How to Foster Psychological Safety - Sage Advice: Episode 44

Psychological safety involves feeling comfortable (and even incentivised) to speak up, ask questions, and otherwise involve yourself beyond your basic role. It is the emotional and mental conditions necessary to say something when you witness a problem – irrespective of your position on the totem pole, and regardless of the nature of the objection.

And while the phrase "psychological safety" may drudge up the Kumbaya vibe of being at a summer leadership retreat, its importance is far from hokey: it creates personal, autonomous accountability among your employees.

At the ATD-ICE conference last year, we met up with Lisa Dahmus – who is a consultant and expert on psychological safety. We asked for a simplified framework in order to share with followers of our blog, Sage Advice, and she shared the following tips to ensure success:

1. Increase openness in the group.
Inviting employees to share more about themselves, talk about their experiences, and express how their feeling gives you a good sense of what barriers they encounter when faced with conflict (and what prevents them from speaking up). Simply inviting them to share about themselves, and receiving their offering in a nonjudgemental way, sends the message that their perspectives and feelings are important and valid.

2. Better qualify what constitutes psychological safety.
Create some standardised language within your unique culture for how you and your team would define psychologically safe conditions. What features would be included? How could your team engender a culture that felt mentally and emotionally safe? What potential roadblocks might derail your efforts to maintain open and receptive dialogue? What conditions could you put in place to deal with retaliation? Creating a list of action steps to move toward psychological safety, as well as variables that could potentially upend your efforts, will help you develop a game plan to respond effectively.

3. Inspire employees to create their own "norms."
Define the conditions on their terms, and in ways that promote self-direction. As mentioned above, it's important to take a nonjudgemental stance and truly listen to their needs. Usually, people begin to freak out about how to implement all these good ideas, but if you can hear everything your employees have to say, they will often have solutions in mind they can implement themselves. This keeps the onus off of you, and gives employees a greater sense of autonomy.