A team is only as safe as the least safe person

When measuring the psychological safety in a team, we often are asked which measurement should be considered the “group measurement,” given that different individuals will likely experience rather different degrees of psychological safety. 

Our stance at Psych Safety is that we consider teams to only be as safe as the least safe person. 

What we often see, and challenge, is a team’s psychological safety being represented as the average (usually the mean) level of psychological safety among its members. This is particularly common when survey tools are used to measure, which use likert statements and present us with a set of metrics. It’s easy to take that data set and look at averages, but this is problematic. As an example, if we have a team of ten people, and nine of them feel very psychologically safe whilst one feels very unsafe, that average score will completely mask the outlier. The score will suggest the team is doing great, when in fact we have someone on the team who is suffering and feeling excluded. Not only does this suck for that person, but it’s a real risk to the integrity and performance of the team.

It’s fundamentally inaccurate to describe a team as psychologically safe if there are people on the team who do not feel safe. “If nine people walked across a bridge safely, and one fell over the side, we wouldn’t say that was safe.” – Eleanor Groat

Psychological safety is not a level playing field.

Only looking at the average stops us from investigating why one person may be feeling significantly less psychologically safe than others. Our work shows that steep power gradients are the primary contributor to low psychological safety in groups. That power may be formal or positional (as in a hierarchy), informal or social (as in social status in a group), demographic (as in race or gender), or expert (as in degree of expertise and experience). And these types of power are not necessarily independent of each other. We get into these power typologies in another piece, but for now, we simply need to acknowledge that significant imbalances in any of these power types usually result in lower levels of psychological safety.

Those who report feeling least psychologically safe on a team often tend to be those who are already minoritised, disadvantaged, or under-represented. Research suggests that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds speak up less and take fewer interpersonal risks than people from more affluent backgrounds, because the impact of failure on their role or career can be so much greater than people with a larger safety net. The same applies for people who already feel different in some way from the majority of the group, whether that’s because of their age, gender, physical ability, race, neurodivergence, sexuality, or myriad other things. 

In many ways, both perceived and real, some people have more to lose by speaking up than others.

Speaking up always involves some level of risk, but the stakes are higher for some than others. 

It can be hard for us to recognise that we might enjoy some speaking up privilege compared to others in the group, because it requires us to acknowledge something we’ve personally never had to consider. For example, if anyone says something that makes you think, ‘Oh, I’ve never had to worry about that,’ it’s a pretty good indicator that they’ve just highlighted a form of privilege that you didn’t realise you possessed. 

If we measure group psychological safety without considering the experiences and perception of the least safe people in the group, and the reasons why they’re feeling that way, we risk only improving it for those who are already somewhat privileged within the group.

Fostering psychological safety for everyone

Some aspects of power we may have no direct control over. Others we might only be able to influence in indirect ways over longer periods of time. But whatever the cause of them, we can always work to alleviate and mitigate the impact of steep power gradients on the people we work with. The first step is to acknowledge the impact that these power differentials have, and see things from the perspective of the person speaking against the power gradient. Then we can begin to put in place measures to address challenges they’re experiencing and ultimately, reduce the power gradient. 

For example, if someone is feeling less safe due to a high positional power gradient, we can, amongst other things, adapt the way teams are structured, refrain from using job titles and honorifics as ways to wield power, and address team members by their given names. We might also change the ways we conduct meetings with the team and bring in 15/5s to surface and address issues as they arise. 

Avoiding “the average trap”

Averages and metrics can obscure the experiences of individuals who feel unsafe, particularly those who are marginalised within the team or in society in general. Fostering psychological safety is a collective effort, and we’re all responsible for doing so. If you have time, and are inclined to do so, try the below:

• If measuring psychological safety, look for outliers as well as averages.
• Reflect on your own privileges and how others may not possess them to the same degree.
• Recognise and actively address power imbalances within your teams.
• Commit to practices that promote inclusion and open dialogue for everyone.

There are plenty of practical ideas in our big list of psychologically safe behaviours and our top ten ways to foster psychological safety which can help improve inclusion by fostering psychological safety for everyone on the team. 

Further Reading:

Measuring psychological safety

Before measuring psychological safety

KPMG Social Mobility Progression Report 2022

How to Run Psychologically Safe Meetings

Behaviours that foster psychological safety

Top ten ways to create psychological safety

Amplifying weak signals

Psychological Safety in Practice

Misunderstanding psychological safety

Juho Nenonen, one of our wonderful community members, wrote this fantastic piece “Misunderstood Psychological Safety – Why Defining Concepts Matters?”, inspired by our recent piece on the definition of psychological safety. Juho gets into why clear and effective definitions are important, and makes this excellent point: “Among researchers, there’s competition over whose definition is used—that is, who is the distinguished individual who has succeeded in defining a concept first. This competition also exists in the field of psychological safety, and partly for this reason, new definitions pop up like mushrooms after rain.”

Definitely worth a read (note, the article is in Finnish), and I want to thank Juho for mentioning Amy Edmondson referring to me as “the hardest working man in psychological safety.” 

Take risks and learn from failure

But you’ll still be punished if you fail….

Another great Work Chronicles cartoon about risk taking! Thanks Diana in the Psychological Safety Community for sharing this 🙂  

Self-reports vs implicit measures

This paper in Nature suggests that self-reports are most often a better measurement option than implicit measures. Implicit measures are popular in psychology, and aim to capture automatic, unconscious attitudes or reactions related to the team environment without directly asking individuals to reflect on these feelings. 

Self reports are maybe what we’re more familiar with in the realm of psycholgoical safety and ask questions such as “Imagine a situation where you have an idea that goes against the majority opinion in a meeting. How likely are you to share your idea?”. The authors of this paper suggest that self-reports can assess complex and nuanced experiences, and they require less technology than implicit measures, making them more accessible.

This week’s poem:

Extract from The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door—
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
               Only this and nothing more.”

Read the rest of The Raven here