How to Create Psychological Safety in Your Team

Have you ever felt nervous to share an idea in your team because you weren’t sure how it would go over? That willingness to bring up new strategies in a group setting because you feel comfortable that your peers will receive them openly is called psychological safety – and it’s critical to team performance (Edmondson, 1999). Teams with high levels of psychological safety learn better, communicate better, innovate better, and show healthier interpersonal team behaviours.

So what do teams demonstrate to encourage psychologically safe spaces? Research shows us they have five things in common:

People in the team have an openness to learning and a proactive posture to lean into that.
Leaders are inclusive, treating status and hierarchy appropriately, and focus on collective goals.
The team is designed for interdependence with clear roles and structure to facilitate that mutual reliance.
A supportive climate exists where group and organisational norms establish shared expectations, with policies and resources to reinforce the culture.
Members within the team demonstrate intentionality to building relationships and reinforcing positive psychological safety.

What gets in the way?

Likewise, there are specific patterns or habits that prevent psychological safety. Actively addressing these will help enable your team to increase that shared sense of willingness to speak up without risk of embarrassment:

Organisational silence: a culture that inhibits the ability to speak up, often driven by leader reactions to someone voicing unpopular feedback.
Power imbalances fuelled by hierarchy that increases boundaries.
Fear of the loss of career trajectory, or loss of support from peers and supervisors.
Team composition: the more diverse a team is, the harder it is to build psychological safety due to the variance in experience and backgrounds. While diversity is great for the breadth of ideas, it can disrupt effective communication.

The role of leaders

One of the keys to overcoming these barriers is the impact of leaders working across all four to proactively support their teams and reduce the negative impacts. Leaders shape culture to reduce silence, minimise power imbalance, and mitigate fear. Leaders can implement strategies to resolve the complexities of a diverse team to gain the benefits and mitigate the challenges through open communication and encouraging collaboration.

Questions worth sitting with

How does your team rate when you consider the positive factors of a psychologically safe team and one that wrestles with the barriers? What might you need to do differently to create an environment that encourages people to speak up, take a risk, and let their voice be heard?

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999