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,
As much as Dunbar’s limits on group sizes might seem to be common sense, and reflected in many real world examples, Dunbar’s theories on group size boundaries have been deconstructed and shown to possess confidence intervals too large to be robust in the real world. That is, group size boundaries do exist, but may be anywhere from 30 to 250, depending on context, culture, and other factors.
Team Charters In a previous newsletter, we discussed “personal readmes” or “user manuals”. I’m a huge fan of personal readmes as a way to foster psychological safety and cohesion in a group. Through making explicit our own needs, desires, preferences and
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses 1-1 meetings, diversity, experiments, scrum masters and design principles. 1-1 Meetings Every great manager I’ve ever met adhered to a strong and principled practice of regular
Whether organisations like to admit it or not, toxic work culture is still a major problem. A study from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that any workplace, which holds some form of toxicity and hostility, will likely see
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses Inspiration (and mountain biking), more emissions scandals, speaking up, bullying at work, autonomy, work agreements, and measuring psychological safety in Japanese. If you enjoy reading this
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses sales teams, game theory and the Agile Prime Directive. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other people
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses making work visible, and rockstar employees. Making Work Visible Dominica DeGrandis is the author of the excellent book “Making Work Visible“. It’s a fantastic book, and covers
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You rock. This week includes cheerleading champions, it’s ok to not be ok, brainstorming, practices, Alan Alda, and failing.If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You rock. This week includes Neurodivergence, Google, Grout, Tigers and Elephants, Pre-Mortems, Equity, Accountability, Gendered Social Biases, and Cognitive Load.If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks
Happy New Year! Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You rock. This week includes WIERD people, Semantic Diffusion, bad bosses, fun, email negativity, Theranos, hidden conditions, neurodiversity and leadership, If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via
As a leader, or a member of a team, you’re probably pretty good at creating a psychologically safe environment where performance is high and people can flourish. Providing clarity of expectations, goals, team behaviours, and exhibiting generative leadership practices may
Why do you want to foster greater psychological safety in your organisation? To improve employee retention? To increase productivity? Reduce risk? Improve innovation? Or simply because it’s the right thing to do for people? I often talk about the business
Silence in a meeting can be a warning sign of very low psychological safety, but that’s not always, or even usually, the case. We all have our own, very different, preferences for how we speak up, contribute and communicate, especially
Introduction Thanks for subscribing to the psychological safety newsletter! This week we have a load of great pieces on education, health and medicine, the work environment and more. Issue #7 is brought to you by Attuned. Attuned fills the holes in
The Psychological Safety Quadrant Exercise This is a really powerful (and fun!) exercise that helps participants learn and understand psychological safety, as well as an opportunity to qualitatively measure psychological safety, and can be carried out remotely or in-person. We’ve
Introduction Thanks for subscribing to the psychological safety newsletter! I find it really encouraging and exciting that so many people around the world and in all types and sizes of organisations are working towards creating great, psychologically safe cultures. You
News and opinion: This is an excellent article by Jonathan Smart (of “Sooner, Safer, Happier”) about the Boeing 737 Max issues and how they stemmed from a lack of psychological safety at all levels of the organisation: https://itrevolution.com/lack-of-psychological-safety-at-boeing/ Leadership lessons in psychological
Trust is Not the Same as Psychological Safety First published November 2020. Rewritten June 2026. There is sometimes a tendency to use “trust” and “psychological safety” interchangeably, and the habit causes more trouble than we might think. The two are
Creating psychological safety at work, in your team or in your organisation may seem like a very daunting task, and it can be hard to know where to start. Here are ten things you can do right now that will
The Psychological Safety Book Club Updated November 2025. We love nothing more than reading fantastic books that help us to understand (and explain) concepts around psychological safety even better. The list below includes many of our current favourite books about
Psychological safety is created through shared values and positive behaviours, where a culture of trusting, helping, and elevating means that all members of the team can work productively and be their true selves, without fear. There are great benefits to
Do you want to improve psychological safety and performance in your teams? Are you facing significant challenges that require transformation to overcome? You can download the Psychological Safety Action Pack and put yourself in charge of driving the transformation, but
There’s not a great deal of research or writing available about psychological safety in the military, despite one of the best leadership books available – “Turn the Ship Around” by David Marquet, being about how he used empowering leadership and
It’s a long and worthwhile journey to build high levels of psychological safety in your organisation, and much of the hard work involves excellent leadership, clarity of direction, effective support, vulnerability, curiosity and much more. However there are some simple
