This article forms part of our Stay Sharp series, we explore what psychological safety is alongside the psychological, emotional, and leadership issues that most affect performance at work.
So, What Exactly is Psychological Safety?
The Short Answer
Psychological safety is present when individuals feel able to speak openly without fear of negative consequences.
The phrase ‘psychological safety’ comes from the worlds of therapy and counselling psychology, where professionals [1] build a relationship of trust to enable the sharing of difficult emotions and life experiences. This is necessary to allow discussion, and hence healing, of whatever issue the client needs help with.
In the workplace, the concept is sometimes evident, particularly in high-performing teams. Genuine psychological safety at work is built intentionally and carefully over time, within a professional relationship that has clear boundaries, informed consent, and ethical responsibility.
Understanding Psychological Safety at Work
In therapy and coaching, sharing of information only takes place within a defined and clear context where an individual has consented to provide that information, and the relationship itself is boundaried by a trained specialist. It is based on trust, which the specialist has deliberately developed over time. If the client doesn’t feel ‘safe’, they will simply leave.
Similarly, in a psychologically safe workplace, individuals feel able to:
- Speak freely about concerns or mistakes
- Ask for help
- Offer different views and opinions, even when they conflict with the team leader’s
- Admit when they are struggling or burning out (ref burnout article)
In psychologically safe environments, individuals can take interpersonal and personal risks in sharing information that might perhaps be used by others to disadvantage them, and take the risk of learning new skills.
Psychological safety at work is particularly important for:
- High-performing teams where clear and accurate communication matters, particularly in times of delivery pressure.
- Individual transformative learning, which is the type of learning that requires significant changes in skills, behaviour, and perspective, and often feels uncomfortable.
Such an environment also mitigates the shame many people experience when they feel they are “not coping”, which in turn reduces organisational risk from staff health issues or individual or team performance failure.
What Does a Psychological Safe Workplace Look Like?
When psychological safety is genuinely present at work:
- People share more openly
- Problems surface earlier
- Learning happens faster
- Teams become more resilient
Psychological safety is not simply encouraging openness. It is about building the team structures that define how, where, and with whom openness happens in a mutually respectful way.
How Does a Psychological Safety Work Environment Develop?
A psychologically safe environment is developed when:
- Interpersonal trust has grown (and usually been tested by participants) over time.
- Individuals understand and often predict one another’s responses.
- There is an agreed shared objective that defines interaction.
- Boundaries about behaviour and use of personal information are clear and understood.
Teams that experience psychological safety in the workplace perform better because people have learned how others will behave towards them in any given situation, and how interpersonal risks can be managed, so they communicate more efficiently and are able to move to considered and agreed action faster.
Where Organisations Often Get Psychology Safety ‘Wrong’
Mission Creep
Psychological safety is often now included as a vaunted deliverable in organisational training. Such safety is essential for people to learn, but an organisational environment may not be safe, as it is both hierarchical and competitive. There is also sometimes confusion when organisations are trying to address behaviours driven by beliefs and conditioning, perhaps about inclusion. Danger signs are asking people to open up to the group about personal beliefs, to provide information about invisible disabilities, personal trauma or potentially problematic personal issues such as marital status, or addiction.
We should remember that:
Training is often delivered in groups of acquaintances from within, or even members of the same team from an organisation. As such, participants may have disparate departmental loyalties, management responsibilities, hierarchical roles and individual ambitions. Groups like this are, by definition, not psychologically safe. This changes the learning and development dynamics significantly.
It’s also well to remember that training is not:
- Therapy
- Counselling
- Coaching
- Mentoring
Those delivering training are not typically qualified coaches, therapists, psychologists or counsellors with independent professional standards and affiliations. They are unlikely to be professionally equipped to handle emotional disclosure safely.
How to Create Psychological Safety in the Workplace: Leadership Guidance
Training Initiatives
- Seek further details from anyone (internal staff or external consultants) who tells you they will create a place of psychological safety in a group organisational setting. How are they going to do it? What will they do if it goes wrong?
- Training activities in organisations exist within the context of competitive and hierarchical groupings, i.e. a team or departments. Leaders have a duty of care to all participants not to expose them to ‘othering’ because of their difference, even if the motivation is to show how common such issues are. Badly handled, performance and motivation are likely to dip.
- Creating psychological safety in groups requires facilitators who are able to manage the multiple interactions within a team as they approach often potentially difficult training materials (perhaps new skills or training that seeks to challenge long-held or conditioned personal beliefs).
- Well-designed team-building initiatives can shorten the time necessary to build interpersonal trust in a group of individuals.
If the Training Topic is Mandated by Senior Leadership
When attendance is a requirement set by more senior individuals:
- Insist that the providers set safe, clear rules about sharing personal information.
- Pre-brief your team participants prior to their attendance
- ‘Check in’ with your team afterwards.
- Help individuals to think about what might trigger them in such training. Suggest they reflect upon what they will do if they are triggered (removing themselves from the source of distress for 20- 30 mins to calm down).
- Rehearse a ‘white lie’ or neutral ‘exit line’ that might be helpful in these circumstances.
General Guidance for Leaders
When in a position of authority –or a facilitator – asking people to share intimate personal details and their beliefs with strangers/acquaintances is not psychologically safe. The power carried by the organisational role puts those in a more subordinate position in a difficult position as they may not feel they are able to decline the request to share.
Beliefs are by definition deeply held. They are a result of family and society (conditioning) and lived experience. They do not change because someone is told to change them. People sometimes do learn to repeat compliant words ‘off by heart’, but doing so does not mean they will effectively change their behaviours. Applauding (praising) people if they share intimate personal details with strangers/acquaintances or work colleagues is not psychologically safe. If you do this when you are in a position of authority, it sets an inappropriate boundary about what may be shared in the workplace.
When Life Collides with Work
Some individuals are, at times, so ‘raw’ from events in their lives that they are driven to share personal information at work.
It’s important to recognise that such sharing, particularly around issues such as health, disability or family and social life issues, may:
- Emotionally trigger others in ways that are difficult to anticipate
- Create an unintended vulnerability for the individual sharing
- Make people vulnerable to bullying.
Use company policy and provisions to support individuals where appropriate. Such sharing should be done first in confidence, to those who need to know, and when the information is relevant to work.
It may be appropriate to suggest professional therapeutic support away from the workplace. Signpost as appropriate. For more guidance, read our article on Leadership, Anxiety and Uncertainty.
Managing Behaviour & Boundaries
People don’t always move into a passive ‘victim’ state; some may become aggressive, perhaps when defending their beliefs, or emotional or life experiences. Although this response is understandable, it is rarely appropriate in the workplace and should be discouraged, formally if necessary.
For those new to an organisation, it may be helpful to explain the difference between a workplace and a therapeutic space from the outset.
In other words, take more control by setting limits on what type of information is appropriate to share in which forum.
Building Psychological Safety Over Time
Psychological safety develops over time. It is not created quickly, and it is not the result of single interventions.
Remember, when it is genuinely present, individuals and teams tend to:
- Understand and be able to predict each other’s responses, even when under stressful conditions.
- Share an agreed joint objective
- Know how others behave and how to manage interpersonal risk
- Share relevant personal information appropriately over time
Final Thoughts
Psychological Safety in the workplace is essential for individual and team performance. It is difficult to achieve in general training initiatives delivered to groups of acquaintances in the hierarchical and competitive environments of organisations. Leaders play an important role in maintaining psychological safety in their teams, and it is part of their general ‘duty of care’. This article contains practical advice on how to do this.
You do not have to manage this alone.
Seeking experienced emotional and leadership support can help you work through these situations with greater clarity and confidence. If this is something you are currently managing within your team or organisation, contact Ann at The Performance Practice today.
[1] Effective professionals work to adopt and maintain a neutral stance and one of curiosity (i.e. not making assumptions but finding out). They do not ‘tell’, ‘fix’, ‘judge’ or ‘assume’. When they challenge, they do so within the context of a trusting relationship of mutual respect, and with knowledge about the client. They have years of training in which they’ve worked to identify their own emotional triggers to stay both emotionally present and ‘adult’ during the session. When working, they employ ‘supervision’ – in essence a second opinion from another professional, to ensure they are able to stay neutral.
[2] Some organisations offer psychologically safe spaces within the framework of professionally delivered health and mental health support services. Such services are delivered by professionals whose affiliation is to their governing professional bodies and ethics. They are independent of organisational management and are not part of the organisational hierarchy or politics. These are excluded from this discussion.