What’s the level of psychological safety in your team and organization?

As I am developing a series of assessments tools and discussion starters for building even stronger teams and organizations, I would like to share this one the level of psychological safety in your team and organization.

It’s a simple exercise where you can use the assessment (see image) to rate your organization on each of the five questions on a 1-6 scale for which 6 is the “best”.?The total score (5 to 30) indicates the level of psychological safety within your organization

Here are the questions and issues I use to sense the level of psychological safety. Feel free to comment and add more to these as this is still work in progress and it’s only good to learn together, right?

Understanding, priority:

To which extent has your organization made psychological safety an explicit priority and created a language, common understanding around this?

Fear:

To which extent is intimidation or maybe even fear seen as a leadership approach/tactic in your organization?

Speak your mind, feedback:

At meetings, can you and your colleagues speak your minds freely? If the others don’t like your input, do you get constructive feedback and if they like it, do they tell you so?

Dealing with failure:

How well do your leaders and thus your organization deal with failure? We don’t talk about outright incompetence, but honest mistakes, things that did just not work out despite proper intentions and efforts

Know it all or learn it all:

Are your leaders, superiors more like “I know it all” or “I listen and want to learn more” types of people?

What’s the score for your team and for your organization? What can you do to improve this? That’s the starting point and key question to move forward on.

Here are two similar assessment tools and exercises on the fixed versus growth mindset and having fun and being happy at work.

Get in touch if we should develop some assessment tools and exercises for your team and organization. That could be interesting and fun to do!