What is Psychological Safety? And How Can You Create it?

If you’re a leader looking at understanding the culture of your business, Psychological Safety is a?vital?building block for you to think about. The issue is, so many businesses take this for granted. They assume if their workplace is ‘reasonably healthy’ then psychological safety will come naturally. However this sadly is not the case, and it takes a lot of work to ensure a psychologically safe workplace.

Firstly, what is Psychological Safety?

In it’s simplest form, for me, it’s having the confidence to know that honesty, and vulnerability are ok at work. You can have a voice, and you can fail. You don’t think twice about admitting to errors, or contributing ideas, or being candid with someone, it just feels right.

Why is it important?

This isn’t just about ‘being nice’ to each other. Many leaders will look at this and dismiss it as a fluffy, ‘mollycoddling’ topic. Yes an element of this is about helping people feel comfortable and confident at work, but the biggest benefit of creating this is?performance.?People who feel psychologically safe share more ideas, contribute more, participate more; solutions are found faster, people don’t sit on failures, giving you a chance to learn and improve way quicker. So if you’re a leader, or have a leader who is perhaps dismissive of this topic, focus on performance as the outcome. I guarantee you’ll see benefits.

So how can leaders create that at work?

What I want to avoid here is just spewing out some generic lines about how you need to ‘give people a voice’… ‘encourage people to come to you’… ‘have an open door policy’.

Frankly, these bits of advice do nothing for me. This is all very well but?how?do you actually make this happen? For me it boils down to behaviours, and if you focus on talking about specific behaviours that you can show, that will help you understand exactly what you need to do to encourage people to come to you, to have a voice. So lets talk behaviours.

This isn’t exhaustive, but just a couple of pointers from me that I think will set leaders on the right path to building a psychologically safe environment.

Be Vulnerable

Actions speak louder than words. So I want to show you what to do, not what to say. As a leader myself I’ve fallen foul of telling people the above things before. “We have an open door policy, please come to me etc”. It doesnt work. If you want people to trust you, you must trust them first, and it starts with you being vulnerable, something I’ve written about?before .

• Share your failures, regularly.
• Get personal. Don’t just get to know your team, tell them about you. Your flaws, your fears, your anxieties. Trust them. You’ll get it back.
• Take the blame. Don’t find ways of pushing it on other things. Understand how you may have contributed to something not working, and admit your involvement in that. Show people that it’s ok to fail, it’s ok to be self aware.

Design Meetings Carefully

We all been there in meetings where the same people take over conversations and speak up. It’s not conducive to high-performance cultures. The quiet, thoughtful ones are often the ones you want to hear from, but speaking up doesn’t come naturally. So show them it’s ok to input, show them you value their opinion

• Take turns- Depending on meeting size, make sure you give everyone a chance to input, but don’t just throw it out there, take control, and go round each person for their opinion. And leave the loudest, usual suspects until last. Start with the silent ones.
• Mix up size- Introverts can be very intimidated in larger groups. That makes them no less important re: their ideas and input. And you could be missing out on so much by letting this pass by. Consider running smaller group meetings, or taking the time to connect 1:1 with individuals who you know are quieter to get their inputs on a topic privately. Show them you value them, and want that input. Over time, they’ll come to you more, and might even speak up more in meetings if they have that confidence of knowing you’ve come to them privately on previous occasions.

Only a few ideas here, but the general point is, words are not enough to create psychological safety. I’ve learned that myself. Trust works both ways, and you need to take the lead as a leader. You go first. Open up, share, be self-aware, oh and don’t take yourself too seriously. It will help people worry less about saying ‘not sure if this is a stupid idea or not…but…’