Do your employees refrain from sharing ideas or taking initiative? Building a psychologically safe environment helps relieve reluctance and allows employees to showcase their true talent. Psychological safety is the shared belief that team members can take risks, without facing negative consequences. In simpler terms, this means that your employees can speak up, share ideas, make mistakes, and raise concerns freely without the fear of embarrassment, rejection, or retribution.
Psychological Safety – An Overview
The term psychological safety was coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who reveals that high-performing teams aren’t necessarily the ones with the most talented individuals. Rather, successful teams comprise members who feel safe being authentic and expressing themselves freely.
In organizations where psychological safety is prioritized (and prevalent), we see employees engaging in open discussions, sharing creative ideas, and dealing with problems early on. On the contrary, in environments that lack psychological safety, employees often withhold valuable insights, don’t own up to their mistakes, and avoid taking any creative risks – eventually impeding organizational performance and growth.
Leaders must recognize that creating a psychologically safe environment requires honest effort and commitment on their part. We’d like to share a few strategies that organizations can adopt to create a psychologically safe and thriving work environment.
Encourage Creativity and Innovation
New ideas, creativity, and innovation bolster business performance and success. It’s important to foster a culture where risk-taking and experimentation are not just permitted, but actively encouraged and celebrated. Leaders need to demonstrate through their behavior and actions that trying new approaches, failing, and winning are all valuable parts of the learning process. They can do so by sharing real-time examples of their own mistakes and the lessons they learned to encourage confidence among team members. Other ways to promote innovation can include the development of a schedule that is solely dedicated to conducting experiments and the setting up of “learning labs” where teams can test out their new ideas.
Provide Constructive Feedback
The way an organization deals with and responds to setbacks and failures sets the tone for psychological safety. Rule #1: To be an effective leader, you must refrain from playing the blame game. Instead, look at failures as learning opportunities, focus on system improvements, and encourage teams to identify and learn from mistakes. Allow members to freely suggest improvements, make genuine contributions, gauge performance, share mistakes, and identify areas of improvement to foster a work environment that provides comfort and psychological safety.
Foster Inclusive and Open Communication
Open communication and transparency serve as another crucial pillar of psychological safety. Companies must develop robust channels for dialogue and feedback that flow across the organizational hierarchy. Leaders should actively solicit diverse perspectives and demonstrate that they value input from all members of their team, regardless of position or tenure. Channels for communication and discussion environments should be inclusive, where all voices are heard and valued equally. Leaders should remain mindful and ensure that new and quieter members receive opportunities to contribute.
Recognize and Reward Performance
Traditional performance metrics have often focused solely on success. However, environments that are committed to psychological safety must acknowledge all efforts and encourage learning from mistakes and setbacks. This can include developing recognition programs for innovative thinking (regardless of the result) and incorporating development and growth metrics into performance evaluations. When employees see their peers being rewarded for taking risks and initiatives, they’re more likely to engage in similar behaviors.
Invest in Positive Relationships
Psychological safety thrives in environments where people trust each other and enjoy positive relationships. Leaders should focus on engaging employees in multiple team-building activities, encourage informal interaction, and promote cross-functional collaboration. As a leader, your role here is to identify and create natural opportunities for people to interact and build relationships that are based on respect and understanding.
Foundation for Success
The prevalence and sustainability of psychological safety lies in an organization’s ability to create a positive environment that welcomes new ideas, risky experiments, healthy disagreement, positive conflict, and continuous learning. When organizations prioritize an environment that provides psychological safety, they lay the foundation for improved innovation, better resilience, and sustainable growth.
At Crosworks, we believe that a culture of collaboration, trust, and respect is paramount to achieving goals and business success. Schedule a call and connect with our experts to learn about our organizational services, including how we can help you shape a work culture that prioritizes psychological safety.