The Myths of Psychological Safety

To some, psychological safety means keeping the peace. To others, it means anything goes. Both are wrong.

To some, psychological safety means keeping the peace. To others, it means anything goes. Both are wrong.

Those two myths slow teams down and get in the way of building real psychological safety.  

Myth number one is that psychological safety is about creating a “nice environment” where colleagues to say anything to upset others.  Not quite.  The evidence suggests teams where people feel safe to speak up, admit mistakes and challenge ideas consistently out-communicate, out-learn and out-perform teams that don't. It remains one of the best-evidenced drivers of team performance we have.

The second myth or misrepresentation is that psychological safety means anything goes. It doesn't. Psychological safety is not a licence to say things that strip away someone else's safety or sense of belonging. Get that balance wrong and you don't have an open, psychologically safe team. You have a loud and dysfunctional one.

Real psychological safety is built deliberately. Values, behaviours and norms are communicated openly and clearly. Leaders model the agreed behaviours. Blame culture is dropped, and a learning approach is adopted where people are comfortable to share their learnings from work that doesn’t go as planned. And people are recognised and rewarded publicly for learning and sharing just as much as they are for success and achievements.

For leaders, the best way to create real psychological safety is kind honesty and transparency. Tell people what’s really going on even if it’s uncomfortable. This is more important during disruptions like restructures, AI rollouts, strategy shifts etc. It can be tempting to want to protect your teams but withholding information that affects them only does one thing – it builds mistrust.

The best way to assess your level of psychological safety is by asking or observing how much the team member with the least power is given a platform to share their ideas and to evaluate the ideas of those with power. How about having a junior member of the team write the forward to your next strategy instead of the CEO?