Category: Create and Maintain

Why do you want to create psychological safety in your organisation? To improve employee retention? To increase productivity? Reduce risk? Improve innovation? Or simply because it’s the right thing to do for people? I often talk about the business benefits of psychological safety, because sometimes that’s the only, or at least the quickest, way to…
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How often do you find yourself anxious and afraid to start something in case you fail, in case you’re not doing it “right”, or in case it doesn’t have the result you expect? Psychological safety makes it safe to fail, but what if we made it impossible to fail in the first place? We’ve been…
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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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Psychological safety is an emergent phenomenon: a property and state of a group that is felt (differently) by members of the group. For this reason, it’s a difficult (but worthwhile) concept to study, and many efforts have been made to codify and structure psychological safety in both conceptual and practical frameworks. There are multiple frameworks…
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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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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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I get asked a lot if I can help out with presentation content for internal training, talks or similar, so here is a slide deck for a psychological safety presentation that I’ve delivered a number of times and you’re welcome to use. Please attribute fairly. In addition to the slide decks below, the Psychological Safety…
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Meetings, whether in-person or virtual (or the worst kind – a hybrid of the two, where some attendees are together in a room, and the others are remote), are a fact of life for many of us. In fact, many of us spend up to 90% of our working day in one kind of meeting…
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Creating psychological safety at work, 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 at work, and reap significant benefits for you, the team,…
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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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