Psychological Safety

Silence in a meeting can be a warning sign of very low psychological safety, but that’s not always, or even usually, the case. We all have our own, very different, preferences for how we speak up, contribute and communicate, especially in group settings. Some of us prefer to dive straight in to debate, whether we’re…
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After doing the psychological safety team performance exercise, you may want to workshop with your team to establish how you’re going to build psychological safety in the team. Whilst there are some standard and ubiquitous approaches to building psychological safety, such as icebreakers, retrospectives, and video call practices, this is an opportunity for your team…
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Providing constructive feedback is one of the most powerful things you can do to help others achieve their goals, be happier in their work, create psychological safety and help your teams and organisations perform at their best. However, it’s really important to bear in mind how, why, and when feedback is delivered, or if it…
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Timothy R Clarke in his book “The Four Stages Of Psychological Safety” describes a conceptual model of four “stages” of psychological safety that teams can move through, progressing from stage 1 to stage 4. These four stages are: Inclusion Safety – members feel safe to belong to the team. They are comfortable being present, do…
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Inclusion is at the core of psychological safety, and must be defined as a central team value. Any individual behaviours or beliefs that don’t align with the principle of inclusion must be addressed.

Retrospective exercises, when teams come together to discuss and discover what went well, what did not, and what lessons can be learned, are extremely powerful and are a fantastic way of building psychological safety. For example, Agile teams usually schedule in a retrospective once every sprint, which is an extremely effective method (if done well)…
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Most of us will be used to the idea of icebreakers that are used in meetings or group sessions where not all the participants know each other, and are a good way to increase the psychological safety of a team or space. There is, however, so much more to icebreakers than just getting to know…
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One of the recipients of the Psychological Safety Newsletter got in touch this week to suggest we launch a Psych Safety community, where we can all share ideas, best practices, workshops, and ask for help and support each other. The newsletter is a bit “one-way” in communication, and the best communication goes both ways 🙂…
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The Psychological Safety Quadrant Workshop This is an example of a really powerful exercise to qualitatively measure psychological safety, team performance, and work collaboratively to increase both, via a workshop that can be carried out remotely or in-person. This is really effective for short-lived teams, who haven’t had, or won’t have, time to build and…
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Sign up here for the PsychSafety.co.uk psychological safety newsletter. Arriving in your email inbox (roughly!) once a month, it contains new, useful, insightful or controversial content all about psychological safety research, applications, practice and opportunities to collaborate. To receive new articles, resources, tools, talks, webinars and videos each month in your email inbox, complete the…
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