How to build psychological safety to enhance team performance

Harvard Business School professor, Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, allowing members to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation. Psychological safety, says Edmondson, is the vital characteristic underpinning the highest-functioning teams.

Here are some tips for developing psychological safety in your team:

Ask genuine questions of your colleagues: What can I do to help? What are you up against? What are your concerns?

This tool is deceptively simple, and deceptively powerful. A question plainly conveys, “I am interested in what you have to say.” In asking it, you have created a moment of psychological safety that helps others offer their own thinking.

Say things that frame the challenge ahead.

Reminding people of what the team is up against—for example, by talking about how the work is uncertain, challenging, or interdependent—helps paint reality in ways emphasizing that no one is supposed to have all the answers. This lowers the hurdle for speaking up. It reminds people that their input is welcome, and in fact truly needed.

Act as if your environment is already psychologically safe.

Dress your work persona for the culture you want, not the culture you have. Be the change you want to see at work.

The personal challenge lies in remembering, in the moment, to be vulnerable, as well as interested and available. To do this you will have to take on the small interpersonal risk that your attempts may be ignored, or worse, rebuffed. Sometimes you have to accept an interpersonal risk to lower interpersonal risk. Assuming a modest level of goodwill in your organization, most of the time your colleagues will respond well to general expressions of vulnerability and interest. Creating a pocket of excellence, candor, and learning in your group is worthwhile, no matter what those above you are doing.