Building a Culture of Psychological Safety

Episode #349 Building a Culture of Psychological Safety

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTRACT vs. PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY

A couple of weeks ago we produced an episode exploring the impact of the psychological contract—Ep.347: How to Wildly Exceed Your People’s Expectations. On the back of that episode, I received several emails and DMs asking me why I didn’t address the subject of psychological safety.

The psychological contract is a very different concept to psychological safety. So of course, I dutifully went to the back catalogue look for an episode about Psychological Safety that I could refer people to.

To my amazement, in 350-odd episodes of No Bullsh!t Leadership, we’ve never produced an episode dedicated to psychological safety. Of course, I’ve mentioned it in passing several times, but I’ve never explained in detail what it is, and why it’s such a critical part of a high-performance culture.

Only a few days later, I was browsing through this month’s Harvard Business Review and I came across an article by the pioneer of Psychological Safety, Amy Edmondson.

I figured the universe was telling me that it was time to produce an episode to address this much misunderstood concept. This feels a little bit to me like one of my Myth Buster episodes, as I debunk some of the commonly held misconceptions about Psychological Safety.

I start by exposing some of the commonly held myths; I then provide some recalibration, courtesy of the recent Amy Edmondson article; and I leave you with one thing that you can do to get maximum traction in your quest to build a culture of Psychological Safety.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY IS PRONE TO MISUSE

The term Psychological Safety was first coined by Harvard Business School professor, Amy Edmondson, in the late 1990s. She defined it as, “A shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

It’s the extent to which team members feel enabled and encouraged to say the things that don’t necessarily align with other people’s view of the world… to go against the grain – not just for the sake of it, of course – but to be able to confidently express their views and opinions.

In a culture where Psychological Safety is high, people feel safe to speak up, to offer new ideas, to fess up to the mistakes they make, and to challenge authority… all without fear of retribution.

This is a core part of the no blame / no excuses culture.

For me personally, I was wired in a way that I’ve never had a problem speaking up. But, for the vast majority of people, working in a culture that’s not psychologically safe can be stressful, and ultimately very damaging, personally.

The emergence of Psychological Safety put logic, reason, and descriptive language around one of the critical elements of team culture. But, as is the case with many robust leadership principles, the concept has been bastardised, stretching it way beyond its original intent.

Here are three common misconceptions of the principles of psychological safety that I saw regularly during my career as a corporate executive:

1. Psychological Safety applies to each person: individually, they get to define what they experience as safe or unsafe. This is an obvious (and, possibly the biggest) mistake with Psychological Safety. It actually applies to team dynamics, but it’s now commonly used by individuals to express their own level of personal discomfort.
   Have you ever heard the words, “I don’t feel psychologically safe?”
   Once that becomes an acceptable articulation of the principle, it’s very easy for an individual to weaponise it. And then, of course, a few million HR advisors across the developed world have line managers walking on eggshells.

3. People use Psychological Safety as a proxy for a conflict-free culture. I have seen many leaders use Psychological Safety as their rationale for trying to eliminate all conflict, friction, and dissent from their team.
   Psychological Safety then becomes the rationalisation that weak leaders use to justify their own willful avoidance. This is a recipe for disaster. In the absence of constructive conflict, groupthink and passive-aggressive resistance flourish – and these are nowhere near as easy to spot as overt disagreement, so they’re way harder to deal with.
4. Keeping people “psychologically safe” on an individual basis leads to better performance. This, in a way, combines the ills of the first two misconceptions as well. The logic goes something like this: “If I keep every individual safe, they will feel happier”… “If they feel happier, they will perform better”… so, “Therefore, my team will be a high performing team”.
   Unfortunately, the polar opposite is true. A team with no conflict or constructive tension is likely to be a very average team indeed. Results play second fiddle to feelings.

THE ARCHITECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY RESPONDS

In my experience, it’s pretty rare that you see a thought leader coming out to correct what they see as a large misinterpretation of the principles that they’ve put into play. But this is exactly what Amy Edmondson did in her Harvard Business Review article, titled What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety.

It feels a little as though it was born a little out of frustration. Like me, and I’m sure many others, Edmondson has found that if the principles of Psychological Safety are misinterpreted or misused, as they often are, it can do more harm than good.

This can completely negate the value of Psychological Safety which, in Edmondson’s own words is, “to enhance learning and performance.” Edmondson makes a few observations that are worth mentioning.

The rule of threes normally works for me so, even though she covers six key misconceptions in her article, I’m going to pick the three that most resonated with me.

1. Safety and comfort are 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, they collude in producing ignorance and mediocrity.

Teams that don’t deal with difficult issues perform way worse than those that do.

Where Psychological Safety exists, people believe that sharing hard truths is expected. It allows robust debate to happen when it’s needed—but obviously, it doesn’t mean people are going to find this level of friction in any way comfortable.

Edmondson draws a distinction between being “nice” and being “kind”.

Kindness is important, but it just means you treat people with respect and deference, not that you avoid any difficult or challenging conversations.

2. Psychological Safety is somehow synonymous with job security.

For example, when a company announces that layoffs or job cuts are necessary, this is seen to somehow be psychologically unsafe.

Without wanting to be insensitive, any employment uncertainty you experience is simply a fact of life. How people respond to the uncertainty of their job tenure has absolutely nothing to do with Psychological Safety.

But what happens in this day and age, when individuals equate lack of job security to a company’s breach of its basic duty of care? Everyone frowns and nods and talks about the callous disregard the company is showing for its people’s psychological well-being.

This is ridiculous. But with mental illness diagnoses rising rapidly, people’s sensitivity to this stuff is completely off the charts.

3. Psychological Safety can be ensured by good policymaking.

I would have thought that our experience with DEI has shown that, as much as you can put desirable policies in place, you can’t control people’s beliefs, attitudes, and values.

It would be really nice if you could… but you can’t.

Trying to put policies in place to ensure an individual’s Psychological Safety is mildly ridiculous, especially because it’s not even an individual concept, as we discovered earlier. Psychological Safety is an attribute of team culture.

But we’re now even starting to see massive government overreach into the workplace under the guise of psychological safety – which they clearly don’t understand.

In April, 2024, the Rhode Island State Senate passed Bill 2473A, the Workplace Psychological Safety Act. This legislation seeks to create psychologically safe work environments for individuals. It opens the door for employees to sue their employer for damages if it doesn’t.

Even the far-left ACLU opposed the legislation, calling it “far-reaching and subjective”.

And, on this side of the world, the New South Wales Government put a regulation in place in 2022 to ensure employers manage what they call “psychosocial hazards”. Seriously!?

As Edmondson herself says, psychological safety is built by the group, interaction by interaction. But our instinct, particularly in larger organizations with large functional support overheads, is to try to put rules, procedures, and compliance measures in place to do what leadership clearly can’t.

DOES PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY PASS THE “NO BULLSH!T” TEST?

Where does psychological safety fit into what you do day-to-day as a leader?

The No Bullsh!t Leadership framework can’t be executed properly unless there is a culture of psychological safety.

That might sound a little confusing. I can hear you thinking, “Marty, psychological safety is soft and fluffy, isn’t it? It’s not at all consistent with No Bullsh!t Leadership.”

Let’s just pause on that one for a minute. Here are a couple of examples taken straight from the No Bullsh!t Leadership playbook.

Think about our core principle, Deliver Value. To create a work program that focuses only on the highest value investments, the relative merits of each initiative have to be agreed. This can only happen where robust discussion takes place with each person putting forward the case for the initiative they believe is going to deliver the biggest bang for buck.

Think about execution excellence: Make Great Decisions. To have any chance of making a great decision, the assumptions and options have to be pressure tested from every angle. This demands robust challenge and, often, fiery debate. There’s no way you can have that if you don’t have Psychological Safety.

Think about the need for you to be comfortable when you Handle Conflict. To bring out the best in your people, you have to be able to offer guidance, sometimes in the form of difficult feedback. This can’t happen unless you feel safe and supported to do that work in a one-on-one setting. You have to feel a level of psychological safety, otherwise, you’re not going to do the hard work of leadership.

Think about the critical principle of Excellence Over Perfection. To build speed and momentum into your team, people have to be prepared to try things in a way that’s appropriate for the level of risk involved, without fear of being scapegoated. This can’t happen unless they feel safe to admit their failures and learn from their mistakes.

None of the critical leadership disciplines in the No Bullsh!t Leadership framework can be executed in the absence of Psychological Safety. If people don’t feel as though they’re psychologically safe, you’ll never get them to contribute their best work.

THE ONE THING THAT MAKES THE MOST DIFFERENCE

I want to keep this simple to finish off: What’s the one thing that you can do to create a culture of Psychological Safety?

In my view, all of this starts at the point where a leader imposes the expectation that every individual needs to contribute something of value—something only they can bring.

As I used to say to my leadership teams, “Your contribution isn’t just accepted, it’s expected. If you think exactly the same as I do, then at least one of us is redundant… and it’s probably not me.”

It’s only when every individual, in every role, feels the requirement to contribute, that you can begin to shape culture.

Having this expectation (at the individual level) opens the door for you:

• To moderate discussions in a positive way;
• To show people that it’s not scary to share their ideas;
• To support and encourage people who choose to speak up by thanking them for their input;
• To point out the merits of each person’s view after they speak;
• To demonstrate the value of new perspectives;
• To show your personal willingness to change your mind in the light of new information or better ideas;
• To let people see how much better a decision can be when it’s been pressure tested by robust debate; and
• To praise people publicly for innovating in clever and thoughtful ways, even if it doesn’t necessarily come off.

This is why I think the way to start is to simply stimulate participation.

If you do, you’ll find hundreds of ways to reward and encourage those who take the first vital steps. You can quickly give them confidence. This is the confidence that says, it’s safe to hold and share ideas that are contrary to the rest of the group.

The only thing that can really trip you up here is if you allow robust conversations to degenerate into personal attacks. Anyone who contributes their viewpoint should feel better about themselves for having done so, not worse.

IT’S NOT ABOUT PROTECTING, IT’S ABOUT EXPECTING!

Psychological safety isn’t about protecting individuals from offense or discomfort—it’s about creating an environment where high performance becomes a realistic possibility.

In my experience, strong leaders who set high standards are highly capable of developing a culture of Psychological Safety. But unfortunately, weak leaders who tiptoe around their people’s feelings often give away the farm, because they’re too busy trying to protect them from the slightest hint of adversity.

Helping your people to feel secure in themselves is the foundation of stretch performance, which is why you really need to take Psychological Safety seriously. Without it, your people are never going to have the confidence to show you their best—and that is something that you will all live to regret.