The truth about psychological safety
“We have a psychological safety problem here” is something I often hear. Whether it’s coming from Directors who have heard it from teams, or employees sharing their views on the organisational culture with me. It’s a concept that is sticking around, but like all good buzzwords, somewhere along the way the meaning of it has been confused.
What is psychological safety? It exists when people feel their workplace is an environment where they can speak up, offer ideas and ask questions without fear of being punished or embarrassed. Candour, transparency, and learning from error is a psychological safety triad.
It is essential for communicating, collaborating, experimenting, and ensuring the wellbeing of others in a wide variety of team and organisational environments.
A few months ago, I was running workshops with a leadership team where this “we have a problem” came up. But it came up in the same conversations where people were sharing their enjoyment of some culture workshops where people spoke freely, regardless of hierarchy. Something wasn’t quite right.
Fast forward to this week, where I was running a workshop with the Executives in the same leadership team, and we did a deeper dive into what psychological safety is and what it gets confused with.
I thought it would be good to share that with you this week because I keep hearing it explained wrongly – just yesterday at an internal comms industry event, I heard someone on stage say “psychological safety has to be top-down” which is not true.
This is what I shared with the Executives this week. It’s the six misconceptions of psychological safety and it’s based on the content from this Harvard Business Review article from Michaela J. Kerrissey and Dr Amy Edmondson (Amy’s book The Fearless Organisation is also an excellent read if you want to learn more).
Misconception 1: It’s about being nice
Thinking that psychological safety is about being nice or feeling comfortable is one of the most common misconceptions. If people say “we have a psychological safe team here because we never argue”, they are confusing psychological safety with being nice or feeling comfortable.
An example in the article is of a grad student who asked to shift from in-person to virtual attendance because they found participating in a large class uncomfortable. This shift was needed, she said, because it was important for her psychological safety.
Safety and comfort are not synonymous. Safety is the condition of being protected from danger, harm, or injury. Comfort is a state of ease and freedom from pain.
Wanting to be nice, people avoid being honest and, whether they realise it or not, it’s part of the problem because it creates ignorance and mediocrity. Teams that don’t discuss the hard truths perform worse than those that do. When people withhold their ideas, questions, and doubts, their team’s risk of making mistakes and experiencing failure increases.
Nice is the easy way out of a difficult conversation. Kind is being respectful, caring, and honest.
Misconception 2: It means you get your own way
This is the misconception people have that psychological safety means their views should prevail. The article shares the story about an employee who had complained,
“You didn’t support my idea in that meeting, and that made me feel psychologically unsafe.”
That employee did not understand that psychological safety is about making sure leaders or teams hear what people think. It’s not about forcing them to agree with what they hear.
Leaders don’t need to agree with everyone’s input. And they shouldn’t tolerate problematic behaviour.
Misconception 3: It means job security
In 2023 Google announced it was laying off 12,000 employees, multiple workers posted on social media sites that the action was counter to their company’s commitment to psychological safety. In an all-company meeting, one employee said this out loud.
But psychological safety doesn’t mean freedom from redundancies. It’s freedom to be constructively candid.
Ironically, the employee demonstrated that psychological safety did exist at Google when they stood up and criticised the company to its senior leaders – and this is what I was hearing from my client about their culture workshops.
Misconception 4: It means there is a trade-off
Some people think there must be a trade-off between addressing weakness and assigning accountability. They can think of it on a spectrum with psychological safety on one end and accountability for performance on the other. But that’s wrong.
When both are low, performance and morale suffer. People hide information to save face or to be agreeable or both.
In any uncertain environment, high performance requires a commitment to both high standards and psychological safety. That is because psychological safety enables learning – it helps surface information and knowledge needed for competing in a changing world.
Misconception 5: It’s a policy
Please don’t write a policy. Psychological safety is built in a group, interaction by interaction. It takes intention and effort to create a climate of candour. We can’t mandate psychological safety any more than we can mandate things like trust and motivation.
Reports in the USA from 2024 show that attempts are being made to introduce the Workplace Psychological Safety Act. The Act sought to create psychologically safe work environments and enabled employees to sue their employer for damages if it didn’t (this has not got past the Senate).
Misconception 6: It’s a top-down approach
This is what I heard yesterday on the stage! I’m a big believer in the role of leadership in creating and sustaining culture – they are in positions of power and what they do matters. But psychological safety (and culture) is built by everyone, at every level.
Research shows that psychological safety varies substantially across groups, even when there is a strong corporate culture overall. This tells us that psychological safety is incredibly local.
In the workshop this week we discussed what to do when people use the phrase ‘psychological safety’ in line with any of these, and this was my advice:
- If employees are stating things don’t feel safe, ask them to share what they have seen or heard – you need them to share the context – explore what they mean by being curious and listening
- Remind them of what it is: Psychological safety is when we feel this is an environment where we can speak up, offer ideas and ask questions without fear of being punished or embarrassed – is this what happened?
- If appropriate gently correct that it isn’t about psychological safety, but perhaps a behavioural issue we need to address in the team. If they did experience this, the behaviour still needs to be addressed.
- You need to show up with empathy, integrity and supportiveness for everyone in the organisation, showing them that they can speak up and that you will listen.
Creating a psychologically safe organisation has to start with a sense of ‘we-ness’ – a belief that everyone is working together towards something meaningful. If that feeling isn’t there then it’s harder to create – and if you want to hear more on the importance of ‘we-ness’, check out this episode of the podcast Eat, Sleep, Work Repeat, which is where I found out about it!
If you want to explore a workshop with your team, let me know and we can chat about how to ensure behaviours are signalling trust and integrity for those you lead!
