What Psychological Safety Has to Do with IT
Building a Psychologically Safe Workplace Through Intelligent Failure
In today's era of remote work and frequent changes in the job marketplace, psychological safety is becoming an ever more critical aspect of a healthy and productive workplace. But what is psychological safety, how is it threatened, and how can we build it in our own work environments? Let's delve into these puzzling aspects.
Understanding Psychological Safety
To begin, it is crucial to understand that psychological safety in the workplace is not an excuse to say anything to anyone without any filters. Nor is it about constantly being "nice" or lowering performance standards. The concept of psychological safety goes beyond these misconceptions. Here's what leading professionals have to say about it:
- Amy Edmondson, sometimes seen as the pioneer of psychological safety, defines it as a supportive atmosphere where employees are not exempt from consequences, and high performance standards are paired with high psychological safety.
- Google's Project Aristotle defines psychological safety as fostering an environment where team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.
- Timothy Clark, author of The Four Stages of Psychological Safety, sees it as granting permission to learn, contribute, and innovate without fear.
By creating an office culture where ideas can be shared, questions asked, mistakes admitted, and experiments conducted without fear, we directly contribute to a more psychologically safe environment.
What Can Put Psychological Safety at Risk?
Research in Frontiers in Psychology points out that if employees feel their ideas and actions are valued, they are more likely to rise to challenging tasks. This is an essential aspect of psychological safety.
However, Gallup has found that only three out of 10 employees strongly agree that their opinions count at work. When employees do not feel safe to express their ideas, the environment becomes toxic and suppresses creativity and innovation. It's important to be vigilant about such perils in our workplaces.
How to Build Psychological Safety?
One of the most useful ways to build psychological safety is through promoting intelligent failure. It's not about giving unlimited permission to fail but allowing an adequate latitude to learn from mistakes and grow. According to Carol Dweck, psychologist and author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, those who see mistakes as opportunities to improve, embody the growth mindset, an integral aspect of psychological safety.
An example of intelligent failure put into action can be seen in the approach of Patrick Kua, former CTO and chief scientist of a company N26. He believes in putting himself through the same process of learning and failing as his team and that failing and learning from it is a normal act.
Conclusion
Overall, building a psychologically safe environment in the workplace leads to better productivity and happier employees. By allowing intelligent failure, fostering a growth mindset, and valuing employees' ideas, we are enabling them to thrive and unlock their full potential. This is the magic of psychological safety.
Building a psychologically safe workplace is indeed challenging, but the results are worth it: lower employee turnover, fewer safety incidents, and increased productivity. So, what is something you will do to build psychological safety in your workplace? Let's start the discussion and share our thoughts.
Remember, psychological safety is not about doing anything you want, but when we create a safe environment that fosters growth and understanding, impressive results can be achieved for organizations and teams. Every step we take towards creating a more psychologically safe workplace is a step towards that remarkable success.
Video Transcription
Thank you, but thank you for joining me. Uh I'm here for the next 20 minutes to talk about what psychological safety has to do with it and honestly, psychological safety has to do with everything in the workplace.Uh And especially those in it because what we're finding in the current state with COVID is employees are being poached, so to speak. So I am hearing from leaders in the tech space that because of those boundaries have removed those geographic boundaries, that companies all over the world have access to their employees. And so some companies are really losing good employees and one way you can strengthen your workplace so those employees will stay in your organization or so you stay where you currently work at is to build more psychological safety in your workplace. And the whole idea of psychological safety has taken on just a huge, a huge microscope given the last year, year and a half. So before I go any further, give me a moment here to introduce myself. I am Jeanette Grace. I am the CEO and owner of expressive communication consulting and training. I am a communication consulting business located out of Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States.
And I've been doing my business specifically for about a decade but doing training and development and speaking about all things communication related with psychological safety for, I hate to say it but about 25 years. So if you want to get in touch with me, you are welcome to use that QR code that you see right there. You can use your, your phone, grab a little snap of that and that will direct you and you can easily connect with me there or you can find me on linkedin Jeanette Grace with two Ns. Otherwise you may not find me or also on Twitter, expressive Pr NG for training and then as well my business Facebook page which is expressive CCT. So that's a little bit about me, but you're here to learn more about what psychological safety has to do with it. So let's jump into that. So what is psychological safety as I've been talking to leaders in the last year around psychological safety? I find that not everybody completely understands what it is and what I have heard from some leaders, sadly is they feel that it feels too soft or too touchy, feely for the workplace to really want to invest in.
And actually psychological safety has some measurable result, results, which is important to know. So let's first talk about what psychological safety is not, what isn't it? What are the fallacies or the misconceptions that people have out there around psychological safety. So one is, well, if there's psychological safety in the workplace, I have permission to say what I want, how I want when I want to, whomever I want. And that actually just creates a toxic workplace. We don't want people to feel so safe that they don't have any filter or that they don't, that they lose all judgment of how they're communicating with the people that they work with and the people that they work for, it's also not just about being nice because we can still be firm and have expectations and still be professional.
So if you think psychological safety means that I just have to be nice to everyone that I work with or the people on my team that is actually not what it is. And I just want to take a moment. I see that there are a couple of people um Andre Asmita, if I'm mispronouncing your name. Um I wish I, I wish you could let me know, but I want to say hello to you because I've, I've noticed that you put a little message in the chat. So welcome specifically to you. All right, Amy Edmondson. Let's talk about her for a moment. She is sometimes the seen as the pioneer of psychological safety. So she had done research a couple of decades ago, really rooted in the health care field. And she has in her book, The Fearless Organization that Psychological safety is not about being exempt from consequences. So in the workplace, if you do things that are bad, if you do things to hurt other people, that there still need to be consequences. So don't think of psychological safety is just this permission to do what you want and that there isn't any consequence that will follow. It's also not about lower lowering performance standards. The best environments where they call them learning environments where employees do their best work is when you have a combination of both this high psychological safety as well as re high expectations or really clear expectations. So employees can rise to what you're asking them to do.
So let's now switch to what psychological safety actually is. So there was, if you haven't heard of this, a large research project that was done between 2012, 2014 at Google, it's called project Aristotle when they did this research and they included team members, managers, supervisors, uh executive team, they included the sales team and then they also looked at the results of employee performance and sales performance.
And the number one factor in success was psychological safety and this is how they define it. Team members feel safe, they feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. So that's one way of looking at psychological safety. And that in this research, it shows when we provide that type of environment, we actually get the best results from our employees measurable results. All right. Another spin on psychological safety. This is by Timothy Clark. He has a book called The Four Stages of Psychological Safety.
It's permission permission for us in the workplace to learn, learn and take some risks to contribute to share our ideas without fear and to also innovate to experiment. I like to think sometimes of psychological safety as productive disagreement because when we have safety, we get to disagree with one another. So take, for example, you're trying to problem solve an it issue, you want productive disagreement, you want people challenging one another in a productive way.
All right, Amy Edmondson, back to our pioneer of psychological safety. It is when a team can focus on achieving their shared goals without spending their time and their energy on self protection or how I like to define psychological safety. It's where we create that workplace culture, where we can share ideas, we can ask questions, we can admit to our mistakes and we can experiment without fear. So taking that definition, let's go forward into what puts psychological safety at risk so that you can be aware of maybe some of the challenges you have in your workplace. All right. This came out of a research article just published last year in frontiers in psychology and quoting this, it says if individuals are under an atmosphere that highly values their ideas and actions, employees can adapt themselves even to challenging risks. Or challenging tasks.
So you can have a really challenging environment. But if those employees feel that their ideas and their actions are valued, they are going to rise to the occasion. That's why we want to create psychological safety. So following that some research that Gallup did in 2017 is they found that three out of 10 employees strongly agree that their opinions count at work. So this is almost the antithesis of that research that I just talked about that came out in 2020. So only three out of 10 employees feel this. So we're really missing the boat here in creating psychological safety. Um I wanna just look here in the chat for a moment. Um Hello to Shana from Glasgow. Um Let's see. Uh Samita, I got your name correct. Thank you. Uh Simone from France. And let's see, a very challenging topic. Uh um workplace, workplace ptsd because of a traumatic event that happened in an open office environment. Yeah, Lisa, thank you for sharing that. Thank you for being transparent. Um What I would recommend there.
Um Oh gosh, and, and now I'm drawing a blank. Um oh, completely drawing a blank. His name is Paul. He's out of Canada. Um His last name escapes me but Lisa, if you connect with me and you remind me, I will put you. Um I'll at least try to connect the two of you. He does a lot of uh work around bullying in the workplace. Um, that he too has been through an experience like yours. He was an attorney and went through some really terrible things that created some traumatic stress. So, um, if you're interested, uh, let me know, co connect with me outside of here and I will get you his information. He posts a lot of really good stuff on, on linkedin. And I, again, I apologize. I can't remember his last name. All right. So let's go back to this research. So those we only have three out of 10 employees that are feeling this. Well, here's what Gallup figured out if we were to double that number to six out of 10. If they strongly agreed, here's what would happen. We would have a decrease of turnover of our employees by 27%. That's pretty phenomenal. This is where we save our organization money because we're not retraining people. We would also, if safety is an issue in the work that you do or in part of the company that you work at, there would be a decrease of safety incidents by 40% and then finally, an increase, 12% increase in productivity.
This is why we wanna create psychological safety. So how do we do that? How do we help you to build psychological safety? And I wanna say this, you may not be a formal leader, meaning you may not have a team that you are tasked with leading. You might be an individual contributor, but nonetheless, you can still contribute to building psychological safety in your workplace. Do you maybe not have as much power as someone in a formal leadership role while it depends, it depends on how much influence you have in your organization.
Do people listen to you? Do people respect you? Which also, by the way, let me say this at 1250 I'm doing another presentation that's about influence. So if that's of interest, join me at 1250. And Simone leadership is not a t it is an act of being I 100% agree with you. So, so I, I echo that, I echo that to the ends of this planet. OK. So here's what I'm going to talk about here is intelligent failure, learning to fail, but doing it intelligently, this is one of the key components of building psychological safety. So recently I came across an article that I thought was interesting. It quoted and talked about Patrick Kua.
He's the former CTO and chief scientist at a company called in 26. And what he does you'll see here is he puts himself through the same process of failing and learning that he does his team. So he expects the same of himself as he does of his team and then he makes that process explicit, he makes it open. So everybody knows that it's normal that it's OK to fail. So taking on that attitude, embodying that attitude is something that's going to help you to build more psychological safety. So I'm gonna share with you some research that I did. This is a, a book that I published a few years ago. It's called G Factor Eight Secrets to Increasing your gravitational pull at work, which is what my talk is really about later today at 1250. But there's a piece in this book that fits into intelligent failure and it ties into this idea that we need to grant people permission other people as well as ourselves permission to make mistakes, permissions to permission to fail. So here is some research behind it. And again, let me go to the chat for a moment. I see that's a great point acting from a position of influence rather than only acting because you have a title manager or leader.
Yes and latanya, there are leaders out there that, that have, you know, the biggest title in the organization, the highest ranking title, but they might fail to really lead people. Those are the people I help, right? I I this is what I do, I help leaders do these type of things. All right. So let me give you some research that supports what I found in my own research. This is Carol Dweck. If you haven't been introduced to Carol Je Google, her, she has a great TED talk. She also has a book called Mindset, The New Psychology of Success that came out in 2009. So after years of research, she has under or been able to help us understand that people who have a fixed mindset, they see mistakes as limitations. Whereas people who have a growth mindset see mistakes as ways to improve. So we want to embody this growth mindset that through failure, we learn when we embody that and when we work in that manner, we then create a more psychologically safe environment. All right, quick story. This is a um if any of you have used a post, it note that came out of a mistake. There was a gentleman who wanted to create basically a removable bookmark for his hymnal. He had adhesive without residue, it didn't stick. And that's what became the removable bookmark.
So the adhesive wasn't working as it should have. And this is, this is a, you know, multibillion dollar industry where everyone uses post its so mistakes are ways to learn. All right, let me go here to an article that I just recently read this um is Alison Catalano. She has a phd and she wrote that speaking up can be interpersonally risky. And this is why psychological safety is hard. We spend our time. Generally speaking, when we don't work in a psychologically safe environment, we spend a lot of our time and energy managing interpersonal risk, managing relationships. Can I say this? Should I say this? If I say this? Will someone laugh at me? Well, they think that my question is a dumb question. So speaking up feels very interpersonally risky. And that is why psychological safety is important because it plays a crucial role in enabling difficult conversations that we need to have so that we can learn more, learn often from how we fail. So we want to be creating an environment where it's ok to fail. Now, let me say this. It isn't that we give carte blanche or all the permission on the planet to fail. This is intelligent failure.
So we need to weigh the risks with the amount of failure that, that somebody has been given permission to do a team ourselves as a leader or not as, as an official leader. So think about the risk. For example, if I have an employee that is learning something new, how much latitude do I give that employee to make mistakes, to fail to come back and say I screwed it up or I couldn't figure it out because if the risk is low enough, that's how they're going to learn. That's how you get the best work from that employee. Just as it is with you, you will do your best work when you can fail in a safe environment because you get to be more creative, you get to be more innovative, you get to in um experiment and come up with ideas because you're not held within certain parameters that are going to quash that creativity.
So my question to you as we have just a few minutes here is I would like to know what is something you will do to build psychological safety. And I'm looking here at the chat UK has a fabulous advertisement just now for armed forces all about growing from failure. Oh my gosh, Shana, I want to find that I am gonna Google that. Thank you for telling me. Um And I see Simone said during my service time, it depended on what you might fail at. That's a double edged feeling on that statement with a wry smile, right? Because psychological safety isn't about just failing all of the time. Again. We're talking here about intelligent fail.
Um Also in, in the world of positive psychology, there is, at least here in the United States, the army goes through positive psychology training and it can really dovetail nicely with building psychological safety in our workplaces. All right, we're just at a couple of minutes here and um as we, as we wrap up, I just wanna throw this up there again. So if you want to get in touch with me, I do blog once a week. Uh Right now I've been doing a series on psychological safety, those get posted on linkedin and Twitter and my Facebook business page. Um But you can also subscribe to my newsletter so you can use that QR code code to get in touch with me. And um as we finish up here again, as I say, as we finish up here, what questions might you have for me? Because I could talk about psychological safety all day. And you're very welcome, Magdalena. Thank you for joining me. So just as in this last moment, I'll just leave you with, with this thought on, on psychological safety. It isn't permission to just do what you want when you want and how you want. But when we create that, that environment, that culture of psychological safety, magic can happen in our organization and on our teams. And when that magic happens, the results are really remarkable.
So if you haven't read anything, um if you haven't dipped your toes into it, go out there, do some research, connect with me. I'm happy to share what I know. So, um oh and Andre, thank you so much. Yeah, it is unfortunate that this is only 20 minutes. It's just a, just a, a little snippet into the, the really big and magnificent world of psychological safety. All right. Thank you very much for joining me and I wish you an absolutely great conference and maybe I'll see you back at 1250 to talk about influence. So, thank you so much, everyone.