23. Sep 2024

Psychological Safety – Easily Understood, Hard to Implement

More people have more brainpower and more ideas, which leads to better results – sounds logical, but is often not the daily reality in organizations: Employees hold back their thoughts for fear of being rejected or excluded. Mistakes and concerns go unspoken, and opportunities for improvement are lost. The consequences can be enormous. Many scandals and corporate failures can be traced back to a lack of a psychological safety culture. But it is possible to do better, and managers can learn how to improve psychological safety in their organizations.

Katharina Lange is an Affiliate Professor of Leadership at IMD and teaches in the Rochester-Bern EMBA. She explains that it is in the nature of human beings to conform to the general opinion of a group and not to express a different opinion. Why is that? Because, from an evolutionary perspective, it is life-threatening to be excluded from a group: in ancient times, humans could not survive alone. So it takes effort to create an atmosphere of safety in which people can really say what they think. And research shows that it is worth it, because a safe culture creates value for an organization.

Definition and stages of psychological safety

According to Harvard professor Amy Edmondson psychological safety is: “The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”. Timothy Clark,describes four stages of psychological safety:

Inclusion Safety – members feel safe to belong to the team. They are comfortable being present, do not feel excluded, and feel like they are wanted and appreciated.
Learner Safety – members are able to learn through asking questions. Team members here may be able to experiment, make (and admit) small mistakes, and ask for help.
Contributor Safety – members feel safe to contribute their own ideas, without fear of embarrassment or ridicule. This is a more challenging state, because volunteering your own ideas can increase the psychosocial vulnerability of team members.
Challenger Safety – members can question others’ (including those in authority) ideas or suggest significant changes to ideas, plans, or ways of working.

The concept makes intuitive sense to most people. “However, there is often a big gap between what managers say their culture is and what actually happens in a company,” says Lange. “Promises are often made when the going is good, and then forgotten when the going gets tough,” she adds. As a leader you want to strike the balance between productive intellectual friction without creating social tensions. When this balancing act is mastered, psychological safety contributes to greater success.

The value of psychological safety

Does psychological safety in the company also make sense from a profit-oriented perspective? Lange turns the perspective around and says: “Think about what happens if you neglect psychological safety in your organization”. The case Boeing is a warning example of the disastrous consequences of a lack of psychological safety.

Boeing has faced dramatic issues, losing planes and catastrophic fatalities. Ongoing safety concerns have led Boeing to face federal investigations, executive shake-ups, and eroding investor confidence as customers scramble to rebook their flights on non-Boeing aircraft. In Lange’s view a culture of psychological safety, in which employees dared to point out mistakes and speak up, could have prevented these catastrophic consequences. And this is just one example. We may recall Enron and other cases where the lack of psychological safety had disastrous consequences for companies.

Psychological safety creates also value because if leads to managing diverse teams better. Research by Gunter Stahl, Martha Maznevski, Andreas Voigt and Karsten Jonsen shows that diverse teams – when well managed – outperform other teams. Psychological safety is one of the elements that makes such teams work well and can therefore contribute to superior performance.

How to implement psychological safety in your company?

“Psychological safety is something you work hard for, but it can be destroyed in a second,” says Lange. Like trust, psychological safety needs to be nurtured, while a negative experience can destroy it. This concept is easy to understand but putting it into practice is a challenge. Therefore, here some recommendations on how to create a company with psychological safety:

Equal allocation of time

“The extroverts should not steamroll everyone, and the introverts should not be able to hide,” says Lange. In a team, all members should be encouraged to speak up. It is the leader’s job to get those who are reluctant to speak out – everyone contributes, and questions, concerns and ideas are clearly put on the table.

Pre-mortem method

Pre-mortem means “before death,” is method, coined by organizational psychologist Gary Klein. At heart is the idea of “prospective hindsight”: Imagining that an event has already occurred. In practice, a project teams looks ahead to the end of a project and imagines it has failed. Before the project has started, the team discusses why it did not work. “In this setting, team members have a safe space to express their fears and concerns,” Lange explains.

Open to hear the negative

Most leaders claim to be open to criticism and challenging ideas. But are they really? “No one likes negative news and feedback,” says Lange. Which makes it all the more important to assume positive intent, listen and avoid to defensive. “Having the courage to listen to people who report errors is key to psychological safety,” she adds.

Humility, courage and empathy

To Leadership capabilities like, humility (being confident and a “learn it all”, not a “know it all”), empathy (the ability to take another’s perspective), and courage (the ability to address difficult issues) are keys to psychological safety – and a great antidote to dangerous defensiveness and arrogance.

Teaching psychological safety

Inculcating a psychological safety culture in the organization is an everyday task. For some it is more natural than to others. But everyone can learn it – and everyone can do it. “It’s like playing tennis. Not everyone becomes a tennis champion, but everyone can learn the basics,” Lange says.

She teaches the concept of psychological safety in the Rochester-Bern EMBA program, guided by the three phases of teaching:

The cognitive phase: Students are taught the concept of psychological safety. That is normally the easy part.
Learning with the heart: Participants experience psychological safety through exercises to internalize and “feel” what it takes to be psychologically safe.
Applying it with the hands: Leaders decide what they will do to create psychological safety in the organizations they serve.

“Psychological safety is in the hands of everyone. We are all a part of a culture. And leaders have a special responsibility because they are role models and can set an example. By showing vulnerability and admitting mistakes, they can go a long way toward creating a culture of psychological safety,” says Lange.

Managers can familiarize themselves with the concept of psychological safety and learn how to foster it in their teams and organizations. Even if it takes time and patience, it is worth the effort: Not only does it make working together more enjoyable, but it also pays off economically.

Learn more about this and other management topics in the Rochester-Bern EMBA.