Leadership And Managing People

What Is
by Amy Gallo
Psychological Safety?
February 15, 2023

Thomas Macpherson/Getty Images

Summary. What exactly is psychological safety? It’s a term that’s used a lot but is
often misunderstood. In this piece, the author answers the following questions
with input from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined
the phrase “team... more

No one likes to deliver bad news to their boss. But that’s exactly
what I had to do when a project I’d been working on wasn’t
delivering the results we expected. I’d been a big advocate for our
team taking on the initiative and, personally, I’d invested a lot of
time into it — and convinced others to do the same.
When I met with my manager to present the data, which showed
that we hadn’t recouped our investment and the initiative had
performed worse than planned, I was nervous. I would’ve
understood if she had been frustrated or even angry and I
expected her to at least ask “What went wrong?” or “How could we
have prevented this?” (both questions I’d prepared answers for).

Instead, she asked a simple question: What did you learn?

I now understand that what she was doing was building

psychological safety. She understood that learning was key — my
(and her team’s) future performance depended on it.
Psychological safety is a critical concept for teams and the people
that lead them. It’s also a topic we’ve covered quite a bit at HBR.
But not everyone knows or fully understands it, so I reached out
to Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor and
author of The Fearless Organization, who coined the phrase “team
psychological safety,” to get a refresher on this important idea. I
asked her about where the term originated, how it’s evolved, and,
of course, how people can think about building psychological
safety on their own teams.

What is psychological safety?

Let’s start with a definition. Team psychological safety is a shared
belief held by members of a team that it’s OK to take risks, to
express their ideas and concerns, to speak up with questions, and
to admit mistakes — all without fear of negative consequences. As
Edmondson puts it, “it’s felt permission for candor.”

Edmondson first landed on the concept when she was doing

research for her PhD. She had set out to study the relationship
between error making and teamwork in hospitals, expecting to
find that more effective teams made fewer mistakes. But what she
found was that the teams who reported better teamwork seemed
to experience more errors. When she dug into the data, she began
to suspect that better teams might be more willing to report their
mistakes – because they felt safe doing so – and conducted follow
up research to explore that hypothesis.

The “team” in team psychological safety is important. “This is a

group level phenomenon — it shapes the learning behavior of the
group and in turn affects team performance and therefore
organizational performance,” she says. As Edmondson explained
to me, the sense of safety and willingness to speak up is not an
individual trait, even though it’s something you do feel and
experience at the individual level; “it’s an emergent property of
the group.” In fact, in most studies, people who work closely
together have similar levels of psychological safety compared to
people in other teams.

Why is psychological safety important?

First, psychological safety leads to team members feeling more
engaged and motivated, because they feel that their contributions
matter and that they’re able to speak up without fear of
retribution. Second, it can lead to better decision-making, as
people feel more comfortable voicing their opinions and
concerns, which often leads to a more diverse range of
perspectives being heard and considered. Third, it can foster a
culture of continuous learning and improvement, as team
members feel comfortable sharing their mistakes and learning
from them. (This is what my boss was doing in the opening story.)

All of these benefits — the impact on a team’s performance,

innovation, creativity, resilience, and learning — have been
proven in research over the years, most notably in Edmondson’s
original research and in a study done at Google. That research,
known as Project Aristotle, aimed to understand the factors that
impacted team effectiveness across Google. Using over 30
statistical models and hundreds of variables, that project
concluded that who was on a team mattered less than how the
team worked together. And the most important factor was
psychological safety.
Further research has shown the incredible downsides of not
having psychological safety, including negative impacts on
employee well-being, including stress, burnout, and turnover, as
well as on the overall performance of the organization.

How has the idea evolved?

I asked Edmondson how the idea has changed in the 20 years
since she first starting writing about it. Academics have
discovered some important nuances. For example, she points out
that psychological safety seems to matter more in work
environments where employees need to use their discretion. As
she explains, “The relationship between psychological safety and
performance is stronger in situations where the results or work
aren’t prescribed, when you’re doing something creative, novel, or
truly collaborative.” She has also written about how hybrid work
requires that managers expand how they think about
psychological safety.

She and others have also been looking at how psychological safety
interacts with diversity on teams. New research by Edmondson
and Henrik Bresman, a professor of organizational behavior at
INSEAD, has shown that on teams with high psychological safety,
expertise diversity was positively associated with performance.
While their study is a single one in a single industry (drug
development), it’s an important proof point “that psychological
safety may be the key to realizing the promise of diversity in
teams.”

How do you know if your team has it?

This is likely the question on many leaders’ minds. Edmondson
has developed a simple 7-item questionnaire to assess the
perception of psychological safety (if you want to run this survey
with your team, there’s an instrument you can sign up to use on
Edmondson’s website).

How people answer these questions will give you a sense of the
degree to which they feel psychologically safe:

1. If you make a mistake on this team, it is not held against you.

2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough
issues.
3. People on this team sometimes accept others for being
different.
4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.
5. It isn’t difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that
undermines my efforts.
7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and
talents are valued and utilized.

Edmondson cautions however that the scores are not definitive;

what matters is the variance. “Anyone filling out a survey is doing
so in a way that is relative to their expectations,” she says. “For
example, if I say ‘yes, I can ask for help’ I’m doing that relative to
what I think it ‘ought’ to be.” She suggests managers use the data
from the survey to reflect on your team’s experience and be
curious about what you could change to improve that experience.
Which leads to another critical question: what can you do to foster
psychological safety?

How do you create psychological safety?

Edmondson is quick to point out that “it’s more magic than
science” and it’s important for managers to remember this is “a
climate that we co-create, sometimes in mysterious ways.”

Anyone who has worked on a team marked by silence and the

inability to speak up, knows how hard it is to reverse that.

A lot of what goes into creating a psychologically safe

environment are good management practices — things like
establishing clear norms and expectations so there is a sense of
predictability and fairness; encouraging open communication
and actively listening to employees; making sure team members
feel supported; and showing appreciation and humility when
people do speak up.
There are a few additional tactics that Edmondson points to as
well.

Make clear why employees’ voices matter.

For most people, it feels safe to hold back and stay silent — they
default to keeping their ideas and opinions to themselves. “You
have to override that instinct by setting the stage for them to
speak up,” she says. Explain clearly and specifically why you need
to hear from them, why their viewpoint and input matters, and
how it will affect the outcomes of the work.

Admit your own fallibility.

If you, as a leader, can own up to and demonstrate how you’ve
learned from your mistakes, it paves the way for others. It’s
important to model the behavior you want to see in your team and
normalize vulnerability. This includes things like being
respectful, open to feedback, and willing to take risks.

Actively invite input.

Don’t assume people will tell you what they’re thinking or that
they understand that you want their input. “Explicitly request it,”
says Edmondson. She suggests asking open-ended questions like:
What are you seeing? What are your thoughts on this? Where do
you stand on this idea?

Respond productively.
You can tell people you want their input or it’s OK to make
mistakes, but they won’t do those things if they feel like they’re
being blamed or shut down. Edmondson suggests asking yourself:
When people speak up with a wacky idea or tough feedback, how
do you respond? Be “appreciative and forward-thinking.” Also,
replace blame with curiosity. As author and coach Laura
Delizonna writes, “If team members sense that you’re trying to
blame them for something, you become their saber-toothed
tiger… The alternative to blame is curiosity. If you believe you
already know what the other person is thinking, then you’re not
ready to have a conversation. Instead, adopt a learning mindset,
knowing you don’t have all the facts.”

What are common misconceptions?

I also asked Edmondson if there are any myths or misconceptions
about psychological safety and she pointed to two.

“It’s all about being nice.”

Edmondson says that creating a psychologically safe environment
isn’t about being “nice.” In fact, there are many polite workplaces
that don’t have psychological safety because there’s no candor,
and people feel silenced by the enforced politeness.
“Unfortunately, at work, nice is often synonymous with not being
candid.”

“You must feel comfortable in a psychologically safe

environment.”
“Too many people think that it’s about feeling comfortable all the
time and that you can’t say anything that makes someone else
uncomfortable or you’re violating psychological safety,” says
Edmondson. That’s simply not true. Learning and messing up
and pointing out mistakes is usually uncomfortable. Being
vulnerable will feel risky. The key is to take risks in a safe
environment – one without negative interpersonal consequences.
“Anything hard to achieve requires being uncomfortable along
the way.” She shares the analogy of an Olympic gymnast. In her
training, she pushes herself and her body; she takes risks but does
so in a way that she won’t get injured. Edmondson reminds us,
“Candor is hard but non-candor is worse.”

...

My boss’s simple response when I came to her feeling defeated

has had a huge impact on me. That one question — What did you
learn? — changed the way that I view my own missteps — with
more compassion and understanding — and how I treat others
when they make mistakes. As my experience shows, by making
psychological safety a priority, leaders set up their teams for
success now and long into the future.

Amy Gallo is a contributing editor at Harvard

Business Review, cohost of the Women at Work
podcast, and the author of two books: Getting
Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult
People) and the HBR Guide to Dealing with
Conflict. She writes and speaks about workplace
dynamics. Watch her TEDx talk on conflict and
follow her on LinkedIn.

 @amyegallo