56: It all Boils Down to Psychological Safety

Building psychological safety may be the most important thing you do as a manager. Creating an environment in which people feel comfortable acknowledging mistakes, asking questions, offering ideas and feedback, and experimenting and failing, enables a team to think big, be nimble, and accomplish great feats.  In this episode, I’ll touch on what psychological safety looks like in the workplace and why it’s important, the difference between psychological safety and trust, why people don’t speak up and what you can start to do about it.  Much of what I share I learned from the book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy C. Edmondson.   Join the Modern Manager community to get the full guides, guest bonuses, access to the forum and more. Join before June 30th and get two special bonus gifts: a Modern Manager mini-notebook (usually reserved only as a thank you gift for my guests) and Meeteor meeting log to help clarify your meeting outcomes. Memberships start at $2.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.   Read the related blog article: Why Psychological Safety is More Important than Trust   Key Takeaways: Psychological safety describes people’s perceptions of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks in a particular context. In other words, what does someone expect will happen if they speak up at work. Psychological safety is what makes integrating diverse knowledge, perspectives, and skills is possible. It’s what enables teams to think big, be nimble, deal with conflict, give and receive feedback, and so much more. Psychological safety shows up in every interaction regarless of medium. The level determines whether someone speaks up when they have a different point of view, notice a mistake, have a question, have bad news or feedback to share, or anything where there is potential risk of looking stupid or incompetent, being seen as a failure, coming across as mean or argumentative or otherwise putting themselves out there. We can’t see when someone doesn’t speak up. It’s a silent act so no one knows except the person who didn’t speak up, making it hard to do anything about it. Psychological safety and trust are two different things. Psychological safety is a function of the group and is about immediate response, where trust is between two individuals and about belief in future action. There are three