1. Make psychological safety an explicit priority.

Talk about the importance of creating psychological safety at work, connecting it to a higher purpose of promoting more significant organizational innovation, team engagement, and a sense of inclusion. Model the behaviors you want to see and set the stage by showing empathy in the workplace.

2. Facilitate everyone speaking up.

Show genuine curiosity, and honor honesty and truth-telling. Be open-minded, compassionate, and empathetic when someone is brave enough to say something challenging the status quo. Organizations with a coaching culture will more likely have team members with the courage to speak the truth.

3. Establish norms for how failure is handled.

Don’t punish experimentation and (reasonable) risk-taking. Encourage learning from failure and disappointment, and openly share your hard-won lessons learned from mistakes. Doing so will help encourage innovation instead of sabotaging it.

4. Create space for new ideas (even wild ones).

Provide the challenge in a more significant support context when challenging an idea. Consider whether you only want ideas that have been thoroughly tested or whether you’re willing to accept highly creative, out-of-the-box ideas that are not yet well-formulated. Learn how to embrace new ideas to foster more innovative mindsets on your team.

5. Embrace productive conflict.

Promote dialogue and productive debate, and work to resolve conflicts productively. Leaders can set the stage for incremental change by establishing team expectations for factors that contribute to psychological safety. With your team, discuss the following questions:

• How will team members communicate their concerns about a process that isn’t working?
• How can reservations be shared with colleagues respectfully?
• What are our norms for managing conflicting perspectives?

If all this sounds like a tall order, remember that psychological safety represents an organization’s climate and culture.And when you consider the enormity of changing a culture, it can feel overwhelming.

Altman notes that transformation comes in small steps. He suggests thinking about it to make incremental changes that yield total wins.

“Most of us agree we could make a 1% improvement in a goal we have each day,” he says. “Ask colleagues if they’re willing to sign up for 1% each day. By the end of the year, you’re over 30 times better,” he says.

Team Members Can Help Create More Psychological Safety at Work, Too

While leaders play a role in shaping their team’s culture, it’s up to each team member to contribute to a psychologically safe climate at work as well.

“A culture is simplistically defined by ‘the way we do things around here,’” says Altman. “We all have a role to play in doing things at work — both on our team and our organization.”

Team members can take the following steps to promote productive dialog and debate:

• Ask colleagues powerful, open-ended questions and then listen actively and intently to understandfeelings, values, and facts.
• Agree to share failures, recognizing that mistakes are an opportunity to learn and grow.
• Use sincerity, whether expressing appreciation or disappointment.
• Ask for help, and freely give help when asked.
• Embrace expertise among many versus a single “hero” mentality.
• Encourage and express gratitude, which reinforces your team members’ sense of self.

Most importantly, positive interactions and conversations between individuals are built on trust. Give your team members the benefit of the doubt when they take a risk, ask for help, or admit a mistake. In turn, trust that they will do the same for you.

Leaders can also strengthen the quality of dialogue across the organization, from the front desk to the corner office. Quite literally, better conversations will lead to a better culture. Improved conversational skills, combined with a psychologically safe environment, will yield more willing colleagues to share unspoken reservations and proposed solutions that are stress-tested more rigorously before implementation.

To summarize, psychological safety is about individuals creating a safe and healthy environment for everyone in the organization. It is built on trust, innovation, and creativity. It’s also about having a sense of truly belonging to the community of similar or differently-minded people while intentionally cultivating respectful relationships with each other.

By instilling psychological safety in a professional setting, the work environment becomes safe for interpersonal risk-taking This will benefit the organizational culture as it becomes more robust, dynamic, and innovative.

Is psychological safety a priority for you and your team? Let’s work together and build psychological safety at your workplace! Get in touch with us by emailing us at info.ph@mgtstrat-asia.com (Philippines) or info.my@mgtstrat-asia.com (Malaysia). Check out our events schedule for upcoming learning sessions on related topics.