Psychological safety is also important in the workplace because fear can create negative situations
By Marina Capizzi, author of Hierarchy to Die or to Thrive?
This is the English translation of the article published on “Il Sussidiario” (November 2nd 2024)
Psychological safety, a concept that Amy Edmondson (Harvard professor and researcher) has made famous worldwide, is about creating a work environment where people contribute their ideas, share mistakes to learn together, turn diversity into resources, collaborate and help each other even when facing difficult issues. But what is psychological safety and how is it cultivated in the workplace?
Let’s start with the reality we live every day. Do you ever find yourself not asking a question for fear of being considered ignorant? Have you sometimes given up proposing an idea for fear that it will be evaluated negatively? Has it happened to you that you made a mistake and were uncertain whether or not to say it and then, for fear of being labeled incompetent, chose silence? And how many times have you refrained from saying “I disagree” or hid a useful characteristic of yours because it was too different from those of others?
Here psychological safety has to do with this. When we perceive a sufficient level of psychological safety we feel the urge to expose ourselves, even taking the relational risk of negative judgment, because we feel that at that moment it is useful to contribute an idea of our own, it is important to understand well in order to then do well-and so, yes, we say it “sorry I didn’t understand, what do you mean when you say…,” or “sorry I don’t know this, can you explain?” -; it is correct to ask for help because otherwise we risk putting in a lot of time operating with low quality; it is valuable for everyone to find a way to talk about an important but difficult issue; it makes one grow to share a mistake to inform others so that everyone can learn and improve.
Amy Edmondson’s decades-long studies show that there is an exponential relationship (positively or negatively) between psychological safety and a team’s performance. We are talking about very concrete things that apply to any work context, type of business, industry, and at any level of an organization. In a store, in an office, in a department, in a sports team, if every time we come up with a new idea we don’t communicate it and experiment with it, it will be very difficult to improve what we do. The same applies to the relationship with failure. In a world of constant change, no one can expect never to make a mistake. But to prevent mistakes and use the ones we make to learn, it is necessary to talk about them. In fact, Edmondson’s research shows that the best-performing teams talk about mistakes, deal with them together, learn from them, and in doing so become increasingly effective. In addition, a good level of psychological safety allows us to experiment with new practices, analyze the results, keep what works and continue to improve what we are not happy with.
Not only that. We talk a lot about diversity and inclusion. Good. It is important to value differences because the situations we face are increasingly complex, and because there are so many different kinds of intelligences, it is important that everyone finds a safe space to express themselves. Psychological safety is also the condition for having frank and productive comparisons. When we compare ourselves frankly and transparently, we broaden our thinking and produce better solutions. Instead, if people dare not speak up, we form what Edmondson calls the “epidemic of silence,” which can create very great damage to businesses. We can no longer allow fear to clutter our workplaces. The costs of fear are too high: for individuals and for all organizations, large or small. Cultivating psychological safety means cultivating a responsible and contributing presence on everyone’s part.