Category: Create and Maintain

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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Building 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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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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There are millions of things that you can, and must, do as a leader to build and maintain psychological safety in your teams. But it’s hard to remember millions of things, so here are three key points that will help you create and improve psychological safety, whether you’re in charge of the team or not.…
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