What is typically going through your mind when you run into a problem at work and you need to communicate the issue to your supervisor? How about when you encounter a family emergency and need to ask for some added flexibility or time away? Are you regularly comfortable sharing new ideas at work, or does the risk seem to outweigh the reward? These questions all point to the same general concept, that of psychological safety.
Team psychological safety, first introduced by Amy Edmondson at the Harvard Business School, refers to 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 inter-personal risk-taking." The idea has been widely studied by Edmondson and others, and the literature consistently points to the importance of fostering psychological safety within a work environment. Google's research on team effectiveness, Project Aristotle, concluded that how your team worked together mattered more than who was on the team. Not surprisingly, psychological safety was the number one factor in determining how that team worked together. Edmondson and colleagues have also written about the implications of WFH and hybrid work environments on psychological safety as we continue to rewrite the definition of "work".
Many factors can contribute to a sense of psychological safety and the ways in which it is fostered by a manager. Unconscious bias is perhaps one of the biggest concerns, as managers may have the best intentions but their own biases may ultimately lower psychological safety. I would posit that each of our identities and sense of self has an impact on our sense of psychological safety as well.
We obviously don't leave the world outside when we step into "work", whether that's a physical office space or a home office. The challenges, concerns, and stresses created by simply existing in an increasingly polarized society can't not come with us as sit down to attend that morning staff meeting. Our feelings of general safety are greatly impacted by the identities we occupy and how we choose to share those with the world around us, not just with our colleagues. Many employees of color reported feeling more comfort and less stress while working from home because it meant they didn't have to navigate the daily microaggressions and othering that took place in an office environment. It has, of course, presented other challenges as well.
For these reasons, it may simply be easier to build psychological safety with a primarily majority white, cis, male team. Those folks are entering the space from a sense of societal privilege and safety that others simply don't possess. As a result, the general steps we might take to ensure psychological safety in the workplace may land differently for someone who doesn't have that same level of privilege. When discussing tactics for ensuring psychological safety, Edmundson regularly points to the need for open, transparent, and proactive communication. We can't simply assume someone knows our intentions, and this is especially true if they feel marginalized in other aspects of their life, based on their identity.
In many ways, ensuring psychological safety happens in the same way as does ally development. Edmundson offers several broad strategies and these same strategies apply to ally development. We lead through our actions and the explicit communication of our hopes, goals, mistakes, and opinions. Others respond to this in their own way, and we ultimately have no control over that response. We can only do our best to communicate that everyone's voice matters, it's ok to be vulnerable, feedback is essential, and that it's ok to make mistakes. In communicating these ideas, we must remember that folks are going to respond to those messages differently depending on who they are and the life experiences that brought them there today. As such, we need to be patient as we work to develop a psychologically safe team.
Discomfort is a natural byproduct of this work, and that's ok. The goal isn't to simply be "nice" to everyone and make them feel comfortable. Hard work and culture change can be extremely uncomfortable at times, but if we clearly articulate why we are doing it and share our own commitment, the change will come.
