The talent you believe you need is at your disposal, and you’ve empowered them to “run the business like they own it”. Yet how often are the leadership team frustrated because your project teams hold multiple meetings deliberating over the same issues and miss the milestones that you so need to hit in your time-limited runway? “With all our talent why can ‘t we get this done on time??!!!”
So, what do you do? Haul the project lead into the next leadership team meeting to explain, intervene and (micro)manage the issue yourself, or give a rallying cry in the hope that the message sinks in? None of these options is appealing and, in our experience, won’t stop this situation from repeating. Something foundational is missing in how your employees are attuned.
That something could well be psychological safety. If the engine of change is honest conversation, then psychological safety is the oil that lubricates that engine for peak performance. Organisations are complex relational entities, products of multiple interactions between people. At Alignment Cubed, we take the position that their success highly depends on the ability to create conditions for meaningful and effective dialogue. By explicitly prioritising psychological safety, you can unlock your teams’ full potential, establishing a key foundation for a healthy, aligned organisation, that is positioned for success.
Other Signs That Your Engine Needs Oil
Silence or lack of challenge in meetings
Significant failures or mistakes not reported
Finger-pointing or scapegoating after setbacks
Defensiveness
Important information not shared across disciplines
Being alert to these indicators can help you recognise unspoken issues that could be severely impacting your company’s performance, its innovation, and overall success. By changing the nature and quality of the conversations in your team, the quality of your outcomes increases exponentially.
What is Psychological Safety?
Psychological safety means working in an environment where people hold the belief that they will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. In such a workplace, people don’t hold back or put on airs, they feel comfortable expressing themself without fear of embarrassment or retribution. They can admit errors, ask for help, or share unconventional ideas without being shut down or treated poorly. This openness allows everyone to learn, collaborate, and do their best work.
In contrast, a workplace lacking psychological safety is one of fear and judgment. People feel rushed to have all the answers and appear perfect. They conceal mistakes and stay quiet even when they have suggestions that could improve things.
A common misconception is that psychological safety is about everyone becoming more comfortable. In fact, psychological safety is about encouraging healthy disagreement between those holding different perspectives. Team members become accustomed sitting with the discomfort that difference can bring and explore these perspectives with curiosity and empathy. Hence teams with high psychological safety often have more debates and disagreements than those without, but these conflicts are focused on ideas and problems in pursuit of the shared purpose and not personal attacks. This leads to better decision-making and innovation.
The High-Performance Oil for Your Innovation Engine
Organisations with higher psychological safety perform better on almost any metric compared to those without it. However, despite what you may think, psychologically safe environments at work are rare. (It’s worth bearing in mind that leaders perceive higher levels of psychological safety in a group than its team members.)
In environments where effectively handling interdependence, failure, and uncertainty defines success, psychological safety is a crucial source of value creation and a potential competitive advantage enabling:
Greater Innovation: Team members feel free to propose unconventional ideas that could lead to breakthroughs.
Risk-Taking: Breakthroughs often require calculated risks. When people feel secure, they’re more likely to take these risks.
Team Learning: Higher quality interactions through the collective comfort with being able to lean into “not knowing”. Curiosity to explore and learn from failure, to navigate changing environments and challenging conditions more effectively.
Open Collaboration: Freedom, trust, and security to fully engage, take calculated risks, share information, and openly work together as a unified team.
Higher Quality Work: Improved feedback, a willingness to help, and productive dissent.
The Leader’s Role: Master Mechanic
As the Founder, Owner or CEO, you are the master mechanic. While psychological safety is actually co-created (another misconception), the leader plays a crucial role in shaping the conditions for its emergence as a pillar of organisational culture. Nobody wants to look ignorant, incompetent, intrusive or negative. That’s why your staff won’t share ideas, questions, and concerns. They are managing interpersonal risk. However, no one gains from silence. To reverse this takes focus and effort to help people develop new beliefs and behaviours. Encouragingly, if consistently worked on by leaders, there are three areas that you can tend to nurture the environment to raise psychological safety.
Setting the Stage - Have you clarified what’s at stake? and how their voice serves the mission?
Clarify what’s at stake and why psychological safety matters to the organisation’s mission. Make it an explicit priority and nurture it. Set expectations about failure, uncertainty, and interdependence to clarify the need for voice. Acknowledge that failures will happen and that the primary goal is to learn from them.
Inviting Participation - Are you encouraging others to speak up and actively farming for dissent?
Demonstrate humility, curiosity and vulnerability – they are the fuel for psychological safety. Be humble, share your own doubts, admit when you’re wrong, acknowledge gaps, and just say “I don’t know.” Practice inquiry by modelling intense listening, asking good questions, and seeking dissent. It gives staff confidence that their voice is welcome.
Responding Productively - When members take interpersonal risk how do you react?
Listening, acknowledging, and visibly valuing those who take the courage to constructively challenge you reduces their sense of risk. Express sincere gratitude when people take the courage to speak up. Destigmatise failure by moving on, offering help, and co-creating a way forward. Finally, and importantly, sanction clear violations that damage psychological safety.
Tuning Your Innovation Engine for Peak Performance
Good things happen when people speak up, reveal vulnerability, show empathy, ask generative questions, and commit to continuous learning. Psychological safety directly oils the cogs of relatedness (one of the three conditions of self-determination theory by which intrinsic motivation emerges). It will improve how your teams connect and how its members see one another’s different perspectives. It will enable them to more openly and innovatively interact with each other in ways that co-create value that is greater than the sum of the parts, thus compounding your organisations intellectual horsepower and attuning them to collectively solve your most complex challenges. Where a single therapeutic breakthrough can change lives, psychological safety isn’t just oil for your innovation engine; it’s rocket fuel.
Is silence costing your organisation? As Fearless Organisation Scan practitioners, Alignment Cubed can support you with the education of leaders and co-workers in psychological safety as well as the assessment and improvement of psychological safety within a specific team setting. If the state of the dialogue in your organisation is not working to your advantage, if there are polite nods rather than vigorous dialogue, or a culture of the after-meeting meeting, then schedule a chat with Jonathan.
Further Reading – Articles, Papers & Books
To deepen your understanding of psychological safety and its impact on innovation, consider reading these articles, papers and books:
- Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams by Amy C. Edmondson, 1999
- What is Psychological Safety? by Amy Gallo, 2023
- Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail (Intelligently): How Great Organizations Put Failure to Work to Innovate and Improve by Mark D. Cannon, Amy C. Edmondson,
- What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team, by Charles Duhigg, 2016
- Hard Truths About the Meeting After the Meeting by Brian Heger, 2024
Recommended Books
Each of these books offers unique insights that can help you create an environment where psychological safety thrives.
- The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson - The definitive guide to psychological safety.
- Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson - Reframing failure, a skill that helps us overcome our spontaneous aversion to failure.
- Getting Naked: Shedding the Three Fears that Sabotage Client Loyalty by Patrick Lencioni - the theory of vulnerability and concrete steps for putting it to work in any organisation.
- Humble Inquiry by Edgar H. Schein - The art of asking over telling.
- Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull - Insights from Pixar on nurturing innovation.
- Good to Great by Jim Collins - Building a culture where truth is spoken.
- Drive by Daniel Pink - Understanding what truly motivates your team.
- The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle - Secrets of high-performing groups.