it or what other people think of it
It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your own living room
Read the directions even if you don’t follow them
Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly
Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good
Be nice to your siblings, they’re your best link to your past
And the people most likely to stick with you in the future
Understand that friends come and go
But a precious few, who should hold on
Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle
For as the older you get
The more you need the people you knew when you were young
Live in New York City once but leave before it makes you hard
Live in northern California once but leave before it makes you soft

Travel

Accept certain inalienable truths
Prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too, will get old
And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young
Prices were reasonable, politicians were noble
And children respected their elders
Respect your elders
Don’t expect anyone else to support you
Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse
But you never know when either one might run out
Don’t mess too much with your hair
Or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85
Be careful whose advice you buy but be patient with those who supply it
Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past
From the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts
And recycling it for more than it’s worth

But trust me on the sunscreen

Best known as a spoken word song released in 1997 by Baz Luhrmann, “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)“, it was originally a hypothetical commencement speech in the Chicago Tribune in 1997 by Mary Schmich.