How HR can help create psychological safety

No doubt you’ve heard the buzzwords ‘psychological safety’ – but what do they mean exactly? The author Amy Edmondson, who’s the acknowledged authority on psychological safety, describes it as … “a belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” But why does it matter and how can we help create it?

The benefits of creating psychological safety for our teams are numerous, such as:

• Better employee engagement and wellbeing.
• Greater collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Better problem solving.
• Higher performing teams and ..
• Employees who are more adaptable to change.

These benefits are pretty much understood and accepted now – or rather, we get it intellectually, but many of the leaders I meet are still struggling to create them.

There are some techniques that leaders can put into practice – relatively simple changes they can make to their behaviour – that can make a huge difference. Here are some of them …

Help them show curiosity

Research shows that we often prefer to talk rather than to listen with curiosity. When 230 high-level leaders in executive education were asked what they would do if confronted with an organizational crisis most said they would take action. Only a few said they would ask questions rather than simply impose their ideas on others. Management books commonly encourage leaders assuming new positions to communicate their vision from the start rather than ask employees how they can be most helpful. It’s bad advice.

Leaders can encourage curiosity throughout their organizations by being inquisitive themselves.

At Ernst & Young, they have implemented the practice of ‘Leading with questions’. They realised that the leaders who were thriving at EY tended to ask better questions that helped generate creativity and fresh thinking.  They also created higher levels of trust through not just listening to fix but listening to learn. HR provided prompts and advice to their leaders to try leading with one question before getting into default conversation mode.

Help them show humility

Another way leaders can create psychological safety is to admit that they are not infallible – that they acknowledge their mistakes. For example, the ad agency Ogilvy had quite a different response to Black Lives Matter. Instead of diving into action planning, the senior team put out a public letter. In it they acknowledged that ‘after over a decade of diversity and inclusion efforts at Ogilvy we have not seen nearly enough progress in increasing representation and leadership of Black employees throughout the company. We have failed.’

It’s really rare to have senior leaders acknowledge failure – but by showing that humility they started to rebuild trust and contributed to a culture where owning up to mistakes is not just ok, but welcomed. Any future commitments to increasing inclusion were going to be much more impactful – and believable – as a result.

Share problems not just successes

Most senior team meetings I’ve attended have been a kind of ‘show and tell’ for grown-ups – where we all talked about how brilliantly everything was going in our department. But one leader I worked for helped to create greater psychological safety by establishing that our team meetings were the place where you brought your biggest problem instead. This helped to create an environment where problems are solved together as a team. At Spotify they use the Swedish term for coffee break a ‘fika’ and regularly hold gatherings called ‘fail fikas’ – a coffee break where people share their experiences in failure and what they learned from it, so they can celebrate their learnings. Their leaders act as role-models, sharing their failures as well – creating a culture where people dare to share.

Enable everyone to contribute

And finally, leaders can help create more psychological safety by enabling everyone in the team to contribute. There are a number of ways this can be done – for example:

• Re-brand Q&A sessions as ‘Speak up’ sessions like they do at Ericsson – a simple reframing like this helps signal to your team that their views and opinions are wanted
• Or you can recognise and reward those team members who show curiosity and ask the difficult questions like they do at Survey Monkey – For instance, they conduct town hall meetings at which they celebrate the “question of the week,” chosen from employee surveys and they have a peer recognition program to reward people who dare to be especially candid
• Leaders can also help their team to give their opinions by recognising that introverts might need to be encouraged in different ways than extroverts. At Amazon, they have silent meetings where the first 30 minutes are spent, in silence contributing to a Google doc on a screen – giving the introverts the chance to give their views before the extroverts start chipping in verbally.

So, psychological safety can be developed by role modelling curiosity, sharing problems not just successes, finding different ways to encourage a wider range of opinions and finally, admitting that they have made mistakes. Small changes that can have a big impact.