Team charters are a fantastic way of creating alignment, cohesion and psychological safety in a team. They also help to onboard new team members, and enable teams to work together more effectively. This Psychological Safety Practice Playbook Add-on for the […]
Create and Maintain
Psychological safety is “The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” (Edmondson, 1999) Also stated as “A belief that […]
“You should know that already.” “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” “Who’s to blame for this?” “We cannot get this wrong.” “There will be zero mistakes on this project.” *eye roll* “Don’t be so negative.” “You don’t need to […]
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 […]
How often do you find yourself anxious and afraid to start something in case you fail, in case you’re not doing it “right”, or in case it doesn’t have the result you expect? Psychological safety makes it safe to fail, […]
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 […]
After doing the psychological safety team performance exercise, you may want to workshop with your team to establish how you’re going to build psychological safety in the team. Whilst there are some standard and ubiquitous approaches to building psychological safety, […]
Psychological safety is an emergent phenomenon: a property and state of a group that is felt (differently) by members of the group. For this reason, it’s a difficult (but worthwhile) concept to study, and many efforts have been made to […]
Timothy R Clark in his book “The Four Stages Of Psychological Safety” describes a conceptual model of four “stages” of psychological safety that teams can move through, progressing from stage 1 to stage 4. These four stages are: This is […]
Retrospective exercises, when teams come together to discuss and discover what went well, what did not, and what lessons can be learned, are extremely powerful and are a fantastic way of building psychological safety. For example, Agile teams usually schedule […]
Most of us will be used to the idea of icebreakers that are used in meetings or group sessions where not all the participants know each other, and are a good way to increase the psychological safety of a team […]
Join the worldwide psychological safety community! Join 7,500 people reading the weekly Psychological Safety Newsletter! Arriving in your email inbox every week on a Friday (usually), it contains new, useful, insightful or controversial content all about psychological safety research, applications, […]
The Psychological Safety Quadrant Exercise This is a really powerful (and fun!) exercise to qualitatively measure psychological safety, team performance, and work collaboratively to increase both, via a workshop that can be carried out remotely or in-person. This is really […]
I get asked a lot if I can help out with presentation content for internal training, talks or similar, so here is a slide deck for a psychological safety presentation that I’ve delivered a number of times and you’re welcome […]
Meetings, whether in-person or virtual (or the worst kind – a hybrid of the two, where some attendees are together in a room, and the others are remote), are a fact of life for many of us. In fact, many […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
There are millions of things that you can, and must, do as a leader to build and maintain psychological safety in your teams. But it’s hard to remember millions of things, so here are three key points that will help […]
New and updated version 1.3 is now available, with extra content about transforming organisational culture, creating mentoring and coaching programs, and optimising for cognitive load. Workshops and Exercises Used by organisations all over the globe including Wholefoods Market, Ithaca, and […]
The tangible benefits of building psychological safety in your organisation range from improved innovation, better ideas, and products that thrill your customers, through to reduced risk of failures, breaches, and non-compliance.
Psychological Safety in the workplace is the belief that the environment is a safe place where you can take an interpersonal risk as a group. This means that the team can speak up, especially when there’s a problem present in […]