Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking; people can admit their mistakes, acknowledge their weaknesses, and ask for help when it’s needed. Building trust and psychological safety in the team is an essential first step for any team to be effective.
Where there is trust and team members feel safe:
- Innovation improves
- Team members learn quickly from their own and each other’s mistakes
- Problems are overcome quickly
- People are more engaged
In a team where there is a low level of trust and psychological safety, we see innovation and learning stalls while gossip and politics can breed. Building trust between people and an environment of psychological safety takes time and the preparedness of all parties to be vulnerable. It requires the team leader to actively build a culture that allows people to feel safe and bring their whole self to work.
Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999. Since then, she has observed how companies with a trusting workplace perform better. Psychological safety isn’t about being nice, she says. It’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other. And she argues that kind of organisational culture is increasingly important in the modern economy.
Video supplied by TED.
Building a leadership team