Why is psychological safety at work important?
The easiest way to answer that is not to answer at all, but instead ask you to consider these two simple questions:
What happens when you feel psychologically safe at work?
What happens when you don’t?
Take a few minutes to think about that. Remember Amy Edmondson's definition of psychological safety, which is that people can make a mistake, speak up, or ask for help without judgement, and that candour is encouraged. Sit with it. What changes, about how you think, what you say and how you behave?
Do you feel able to bring your full self to work if you're not psychologically safe?
Are you able to tap into the depths of your talents and potential?
When we don't feel psychologically safe at work, our thinking and our behaviour changes. Our focus is on self preservation, not engaging and contributing. We stay in protect mode.
It's true for all of us. We're just so used to this rapid, natural filter that we don't pay it much attention. But we should - because what we lose when we stay stuck in protect mode is profound.
Here's the catch - psychological safety is an inside job. You can't make it happen for your team - you can only create the conditions for it. Conditions that enable your team to assess themselves as feeling psychologically safe. Here's why it's worth doing that - no matter how performance oriented you are and how woo-woo this seems...
Psychological safety determines how much - or how little - we trust;
Trust is an active expression of our perceived psychological safety, which amplifies or diminishes performance; and
Performance - our outcomes and how they are handled by the leader and organization - is the evidence that strengthens or weakens our decision to trust, and ultimately reinforces our perceptions of how psychologically safe we believe ourselves to be.
Remember The Psychological Safety Performance Model?
As a leader, you sit at the centre of the model - you have direct influence over individuals and the team collectively.
As a member of the leadership team, you sit at the cornerstone of the model. Experiencing your own assessment of psychological safety.
You also provide air cover for your team and it's members from the wider organisational system. You can moderate, facilitate and provide access and advice that can improve the psychological safety of your team. You can - irrespective of the politics and culture of the organisation - create a micro-climate of psychologically safe performance in your team.
Can people still connect if they feel unsafe? Yes. They can.
But it takes energy to override our body's natural preservation mechanisms. When people fake it, they're creating artificial harmony and counterfeiting trust. It takes energy to keep the charade up. Over time, it becomes exhausting. It's a fast route to burnout and exit. And while much of the world is fighting a war for talent, that's something worth avoiding.