At its core, team psychological safety is a shared belief that you can take interpersonal risks on a team. This means being able to voice ideas and concerns — and not be punished, ridiculed or rejected for doing so. It also means that when you feel vulnerable at work, others will rally around to support you instead of putting you down. Psychological safety means that you can be yourself.
As Dr. Amy Edmondson, who coined the term puts it, team psychological safety is “felt permission for candor.” Though, without explicit leadership actions, candor can be tough to initiate or get rewarded. In fact, a more persuasive argument likely exists to withdraw and withhold ideas at work. Which might be a losing proposition for everyone involved.
So, why is it helpful to create a team culture where risks can be taken? Google conducted a comprehensive two-year study on team performance and found that their highest-performing teams had one thing in common – psychological safety. Yet a McKinsey survey conducted during the pandemic confirms “that only a handful of business leaders often demonstrate the positive behaviors that can instill this climate, termed psychological safety, in their workforce.” It’s not that the case for safety is not convincing, it’s that leaders are often not supported and trained to do something with it.
Good news is that significant studies are now available to indicate specific steps that can help leaders create this team climate. This needs education, awareness and a safe space for team leaders to practice and ask necessary questions.
Here are practical and research-driven ways to make team psychological safety training more successful and useful for team leaders. This helps to approach safety from several actionable perspectives.
Practice Empathy and Empathetic Responses
Empathy is a powerful way to begin the conversation. It’s also not a new thought. Most leaders though are not as good at this crucial skill and can feel awkward and resistant. For them, empathy may sit too far out from their comfort zones. Without empathy, teams retreat into protectiveness and lack of candor which lowers courage and subdues concerns and risks. Empathy is imperative to safety – and team outcomes.
What can make this pragmatic and less daunting is to offer specific and outcome-based communication skills. Including dispelling myths around empathy leading to excessive vulnerability or lack of boundaries at work. Teach leaders how to reflect feelings and acknowledge adversity, hurt or failure. This can include how to expand one’s emotional vocabulary (identifying names of emotions) and raising emotional self-awareness in a safe and non-judgemental learning space. Leaders can also benefit from learning techniques to listen deeply, create pauses and ask questions to step into empathy and not indifference.
Learn to Lead With Inclusion and Belonging
While this deserves a dedicated workshop, inclusion is a key aspect of leadership training. Inclusive practices help leaders activate team diversity, so more people can safely bring their differences to work. This is important because research clearly shows differences being a hindrance than an opportunity when diversity exists but not psychological safety. Which makes team diversity backfire, lowering satisfaction and performance.
A clear differentiator to diverse teams and their performance turns out to be a climate of psychological safety. Which allows differences to elevate team communication. Consider practices such as role modelling respect for differences, acknowledging diversity as a team strength, interrupting biases, staying respectful in disagreements and ensuring fair and transparent processes. These in turn can contribute to confident participation, better ideas, collaboration and robust decisions.
Encourage Consultative and Supportive Leadership
According to recent research by McKinsey, the benefits of psychological safety are well established. By developing specific skills, leaders can create a safer and higher-performance work environment more effectively. The survey finds that “team leaders’ authoritative-leadership behaviors are detrimental to psychological safety, while consultative- and supportive-leadership behaviors promote psychological safety.”
Consider the behaviors leaders would exhibit when they were being consultive. Such as, holding open dialogue with team members, soliciting input and considering the team’s views on issues that affect them. “The study says, supportive leadership has an indirect, but still significant, effect on psychological safety by helping to create a positive team climate. This may involve leaders demonstrating concern and support for team members not only as employees but also as individuals.”
Offer Respectful and Actionable Feedback
Feedback is a crucial aspect of psychologically safe communication, given it often happens under adverse circumstances. Team behaviors can deteriorate when leaders either miss poor behavior or notice it but don’t take any action. Leaders can shy away from giving difficult feedback because of discomfort and possible confrontation. This enables those who prefer to push boundaries or don’t realize their impact on others’ sense of psychological safety at work.
Offering candid and respectful feedback is not so much about courage, but technique. When leaders learn science-backed approaches to feedback, it can considerably lower resistance. For example, giving heads up that feedback is coming which encourages participation rather than push back. Plus making feedback respectful, fair and specific while outlining the impact of the person’s behavior or decisions. Which creates a case for change and improvement.
Training managers can design this training based on helpful aspects of what creates psychological safety on teams. And when team leaders hear how their actions, communication and decisions affect people’s sense of inclusion and safety, they may see their own behaviors in a new light.
