pSychological safety
Understand and improve the Psychological Safety (PS) of your teams and organisation.
Psychological Safety (PS) is the number one fundamental requirement for team and organisation performance.
Amy Edmondson defines Psychological Safety as ”a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes…”
It seems such a simple statement, but without Psychological Safety, nothing good happens: errors and issues remain hidden, and learning and improvement are stunted. With high levels of Psychological Safety, we open the door for greater staff engagement and innovation, improved work quality and collaboration, and support for learning and process improvement.
Harvard research finds that “Organisations with a higher level of Psychological Safety perform better on almost any metric or KPI in comparison to organisations that have low Psychological Safety”.
After a thorough study of 180 teams, Google’s Project Aristotle concluded that Psychological Safety is “by far and away the most important of the five dynamics we found, it was the underpinning of the other four (Dependability, Structure & Clarity, Meaning and Impact)”.
Ripple Rock provide several options to help teams and organisations improve levels of psychological safety.
The Fearless Organization Scan is an excellent place way to start the journey to higher performance through improved Psychological Safety.
Cultivating Safety – Train and practice deeper concepts and behavioural changes to cultivate enhanced safety throughout your organisation.
Not ready to jump in with a Scan? Run a Psychological Safety Briefing to raise awareness and understanding for leadership, teams or the wider organisation.
The Fearless Organization Scan is a well-proven and excellent place to start the journey to higher performance through improved Psychological Safety.
This short scan establishes a benchmark of a team’s or organisational unit’s current levels of safety across a number of dimensions and raises awareness of the impact this may be having on collaboration and performance.
There are three steps to the scan facilitated by one of our Fearless Certified Practitioners:
- A one-hour Psychological Safety team briefing to establish why it matters in a team, the wider organisation and as individuals.
- A short online anonymous five-minute survey to be completed by each person. The survey questions are designed by Dr. Amy Edmondson and are well-validated reliable indicators of the level of safety.
- A three-hour team debrief follows, where we explore the results and reflect on what might be happening to generate actionable insights.
The purpose of the scan is to start the conversation and the journey to higher levels of safety and performance. Scheduling a re-scan 6 months into the future helps to focus everyone’s minds on acting on the insights from the initial scan. Our Cultivating Safety programme deepens and accelerates the journey.
Building on either the Scan or Briefing, further explore and embed the deeper principles, along with simple and effective interventions that can be used to improve Psychological Safety within your team and organisation.
We provide programmes of training, workshops and group-coaching sessions to delve deeper into the concepts and learn and practice behavioural changes to cultivate enhanced safety throughout your organisation.
We focus on five elements which influence safety:
- Environmental Factors – explore and understand how an organisation’s leadership, processes, and policies impact safety.
- Raise Awareness – by attuning people to sense when safety is low so that they can work to address it.
- Learn and Adapt – by reframing work and failures and evolving an attitude of experimentation, reflection and learning. Psychological Safety speeds up and improves the speed and quality of learning which is especially important in a volatile and uncertain world, where our ability to adapt is key to survival.
- Real Conversations – by having candid conversations where we are able to openly discuss the difficult challenges and not settle for artificial harmony.
- Create the Space – by enabling everyone to bring their full selves to work through sharing perspectives, increasing diversity and deepening exploration.
Psychological Safety provides the soil to nurture a highly performant culture where creativity and collaboration can flourish.
Run a Psychological Safety Briefing to raise awareness and understanding for leadership, teams or the wider organisation.
One of our Fearless Practitioners leads an interactive briefing to explore what Psychological Safety is and is not, establish its credibility and understand the impact that low and high levels can have on teams and organisations. The session will complete by introducing some strategies for improving safety.
Alternatively, go straight for a Fearless Organization Scan!
