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)”.
The Fearless Organisation Scan is a quick and proven way to start the conversation about Psychological Safety. The short scan enables you to benchmark your team’s safety levels with hundreds of other teams.
There are three steps to the scan
- A one hour briefing of the team on Psychological Safety and
why it matters in a team, the wider business and for them, as individuals. - A short five-minute survey to be completed by the team.
This includes the questions that Dr Amy Edmondson has
been using for years which have been validated to be a
reliable indicator of safety. - A three hour team debrief, where we explore the results and reflect on what might be happening within the team and what options are available to them.
Typically, this can be completed within two weeks. Time that is well spent to raise awareness of how Psychological Safety may be showing up in a team and then how to begin to address such an important topic.
We have been certified by Fearless Organisation to run the scan with your teams.
This series of sessions aims to build awareness and understanding of the
underlying mechanisms of Psychological Safety with specific techniques on how
you can begin to improve safety.
We focus on four elements which influence safety.
- Raise awareness – by attuning people to sense when safety is low so that
they can begin to do something about it. - Learn and adapt – by reframing failure and evolving an attitude of
experimentation and reflection. Psychological Safety speeds up and
improves the quality of learning. This is especially important in a volatile
and uncertain world, where our ability to adapt is key to survival. - Have 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.
Importantly, the aim is NOT to grow psychological safety, as nice as that may be! It is to cultivate the psychological safety ‘soil’, in order to grow the business and personal benefits.