Psychological Safety

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 to use. Please attribute fairly. In addition to the slide decks below, the Psychological Safety…
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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 of us spend up to 90% of our working day in one kind of meeting…
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Trusting other people When building psychological safety in a team, or in any group context, it’s necessary to foster and maintain trust. Trust and psychological safety are sometimes confused with each other, and whilst they are related, trust is simply a component of psychological safety. Trust can be defined as the extent to which we…
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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 help to create psychological safety at work, and reap significant benefits for you, the team,…
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There are so many leadership books that propose to hold the key to unlocking team and organisational performance that it can be really difficult to decide which ones to actually read. To help you build psychological safety in your organisation, here is a carefully curated selection of books that highlight the importance of psychological safety…
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In early 2020, due to the Covid 19 outbreak, many organisations around the world went through a sudden digital transformation and many teams became remote. With this near-instant operational pivot to virtual and remote teams, organisations and the people within them encountered new and difficult challenges such as poor internet connectivity, inadequate home offices, and…
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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 be had through building psychological safety at work. Liu et al (2020) found a negative…
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On a recent Agile Engineering Podcast we discussed cognitive load and how it relates to psychological safety. Cognitive load is also a fundamental aspect of Team Topologies, affects the scale of the domain that a team works with. Cognitive Load Our human working memory, our capacity to learn and solve problems, is a system with limited capacity.…
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Do you want to improve psychological safety and performance in your teams? Are you facing significant challenges that require transformation to overcome? You can download the Psychological Safety Action Pack and put yourself in charge of driving the transformation, but if you would like some extra help in driving true organisational change, improving the performance…
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There’s not a great deal of research or writing available about psychological safety in the military, despite one of the best leadership books available – “Turn the Ship Around” by David Marquet, being about how he used empowering leadership and psychological safety to drastically improve the performance of the crew of the US Navy Submarine,…
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