The Organisational Fabric of Psychological Safety

(AKA psychological safety is more than just a team phenomenon)

By Tom Geraghty

When we talk about psychological safety, the definition we usually use is something along the lines of “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” That definition is rooted in the original research context (teams of people) and it’s entirely valid. But in practice, we need to expand our thinking. Psychological safety isn’t only a team phenomenon. It’s a group phenomenon.

After all, at a very simple level, a team is just a group with a shared goal. It’s nonsensical to imagine that psychological safety applies to teams but doesn’t apply to other types of groups such as committees, paired peers, communities of practice or even groups of family or friends. Any context in which people come together to collaborate, communicate, or interact in any way is a context in which psychological safety can exist, or be absent.

Isolated High Performing Bubbles

There are countless articles and books about creating and maintaining high performing teams, underpinned by the (slightly simplistic) rationale that if each team in an organisation is psychologically safe and high-performing, the organisation will thrive. However, organisations comprise more than just a lot of high-performing team bubbles. Teams are rarely singular, static, isolated ‘units of performance’ in organisations: in practice, teams constantly interact with other people and groups throughout the organisation, and they’re often fluid in their membership too. When we work with teams on developing team charters, often one of the most surprisingly challenging questions is “Who’s in the team?”

And sometimes, a too-narrow focus on ‘the team’ actually undermines the smooth operating of the whole organisation. It can create unintended friction, where we optimise pockets of the organisation without understanding how they rub up against each other. For instance, a higher-performing marketing team might generate more demand than the sales, customer service, or delivery teams can handle (we’ve covered this previously in our Theory of Constraints piece). The same dynamics apply in healthcare, manufacturing, tech, and virtually every complex domain. Localised excellence doesn’t scale well without coordination and alignment between groups. And that coordination is deeply dependent on the level of psychological safety felt when those groups interact.

“The performance of a system doesn’t depend on how the parts perform taken separately, it depends on how they perform together – how they interact, not on how they act, taken separately. Therefore, when you improve the performance of a part of a system taken separately, you can destroy the system.“
— Russ Ackoff

At both a team level and an organisation level, it’s worth taking a step back and focusing less on the components of a system (in this case, the teams), and more on the interactions between components. This includes the interactions between teams and indeed between individuals and groups of people across (and even beyond) the organisation.

The Fallacy of Organisation-Wide Psychological Safety

Despite the lack of writing and research around psychological safety beyond the unit of ‘the team’, we often hear about attempts to measure psychological safety “across the organisation”, and arguably this is a core failing of more than one academic paper on psychological safety, such as this one.

In fairness, it is tempting to summarise psychological safety at a high level and demonstrate some high-level organisational metric. However, it’s questionable how useful or valid that measure actually is. Psychological safety exists in lived experience: at the point where people interact. We can’t really say that a 10,000-person organisation is or isn’t psychologically safe. The survey questions used become somewhat abstract and meaningless at this scale – for instance, we very rarely, if ever, address every single person in an organisation, so if asked about our perceived cost of (for example) admitting a mistake ‘in the organisation’, what are we actually drawing on to answer? The perceived cost of publicly admitting a mistake in front of all 10,000 people in the organisation (likely very high, but also, thankfully, a fairly unlikely situation!), the perceived cost of admitting a mistake to the senior leadership team, the perceived cost of admitting a mistake to the people we actually work with day-to-day, or something else altogether? The lack of clarity in what’s being asked makes the answer at best arbitrary, at worst completely invalid. 

However, instead of fixating on measurement, we can focus on improving the quality of interactions between groups. Much of the dysfunction in organisations stems not from within teams, but from the frictions between the mismatched expectations and mental models, misaligned goals, unclear norms, or a lack of trust and understanding between different teams and different groups of people.

To make this explicit: when two teams come together to collaborate, hand over work, or align on plans, they comprise a group. And that group, temporary as it might be, possesses a degree of psychological safety. We can work on this.

Fostering Psychological Safety Across the Organisation 

The vast majority of the narrative on psychological safety focuses primarily at the team unit level, so what can we do to foster psychological safety between teams and across groups?

Here are a few practical, powerful tools, many of which we’ve already shared, but I’m collating here in one place:

1. Agree on Organisational Ways of Working

Beyond team-specific norms, organisations can create broad, cross-cutting agreements about how teams work together. These might include value statements, shared practices around communication, meeting cadences, handoffs, or escalation paths. While they’ll necessarily be more generic because they apply across the organisation, they can help set the tone for respectful, effective collaboration across team boundaries. These can still be interpreted and applied in ways that suit the local context of the different teams – they should be seen as enabling constraints, rather than restrictions.

2. Reduce Power Gradients

Ditch job titles, grades and levels in introductions wherever they happen across the organisation. Instead of “Hi, I’m Jane, the Chief Finance Officer,” try “Hi, I’m Jane, I do finance.” Explain what you do, not where you sit in the hierarchy. This helps flatten the power gradient and puts the focus on the humans doing the work, rather than their status.

3. Foster Interpersonal Understanding

Psychological safety is improved when people know and understand each other. So finding ways for people across different teams to spend more time together can help foster psychological safety. Things like short-term placements, shared low-stakes projects, or Communities of Practice that span departments all contribute to inter-team psychological safety. These interactions help people understand each other’s contexts, work, challenges, and ways of thinking before they need to deliver something critical together.

Informal socialising can help too, but try to make these opportunities an inclusive part of the work day where possible: after-hours events can exclude people with caregiving or parenting responsibilities, and alcohol-centred events can alienate those who don’t drink alcohol. 

4. Create and Share Team Charters and Social Contracts

Creating a team charter or social contract helps define how a team works, what they value, how they make decisions, and what they need from or provide to others. These are great for alignment, onboarding, and performance, and are fantastic ways to build greater coherence and psychological safety in teams – but they become even more valuable when shared with other teams.

Team charters make the implicit, explicit. And sharing your team’s charter helps other groups understand your team’s context, needs, and constraints. It surfaces assumptions. (“Oh, we didn’t realise you needed that information before you could start,” or “we didn’t know you were juggling conflicting priorities.”) These revelations can transform collaboration between teams by creating a much more predictable and psychologically safe space when people from different teams come together.

5. Develop Team APIs

Some teams go even further, turning their charters into something called a “Team API.” Borrowing the API concept from software (API stands for “Accessible Programmable Interface”), a team API defines the inputs and outputs of working with a team: it’s a way of describing different aspects related to team ownership, communication preferences, practices, and principles. What information is needed to make a request? What’s the expected response? What’s the preferred channel? How long might a request take to respond to?

A network of team APIs across an organisation can build clarity, predictability, and trust into cross-team interactions, all of which foster greater psychological safety when people from different teams interact.

6. Improve Handoffs or Handovers

One of the biggest pain points in cross-team work is poor handoffs and handovers of work. Clarifying and agreeing expectations around what’s required for an effective handoff (of work, information, or a patient, for example) improves both the handoff, and psychological safety by, again, making ways of working explicit and mutually understood.

7. Facilitate Inter-Team Meetings

Structured meeting formats like Lean Coffee can help when teams collaborate together. Lean Coffee creates a flatter, democratised space for discussion and decision-making, and helps to reduce power gradients. However, be mindful of team size differences: if one team is much larger, collectively they have a greater share of the vote on topics, so you could consider weighting votes in inverse proportion to team size to ensure greater equity.

We can also use a “spectrum of participation” to set expectations when different teams or groups meet. Are we here to be informed of a decision? To help shape a solution? To co-create from scratch? Clarity about the purpose of the space fosters greater psychological safety.

The communication fabric of an organisation

Although much of the academic research into psychological safety focuses on teams, psychological safety is, at its heart, a group phenomenon. Psychological safety exists (or doesn’t) in every interaction and in every group where people are required to take interpersonal risks. 

Building psychological safety across an organisation requires more than just nurturing high performing bubbles of teams in isolation. It also requires weaving an organisational fabric, creating the foundational substrate of psychological safety through tools, practices, norms and structures that support clarity and collaboration between groups and across the organisation.

Further reading

• Theory of Constraints
• Definition of psychological safety
• Team Charters
• Team APIs
• Reducing power gradients
• Lean Coffee
• Spectra of Participation

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Psychological Safety in Practice

Models, models everywhere

Here’s a great piece from Lorin Hochstein on the utility and wrongness of models (related to our recent piece on “some models are harmful“): “There’s no way we can build complete models of people’s mental models, or generate complete descriptions of how they do their work. But that’s ok. Because, like the models in formal methods, the goal is not completeness, but insight.” 

Stories

“Stories aren’t just fillers or decorations, they’re bridges between ideas and action, between individuals and shared purpose. Knowing when to tell them requires listening, empathy, and an awareness of the situation. A great story, told at the right moment, can move people in ways no spreadsheet or bullet point ever could.“

There’s a reason we use so many stories in our training and workshops – this excellent piece by Mike Fisher explores the transformative power of storytelling, using historical and practical examples to illustrate its role in connecting people and conveying complex ideas.

Psychological Safety in Large Scale Agile teams

This study in the Journal of Software Evolution and Progress explores how strengthening interpersonal dynamics can boost performance in large-scale agile (LSA) teams. The research shows that high-quality relationships built on shared goals, knowledge, and mutual respect create a safe environment for team members to openly discuss and learn from failures. They show that in this context at least, psychological safety not only fosters continuous learning (in particular from failures) but also drives better team performance. 

The Four Stages of Psychological Safety

We’ve written about the Four Stages model a number of times, and mention it here in “all models are wrong and some are harmful“. Community member Romy Alexandra shared this excellent LinkedIn article about why she’s no longer using The Four Stages model either.