Lead your team toward a better world: How to create a psychologically safe team where people thrive

By Drs Lies Wouters

Drs Lies Wouters, international organizational psychologist, advisor, trainer and team coach, based in the Netherlands, introduces her unique Metaphor Map and Metaphor Model of Psychological Safety in this, her first book published in English. She shines a new light on how all leaders across the world can

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serapis Bey Publishing
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986105765

Book preview

Chapter 1

What Psychological Safety Is

To gain a good understanding of psychological safety this chapter presents the scientific definitions that represent different ways of looking at the concept of safety. You will find an explanation of what happens in your brain when you feel safe or unsafe, which will deepen your understanding of what it feels like to work in a safe environment. You can zoom into the different points of view by reading the practical examples and you can reflect about your own team and organisation. The behaviours of what people do in a psychologically safe environment will give you a good idea of why it is so important to build this within your team and organisation. In addition to these behaviours, studies have been completed that provide evidence of many more benefits. Interestingly, an unsafe environment does not simply offer a lack of these benefits but can be decremental to your organisation or the growth you are looking for. To know what safety means and what it brings you is only one aspect. How you can build psychological safety is explained using a new scientific model that is easy to understand and to apply.

Psychological safety

To understand what psychological safety is we have to differentiate between the levels of point of view. When we search the scientific research, we discover three different ways of looking at psychological safety.

  From an organizational point of view.

  From a team point of view.

  From an individual point of view.

Different definitions of psychological safety clarify how you can look at the same situation from these different points of view. For example, Schein and Bennis¹ introduce psychological safety as an essential part of the ‘unfreezing’ process that is seen as a requisite for learning and changing within organizations. They consider psychological safety as a factor which diminishes interpersonal risks that go hand-in-hand with insecurity and change. It creates a context that encourages trial behaviour and discourages placing guilt, blame or retaliation in case of mistakes¹. The most commonly used definition by Amy Edmondson² aims at the team perspective as she refers to ‘the shared belief of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’ According to Kahn⁴, psychological safety accommodates personal involvement and flow at work. He defines psychological safety as ‘the feeling to be able to be yourself and make an effort without fear of negative consequences to the self-image or status or career.’³

Where Bennis en Schein give the perspective of the organization, Edmondson’s² perspective is directed at team level and Kahn⁴ approaches safety as an individual construct. Both Frazier and colleagues³ and Edmondson and Lei⁵ point out that these different perspectives don’t have to compete but rather complement each other. They see the conceptualizations of the different levels coming together as one unified principal; ‘The need to create a work environment where the perceptions of interpersonal risks are minimalized.’³

What happens in your brain when you feel safe

Let’s have a deeper look at the different levels of psychological safety. When you look into the impact of challenging circumstances on your performance, you find a system in your brain and body where the amygdala plays a crucial role. The amygdala is a small almond-sized structure in the middle of your brain that has an enormous impact on how you feel, how you function and how you relate to other people. Your amygdala scans your environment all day, every day and is triggered by danger and safety. Scientists used to think this structure was only involved with feelings of threat, but recent studies have shown that it is also involved with feelings of safety. When people think about threat or safety, they mostly think about things like snakes, or loosing someone they love, or maybe loosing face. However, the amygdala responds to much more than that. For example, when you have a very tight deadline, your amygdala can identify this as a threat to being able to perform well, even when you don’t think about it as a threat. You might experience it simply as a desire to perform well while your amygdala is responding to it by sending signs of threat to your brain. When you haven’t been sleeping well for a couple of nights, your amygdala can identify this as a threat to your competence. When people who are in the room with you experience threat when you don’t, studies have shown that the micro-expressions in other people’s faces trigger your amygdala to signal the threat too. Even in situations where you don’t consciously observe these micro-expressions in their faces.

Figur 1: A schematic illustration of the brain’s complex circuitry mediating fear responses and anxiety behaviour along with hormonal mechanisms responsible for hyperactivity of the HPA axis in response to a threat⁶

When you don’t always consciously identify this threat, how do you know whether your amygdala signals it as such and how can you influence this? Studies performed with fMRIs show you that when your amygdala gives signals of unsafety, you withdraw from the situation. This withdrawal can take many forms. For example, an employee might say: My manager asked me to collaborate more, but I really don’t see the benefit of doing so. The team member can be convinced that the reason for not collaborating is because there is no benefit, when in fact it is the amygdala signalling this situation as a threat. It might be a threat directly from the collaboration when the team members treat this colleague very poorly, or it could be a threat because the team member is already so overwhelmed with work that any extra task would be a threat to maintaining their health and energy.

When your amygdala signals safety, it gives a different kind of signal which results in engaging behaviour. This means you will experience a motivation to pick up the task or approach somebody. In the case of the manager asking to collaborate more, when the amygdala of the employee signals safety, they will feel motivated to approach the other people in the team to collaborate more.

Is psychological safety purely an individual perception? Research tells us that this is not the case. People who are independent thinkers, amenable to new ideas and more likely to challenge the status quo score high on the big five factor ‘openness to experience.’ It would seem that people who score high on openness to experience will speak up more in groups. However, Frazier and colleagues³ did not find an association between openness to experience and psychological safety in their research. They conclude that it is likely that people who are open to experience simply are more focused on how to express themselves, rather than whether it is safe or not to speak out.

A deeper look at psychological safety in teams

Professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis introduced the concept of psychological safety in 1965¹. They argued that psychological safety is essential for making people feel secure and capable of changing their behaviour in response to shifting organizational challenges. This makes a lot of sense if you consider that when the amygdala signals safety, you have a tendency to pick up tasks and approach people.

In this book we use the most used definition in research introduced by Amy Edmondson in 1999² as below.

"Psychological safety is a shared belief from

the team members that the team is safe for

interpersonal risk-taking."

The focus here is clearly on the team perspective of psychological safety. What does Edmondson mean by this definition? What does this look like when you are working in a team? Imagine you are discussing a certain project or subject with your team. You realize that your opinion on the matter is vastly different from that of your team members. At that moment, you subconsciously decide to either share your opinion with the others or keep it to yourself. What you decide is based on two steps, which sometimes only takes milliseconds and often happens subconsciously, by the following premises.

  My team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.

  I am able to handle it if it is not safe.

Have a look at the first premise. What makes the team safe for interpersonal risk-taking is whether you run the risk of being ridiculed or maybe, ousted because you have a different opinion. If you expect the team to judge you for your different opinion, you might decide not to share it.

However, the second premise tells you that in some cases, you might decide that even though you know you will be ridiculed or at least expect to be, you will still share your opinion. This decision can have many reasons. For example, you might feel disconnected with the team members and you do not really care about their opinion. Or maybe, you consider your opinion so important that you want to put it forward anyway.

Psychological safety is an environment where you share your opinion as a result of the first premise, not the second. Many team leaders and team members have shared with me that they do share their opinions, so the team must be safe. However, they have also told me that they were often ridiculed or scolded for sharing their opinions, which actually means it was not safe at all. They simply had learned to deal with the unsafety. Also, some said: It’s not that I didn’t share my opinion because I didn’t feel safe, but because I didn’t care about what they think about my opinion. These employees must have subconsciously decided that it was unsafe and they simply didn’t care enough to take the risk of being ridiculed.

Sharing a different opinion is only one behaviour related to the perception of psychological safety. Other behaviour that you engage in when it is safe, include the following.

  Bringing in new ideas.

  Questioning the status quo.

  Admitting mistakes.

  Asking for feedback.

  Sharing information.

  Asking for help.

  Taking the initiative.

In all these cases, when the answer to the first premise is: Yes, it is safe to take this interpersonal risk, you have a psychologically safe environment.

A common misunderstanding regarding psychological safety is in the word itself. Many people assume that you should always feel safe and keep the team safe at all cost. The definition from Edmondson shows us that psychological safety is about being safe enough to take an interpersonal risk. One of my coaching clients shared a story about how he felt a lot of pressure at a certain point in his job. He dropped an innovative project because he felt he could not contribute to it as much as he wanted to. A couple of months later he decided to leave the company. As he started looking for another job, he felt much less pressure in the job he had because he was leaving anyway. He decided to pick up the project again and now he was making much more progress, partly because he was being more creative and partly because he felt more courageous trying out new things. The decision for him to leave made him feel safe enough to take those risks. Unfortunately for the company, their employee had to decide to leave his job to feel safe enough to be more innovative and creative. Taking a risk and trusting that you and the team will be alright, is exactly what safety is. Now we understand what it means when it is safe enough to take a risk, what did Edmondson mean by ‘interpersonal’ risk-taking?

Name the elephant in the room

When you have a psychologically safe environment, you can challenge the status quo and name the elephant in the room. You welcome all aspects of every topic and are attentive to present them in such a manner that other people can accept them, even though they have a diametrically opposite view or attitude. When you think about speaking up in a group, you can do this without caring what the effect is of your words on the other people. However, when we refer to the phrase ‘name the elephant in the room’ I would like to point out that elephants are particularly empathic animals. When you name the elephant, you have to consider their feelings . For example, some years ago, I was leading a group training where somebody in the team shared that she felt very insecure in her team. The team member next to her replied: But that is your own fault because we have a very open and pleasant team. Both the team members spoke up and shared their opinions, but the second comment was very hurtful for the first team member. What was different about the way they presented their opinions? The first colleague shared: I feel very insecure in this team. She shared her emotions without putting the blame on other people or judging where this feeling might be coming from. The second colleague did not share her emotion, but pointed her finger at her colleague as a scapegoat. Was this second person not allowed to share her opinion? She should also feel safe enough to speak up, shouldn’t she? If the second colleague had said, for example: I am curious what it is that makes you feel insecure because I have a different experience in this team, she would have delivered the same message, but stayed connected to her colleague, which was now not the case.

Thus, the interpersonal part of the risk-taking refers to speaking up while remaining connected with the other person(s). Whether something is considered a risk, or what the answers to the two premises are differs between people.

The organisational point of view about psychological safety also has an effect on the team perspective. When I trained a group of leaders in one of my sessions, I asked them to score how psychologically safe they felt in their team. They discovered that this depended on what they brought to the table themselves. In the next step, we talked about actions they could take as leaders to create more safety within their team. One leader asked: What if I don’t want the team to feels safer? That was an unexpected question for me at the time. I asked him why he would not want this, as he had already shared all the benefits of a safer environment before. He replied: Because our organization is not safe. If my team feel safer, aren’t they too vulnerable? To answer his question, it is important to distinguish between different perspectives. It is perfectly possible to create a safe team environment within an unsafe organization. Our open conversation with these leaders nicely demonstrated the different perspectives and their impact on whether the situation is considered safe or not.

Another example of the different perspectives is one that Simon Sinek, anthropologist and management guru, shared in one of his seminars in 2018. He shared an experience he had in the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas. He was deeply impressed by the service he received from this barista and decided to ask him: Do you like your job? The barista answered: I love my job. This triggered Sinek to ask more questions and he discovered that the barista had two jobs. He was a barista in two different hotels. But, the barista said, in this place I like to make jokes and have a nice conversation with my customers, but in the other hotel I try to do my job and keep my head down. The same barista with two totally different customer experiences. It turned out that the barista felt safe and appreciated at one work place, but was afraid he might do something wrong at the other. In this case, the individual is the same, but the organization is very different. We often think that as leaders we must find the right people for the job, when in fact it is much more about creating the right work environment for the employees.

The three levels of psychological safety all influence each other but can also be separated. You can create a safe team within an unsafe organisation. Or you can feel individually unsafe in a safe team. The biggest impact on the organisation in terms of performance and competitive advantage are to be made when you are able to create safety on all three levels.

The benefits of psychological safety

Why would you care about having or creating an environment that is psychologically safe? Frazier et al.³ performed a meta-analytical review that showed how psychological safety has a positive effect on:

  engagement;

  task performance;

  information sharing;

  creativity;

  learning behaviours;

  commitment; and

  job satisfaction.

How come psychological safety has so many positive effects on people and organisations? When you experience psychological safety, your amygdala sends out a signal to the rest of your brain, which triggers your (intrinsic) motivation to either: connect with other people; develop yourself; experience a sense of purpose; or take control of the situation.

The Psychological Safety Metaphor Model

Psychological Safety Metaphor Model by Drs Lies Wouters

Barbara Fredrickson⁷ discovered that when your amygdala identifies a safe environment, your brain broadens and builds. This means your environment needs to be safe both physically and mentally. When it comes to motivation, you can be motivated by external rewards, or by objects you simply feel an internal motivation for. Deci & Ryan’s⁸ introduced Self-Determination Theory, which shows that every human being has three basic psychological needs. Later a fourth need was added. The first need is that every human being wants to connect to people. We might not want to connect to the same people, or even to the same amount of people, but we are all motivated to connect. The second need is that we all want to develop ourselves. The way we want to develop can be quite different to different people. Some people want to become rich; others want to become smarter and others want something completely different, or a combination of these. And finally, we all want to have a sense of autonomy. We want to have a sense of control about how and when we do things. In fact, research in medicine for example, has shown that when people are chronically ill and they have to take medicines, they are more likely to keep doing so if they can control the timing, or the amount they take. This clearly shows us the importance of having a sense of autonomy and the effect on our behaviour. The fourth need people share is a sense of meaningfulness. We want to feel that what we do is useful and meaningful.

To link back to the benefits of psychological safety, you can imagine that when people have their own motivation to:

  connect to their colleagues or their customers;

  further develop their skills or work toward their goals;

  take initiative and think about best ways of how to do something; and

  feel useful and meaningful.

Then, the team and the organization will be able to benefit from this in all the ways mentioned before.

For example, in training sessions where leaders practice building psychological safety in a one-on-one