How Psychological Safety at Work Spurs Innovation and Growth

August 28, 2024

Sherry McMenemy

Psychological safety has become a cornerstone of our understanding of healthy workplaces. Amy Edmondson’s work in her book, The Fearless Organization, sets down the key concepts and frameworks of how psychological safety is built, and what happens when it’s missing.

In brief, psychological safety is when there is a “shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” Interpersonal risk is relative. What I see as a risk may be very different from what you see as a risk.

4 levels of psychological safety

Author Timothy R. Clarke outlines 4 levels of psychological safety that are needed for people to be full contributors to organizational performance:

Inclusion safety. Employees feel accepted and recognized for their unique skills and characteristics.
Learner safety. Employees feel comfortable asking questions, experimenting, and seeking feedback.
Contributor safety. Employees are enabled to live up to their full potential using the unique set of skills and strengths they can bring to work.
Challenger safety. Employees feel comfortable enough to challenge the status quo and express dissent openly. Diversity of thought is celebrated.

Silence, uncertainty, and interdependence

Workplace silence is when people don’t say anything, even though they really should. There are several reasons this might happen, including impression management. Essentially, we are conditioned to avoid looking ignorant, admitting mistakes, or asking critical questions. It’s a form of self protection or even personal brand management.

But if we are all in self-protection mode, then we, and our colleagues, miss out on learning moments and create barriers to contributing fully toward creating a better organization. Furthermore, our interdependence to achieve organizational goals means that even a few barriers can prevent us from achieving personal and collective goals.

We have to feel safe against interpersonal risk to overcome those barriers. So, where there is uncertainty and interdependence, according to Edmondson, psychological safety is essential.

Psychological safety and performance standards

The common understanding of psychological safety is a simplified one. The other element is performance standards. In other words, there is still a need for performance expectations and consequences for poor performance.

In the Comfort zone, there is high psychological safety, but performance standards (expectations) are low. This workplace will be comfortable, but not efficient or profitable. High achievers will likely become leavers as they look for positions that will offer them more challenges. Over time, the organization will likely have a lot of B players and very few A players.
In the Apathy zone, both psychological safety and performance standards are low. This is not a healthy workplace. High achievers will likely become leavers, and everyone is at risk of becoming cynics. Over time, the organization will likely show poor performance and very low levels of engagement.
In the Anxiety zone, there are high performance standards, but there is low psychological safety. Managers demand performance, but provide no supports to help people to meet the challenge. Fear of failure is high. As a result, people become very risk averse, to the point where the work suffers.
In the Learning zone, high performance standards are supported with high psychological safety. Because people feel supported, they are open to learning, to asking questions, and to challenging assumptions. There will be experimentation and meaningful engagement as everyone seeks to contribute to meeting performance goals.

Other factors to consider

1. Accountability

Alongside performance standards, there needs to be accountability – both personal and collective – to tie organizational goals into desired outcomes.

Collective accountability is one way that companies avoid the downsides of the Comfort zone. Organizational goals clarify expectations for roles & departments, and they increase a sense of obligation among employees toward each other and to the organization.

Within Volaris, appropriate cascading scorecard goals along with talent management processes are one way we deliver clarity and support accountability.

2. Lots of learning

The strength of psychological safety will be evident when things go wrong. In organizations with high safety, employees perceive risk as a good thing. That means there will be some failures.

Knowing they can take risks and succeed or fail quickly will carry the momentum needed to stay relevant and purse growth goals. When things go wrong, or an experiment fails, it should kick off a learning cycle. Risk-taking and learning from mistakes so the team doesn’t repeat them again are behaviors of high-performing teams. Tolerance is an indicator of sustained psychological safety. Employees and leaders aren’t afraid to be open about mistakes they made, and mistakes are treated as learning opportunities.

Teams regularly review outcomes via audits and retrospectives to extract key learnings. Micro-moments of learning are a regular part of how work gets done. Employees and leaders recognize and take part in learning moments, and everyone is encouraged to display some healthy skepticism.

3. Diversity

Teams embrace and understand how cognitive diversity benefits them via better decision-making and problem-solving capabilities. Leaders encourage autonomy and support flattened power structures to allow employees and teams to take ownership of their performance. Everyone is still working toward collective performance standards and goals together.

4. Efficacy

Efficacy is “the belief that an individual’s ability or competency to perform a particular task will produce a successful outcome.” Group efficacy, then, is the belief of group members that they can accomplish a given task as a team. Your sense of efficacy can play a crucial role in how you approach your goals, tasks, and challenges.

Psychological safety likely positively interacts with efficacy – when you feel safe, you feel more capable, and teams with high psychological safety have a better toolkit for accomplishing their tasks. Learning and training feed efficacy as well.

People managers are key: support and challenge

The psychological safety matrix shows how people react to conditions of low/high safety and low/high performance standards, but it doesn’t tell you how those conditions are created. The Support-Challenge Matrix is a useful way to see how both safety (Support) and standards (Challenge) are needed for personal and organizational growth:

A) Placement on the matrix varies from person to person based on their perception of interpersonal risks, supports, and challenges. You may be in different quadrants for different projects or with different leaders.

B) Managers must focus on different elements of their leadership approach depending on which quadrant they are operating in, which will be situational.

Comfort quadrant: Leaders operating in this environment need to learn how to challenge their teams to stretch their capacities and skills, which might come from struggling with challenging conversations.
Apathy quadrant: Leaders operating in this environment have to rebuild culture as well as morale by moving to a coaching leadership style that incorporates Support and Challenge.
Anxiety quadrant: This environment may generate short-term performance, but it is ineffective long-term as people can’t sustain their efforts without supports. Leaders operating in this environment need to learn how to support their teams to help them to take healthy ownership of their growth and success.
Growth quadrant (Learning zone): When leaders operate in this quadrant, they support their people, but also challenge them to be better.

What psychological safety is not

From all of this, it should be clear that psychological safety is meant to lead to learning and better performance in a safe environment. It’s important to set boundaries on our understanding of what it is by knowing what it is not:

It’s not about being nice. A workplace where everyone is nice and offers unconditional support is in the Comfort zone. A healthy workplace should have productive disagreement, which is needed for learning and innovation.
It’s not about making no mistakes. In fact, Edmondson’s initial research showed that high performing teams seemed to make more mistakes. But further research showed the real difference was that they continuously reveal and talk about mistakes framed as “learning problems” that need everyone’s capabilities to get to good solutions.
It’s not a personality trait. It is not correlated with introversion or extroversion; it’s the work climate. In a psychologically safe environment, introverts will have the space to participate.
It’s not another word for trust. Trust can be an element, but we experience psychological safety as a group. Trust may be a person-to-person experience. A team or workplace can be safe even with some people we don’t trust in it.
It’s not about lowering performance standards. Making feel people safe by removing accountability is not actually psychological safety. Psychological safety and performance standards are two separate, equally important dimensions—both of which affect team and organizational performance in a complex interdependent environment.

Building psychological safety and performance standards

There’s lots of advice out there about building psychological safety, but the key is to always also think about performance standards in how you go about it. Here are some suggestions:

Explicitly discuss and value psychological safety. Make sure people understand why it’s necessary.
When leading teams or projects, manage team dynamics and encourage participation from all members, thinking about how cognitive diversity has a positive impact on decision-making and problem-solving.
Build a coaching culture that values authentic expression, candor, and open-mindedness, while also challenging people to be accountable for their performance goals.
Encourage a default response of curiosity as a leadership behavior and use tools such as data-driven decisions and experimentation to turn curiosity into actionable insights.
Treat mistakes and informed risk-taking as learning opportunities.
Train leaders to develop their capabilities to manage conflict openly and respectfully, and to be good coaches.