How to tell if your culture is psychologically safe—and what you can do to increase it
Psychological safety, the idea that you won’t be punished or humiliated for making mistakes, raising concerns, asking questions, or speaking up, is the most important dynamic of a successful team (for more about the origins of the term and why psychological safety is important, check out part one of this post here).
In part two, let’s look at a quick assessment that will help you determine if your team is psychologically safe, what to do if it is, and some actions you can take to make creating a psychologically safe environment part of your practice if it’s not already.
This quick assessment will help you determine if your team is psychologically safe
For this assessment, rate each question 1-5 with (1 being strongly disagree, 2 being disagree, 3 being neutral, 4 being agree, and 5 being strongly agree):
Everyone on my team easily identifies problems and gives others feedback.
People on my team not only accept the differences of others but encourage them.
No one on my team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
On this team, I’m confident that I won’t receive criticism or retaliation if I admit a mistake.
It is safe to take a risk on this team.
Scored 5-10? You might be lacking in the psychological safety department. If you scored 11-15 you could use quite a bit of work. 16-20 means you’re on the right track. Got 21-25? Your culture sounds psychologically safe!
If your team is psychologically safe, that’s great!
But don’t get complacent. Make sure new members of your team also feel psychologically safe and ensure that you’re staying aware as you grow, people come and go, and your team gets more diverse. During culture shift and change management, I often see psychologically safety deteriorate first. As your culture continues to evolve, ensure that intersectionality is considered, it continues to be inclusive, and people feel like they can speak up and make mistake or give feedback to people who don’t look, act, or think like them.
Lacking in psychological safety? Here are some actions you can take to make creating a psychologically safe environment part of your practice
Why does it need to be part of your personal practice? Well, you don’t just want to improve this team or this company or this relationship, you want to be the type of person who brings the psychological safety bubble with you wherever you go. So it’s important to build your personal toolkit.
Not a CEO? You might be thinking, “Well, I’m not in charge, so what can I do?” People often think that only leaders are in charge of psychological safety, but anyone can help create a psychologically safe environment. Leadership can be found at all levels regardless of whether or not someone has direct reports.
The first thing you can do to increase psychological safety on your team is to increase your emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. Now more than ever, it’s an essential skill for the workplace. In their 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report, Deloitte said that “skills such as empathy, communication, persuasion, personal service, problem solving, and strategic decision making are more valuable than ever.”
Unfortunately, many times, the person creating the psychologically safe environment doesn’t know because they don’t have enough emotional intelligence to tell. But since we know that psychological safety is the most important aspect of a successful team, if your team is struggling in a certain area, that could be a good indication that you’re lacking in psychological safety in that area. Look out for things like finding out about secret mistakes, poor client feedback, high turnover rate, or any other trend that you’ve avoided coming to terms with. Do people on your team complain about meetings? Is there something wrong with those meetings? Are the same three people coming to your office hours when you say you want to hear from everyone? Maybe you’ve said or done something to indicate to everyone else that their opinions and ideas aren’t welcome.
You don’t need to walk on eggshells all the time. Just try to get into an improvement mindset instead of a defensive mindset. I worked with someone who kept getting the same feedback in exit interviews and who figured out a way to write it off every time. It’s true that you can’t please everyone, but if you notice a trend, it can save you a headache in the long run if you at least investigate if it might be valid and why.
Another way you can create a more psychologically safe environment is to assess—and improve—how you react to feedback
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen someone in charge say something to the effect of, “my door is open you can come and talk to me anytime, I love feedback, I thrive on it,” and then I notice the faces of the people in the crowd. You can see them thinking nope. Either because they’ve done it and the person speaking has reacted badly, or they’ve heard through the grapevine that this person isn’t telling the truth. When people—especially leaders—react poorly to feedback, it completely zaps psychological safety.
It is completely natural to react defensively to feedback and it’s something we all have to work on, on both sides. As humans, our communication skills are weirdly awful. We’re just not great at communicating with one another. But since you can’t change the way another person speaks (although you can give them feedback about the way they speak!), you have to focus on yourself.
One of the most helpful things you can do is adopt a learning mindset. If someone gives me feedback, regardless of what form they use to deliver it, and I start to feel myself getting defensive, I try to stop and think. This person is taking a risk to give me feedback. That must mean it’s important in some way. Either I’ve done something wrong or it’s been perceived that way. Do I need to change my behavior or the perception? Is there something I can learn here that will make me a better person? Because that’s what it’s about: you being the best you you can be.
Learning how to give good feedback can also increase the psychological safety of your team
Once I was giving feedback to a receptionist on my team. I said, “Whenever I come up to your desk, you’re always on your phone.” Her reaction? “No I’m not.” I sounded like I was accusing her so she responded defensively. Spoiler alert: we didn’t get anywhere with that conversation.
I also created a psychologically unsafe environment because not only did it sound like I was annoyed and complaining about her behavior, the “always” made it seem like I was spying on her, as if I’d been noticing her behavior and had been saving up the instances to finally catch her. Next time, I tried a feedback script like this instead:
When you do / I observe ____, it makes me feel / it seems like _____. I think it would be a lot more effective for both of us / I would be better positioned to help you if you did _____ instead.
Next time, I said, “When I come up to the desk, I see you on your phone a lot and it makes me feel like you’re not ready to help our guests. I think it would make a better impression if you weren’t on your phone.”
She was surprised! She said, “Oh, I have our team chat on my phone, so I just have my laptop here and my phone with the team chat so I can see both.”
Well, there was an easy solution for that! I grabbed her a second monitor so she could have our team chat open at the same time.
Top tip: strike “you always” and “you never” from your vocabulary. They do not work when it comes to feedback. Try this at home with family members or roommates as well! Instead of saying “you never do the dishes,” use a more positive and effective feedback script. You’ll thank me when you see your clean sink.
When people don’t get effective positive feedback, it can be just as impactful to psychological safety. Think of the mental energy it takes to wonder if you’re doing a good job or doing something right. You don’t want to ask because you don’t want to seem needy or like you’re digging for a compliment. Or you don’t want to find out you’re doing it wrong, so you fly under the radar. Giving effective positive feedback is a huge boost to psychological safety, because it gives people guidance or a confidence boost and allows them to really put their foot on the gas (again, this works wonders with family and friends as well!).
Another way to create a psychologically safe work culture is to question your assumptions
In the previous example with the receptionist, I made an assumption that she was on her phone messing around. Why? Humans jump to conclusions, see what we want to see, and our unconscious dictates a lot of our observations. To me, phone = leisure time (or, more like a mindless, scrolling hellscape). But that’s on me.
Instead, if you feel yourself jumping to conclusions or even repeating a well-worn opinion to yourself, start asking yourself questions. If something happens, why does it happen? If I don’t like it, what’s the most effective way to change it?
I’m the sort of person who responds immediately when asked a question. It doesn’t mean what I have to say is the most valuable thing that can be said—I just say it first (I appreciate your patience while I undo this life-long habit). I also care about everything (for real). I always have an opinion! So I equate speaking up with caring about something and an assumption I make is that if someone doesn’t say something, they don’t care. I had someone on my team who never spoke up in meetings and I assumed she just didn’t care about what we were doing. Until I asked her. First I said, “Why don’t you ever speak up in meetings?” And she responded, “I just don’t have anything to say.” Bad communication skills, Caitlin. Bad!
You can increase the level of psychological safety on your team by thinking about how you’re communicating and asking questions
Asking people “why” can come across as accusatory instead of caring. “What” and “how” are always better. So instead of saying “Why don’t you ever speak up in meetings?” say something like, “I notice that when I ask if anyone has anything to add in meetings, we don’t hear from you. What’s going on that’s keeping you from sharing?” You’re not accusing them of anything, you’re stating an observation that you had that they are able to counter with more info and you’re opening up the lines of communication and giving them a secure space to respond.
Turns out, when I asked this way, the answer was simple. “I never have my thoughts together by the time you move on,” she said. I paused and let her elaborate (excruciating for me, honestly). She said, “You only pause for like two seconds to see if anyone has anything to say and by the time I get my thoughts together, you’ve moved on and then I don’t want to interrupt.”
I wanted to immediately counter with, “I always say, anyone can interrupt me if they have questions or feedback during a presentation or meeting,” but that’s the equivalent of “my door is always open.” I’m just saying “interrupt me!” and not realizing that people don’t feel comfortable doing that. So I started pausing longer, paying attention to body language, and asking people directly if it looked like they wanted to say something, but mostly pausing. Stop talking, Caitlin. And guess what: people started speaking up. And not just that one person! My whole team. All because I stopped assuming that we all communicated the same way.
Lastly, you can create a psychologically safe environment by practicing confident vulnerability
Everyone is free to decide how much they want to share about themselves at work and I’m not saying that you should tell everyone all of your personal information. But in many of our current work cultures, we have this aim for perfection, independence, putting on a brave face, and powering through.
This makes everyone else think they have to do the same thing. And then we’re in a situation where no one wants to show vulnerability or weakness. If you’re a leader or manager, you should absolutely be practicing confident vulnerability because you have more power than those around you, but anyone can do this.
Many times, managers think their role is to pump everyone up and make sure things run smoothly. I’ve seen boards that say things like, “We’ve gone 20 days with no mistakes!” and I’m like, well, you’ve gone 20 days without anyone admitting they’ve made a mistake for sure. I’d love to see managers reframe it like, “Here’s how many problems we solved this week” or “here’s how quickly we fixed this bug once our teammate brought it to our attention” or “here’s how many client complaints we’ve rectified.” That’s honest about the struggles of doing your work and cultivates a culture of shining a light on mistakes and fixing problems instead of setting the goal of perfection and making behavior conform to that goal.
If you’ve noticed, I use a lot of personal examples of mistakes I’ve made and places where I haven’t done perfect work in my own field of expertise. I teach people about things like communication, change management, impostor syndrome, assertiveness, and peer coaching, and I use my own mistakes and learning as examples. I’ve always been a vulnerable leader, but when I started teaching and public speaking more often, the data confirmed what I suspected: feedback and reviews from audience members and students was that I was authentic, honest, vulnerable, and they felt like they could learn from me because I had learned and changed—and I showed them that they could, too. Confident vulnerability works.
Anyone can practice confident vulnerability. Saying something like, “When this client sends over feedback on a Friday, it is hard for me to do the standard of work that I take pride in. How can we let them know that we’ll be able to do a better job if they get it to us by Wednesday?” is so much better than simply complaining that the client always sends feedback late or continuing to do shoddy work and hope that it flies under the radar.
If you normalize being open with confidence by saying things like, “This is hard, but I do a good job and I want to continue doing so,” it gives those around you the safety to do the same. It doesn’t make you look weak; it makes you seem like you know what you’re doing and you have the best interest of the team at heart.
If you were in a psychologically safe environment, what could you achieve? What risks would you feel safe taking? What goals could you reach? How could you make your team or organization better?
Want to create a culture of psychological safety on your team right now?
In my workshop, Cultivating a Psychologically Safe Work Environment, we learn what it means to have a psychologically safe work environment and how we can cultivate a culture where people feel empowered to ask questions, give feedback, and (truly) make mistakes. We explore the concept of psychological safety, the research around why it makes teams so successful, and actions you can take to create a psychologically safe environment on your teams, no matter your role. Get in touch and we can talk about bringing the workshop to your group.