Psychological Safety & High Performance Leadership

Trusting other people When building psychological safety in a team, or in any group context, it’s necessary to consider trust. Trust can be defined as the extent to which we hold expectations of others in the face of uncertainty about their motives, and yet are willing to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Trust is indeed…
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Building psychological safety in your team or in your organisation may seem like a very daunting task, and it can be hard to know where to start. Here are ten things you can do right now that will help to create psychological safety in your workplace, and reap significant benefits for you, the team, and…
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There are so many leadership books that propose to hold the key to unlocking team and organisational performance that it can be really difficult to decide which ones to actually read. To help you build psychological safety in your organisation, here is a carefully curated selection of books that highlight the importance of psychological safety…
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In early 2020, due to the Covid 19 outbreak, many organisations around the world went through a sudden digital transformation and many teams became remote. With this near-instant operational pivot to distributed and remote teams, organisations and the people within them encountered new and difficult challenges such as poor internet connectivity, inadequate home offices, and…
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Psychological safety is created through shared values and positive behaviours, where a culture of trusting, helping, and elevating means that all members of the team can work productively and be their true selves, without fear. There are great benefits to be had through building psychological safety at work. Liu et al (2020) found a negative…
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On a recent Agile Engineering Podcast we discussed cognitive load and how it relates to psychological safety. Cognitive Load Our human working memory, our capacity to learn and solve problems, is a system with limited capacity. The amount of information presented, any distractions in the environment, and one’s existing knowledge and capability all influence our capacity to…
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Do you want to improve psychological safety and performance in your teams? Are you facing significant challenges that require transformation to overcome? You can download the Psychological Safety Action Pack and put yourself in charge of driving the transformation, but if you would like some extra help in driving true organisational change, improving the performance…
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I’ve spoken to experts in high performing teams across industries and sectors ranging from corporate enterprise and technology, to elite sports and the Armed Forces. Through those discussions it’s clear that there is a universality to the elements required to create psychological safety and performance: Five key elements of High Performing Teams 1: Trust in…
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It’s a long and worthwhile journey to build high levels of psychological safety in your organisation, and much of the hard work involves excellent leadership, clarity of direction, effective support, vulnerability, curiosity and much more. However there are some simple exercises that you can carry out with your teams that directly build psychological safety in…
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A safe state of mind. Psychological safety is “being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career” (Kahn 1990, p. 708). That is: psychological safety refers to a personal state of mind of being safe in your team and amongst colleagues; it is not about being protected…
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