What is psychological safety and why does it matter?
Early in my career I worked as a project manager on digital projects. A large part of this role was maintaining documents like project plans, status reports, risk registers and project timelines. I spent a lot of time making these “perfect”.
After successfully managing a number of smaller projects, I was given the opportunity to manage the largest website build that I’d done to date. I was working with a new team, which I’ll admit made me a little nervous, but I was determined to do a good job. So I got to work creating the essential documents. I remember the project timeline in particular was a thing of beauty. It had hundreds of lines of tasks and subtasks, dependencies, milestones and assignees. Importantly, it showed that we were going to deliver to the deadlines set by the client.
2 months into the 6 month project, things were starting to go off the rails. Development was running behind schedule and I didn’t understand why. I had validated my timeline with the team, and in our weekly status meetings they assured me that everything was fine and they would be able to make up for lost time. And yet, day by day, we fell further and further behind.
As we approached the 3 month mark I called an urgent meeting with the whole team. I had to figure out what was going on and how to fix it. I handed out A3 printouts of the project timelines and started working through it with the team. After a few minutes I noticed that people were looking confused, so I asked what the issue was. The response floored me - the tech lead admitted that he didn’t know how to read the timeline. Other team members nodded in agreement.
Almost halfway through the project, reviewing the timeline every week at our status meetings, and they didn’t know how to read it?! I wish that I could say that this was a lightbulb moment for me. That I realised then and there that I was the problem and that I needed to change how I interacted with the team. That I had not created a space where they felt safe to admit that they didn’t understand, to ask questions and to voice concerns. However, it was only later that I learned about psychological safety and its importance in creating high-performing teams.
"Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that it's OK to take risks, to express their ideas and concerns, to speak up with questions, and to admit mistakes - all without fear of negative consequences"1
In this article, I’ll cover why psychological safety is important, how you can understand it in your team and actions that you can take to improve it.
Why psychological safety matters
The executive summary is that psychological safety leads to happier people and teams and better results. There are a few parts to this, so let’s break it down.
Improve teamwork and collaboration
It has been shown that increased psychological safety leads to improved teamwork and collaboration. Teams with high psychological safety have higher levels of trust and communicate better. Because team members are comfortable speaking up with ideas, giving feedback and acknowledging mistakes, problems are less likely to be ignored. This doesn't mean that everyone is nice to each other all the time or that everyone always agrees.
There's still conflict. But it's useful conflict. The team can explore different opinions and agree on a course of action knowing that everyone's voice has been heard.
Encourage innovation and creativity
By definition, innovation and creativity are about coming up with something new. There is a degree of risk involved. Will I be judged by others? Perhaps what I'm suggesting is not good enough? An environment where you feel comfortable to suggest something completely new and to take risks is necessary for true innovation.
This is not a new idea. In fact Carl Rogers said in 1954: "by setting up conditions of psychological safety and freedom, we maximize the likelihood of an emergence of constructive creativity"2.
Create a feedback culture
One of the best ways to learn and grow is through feedback. Psychological safety is a prerequisite for creating a feedback culture. It cultivates an environment where people are comfortable giving and receiving feedback and advice and it makes it ok to make mistakes and learn from them.
Improve employee engagement and retention
Studies have shown that high psychological safety correlates with higher employee engagement and retention. It makes sense when you think about it. If people enjoy working in their team, feel comfortable contributing their ideas and have opportunities to learn and grow, they're going to be more engaged with their work.
Positively impact mental health and wellbeing
This in turn can affect people's mental health and well-being. Sure, being engaged with work is part of it. But psychological safety also means that people can bring their whole self to work, admit when they're not doing ok (and get support if they need it), and have open and honest conversations.
Google’s view: Project Aristotle
In 2014, Google quantified the impact of psychological safety in a study called Project Aristotle3. In this study, they found that psychological safety was the single biggest predictor of team effectiveness. They measured this over 4 dimensions:
Executive evaluation
Team leader evaluation
Team member evaluation
Sales performance against quarterly quota
In other words, teams with high psychological safety were judged to perform better in all of these areas.
Understanding your team’s psychological safety
Here are 3 quick techniques you can use to understand your team’s current level of psychological safety. They don’t have the rigour of a more formal survey (which we’ll cover in a future article), but they do have the benefit of being easy to implement.
Monitor conversational equality
The easiest thing to do, and usually a good place to start, is to monitor conversational equality. For a given team, across a series of meetings, monitor how much each person in the team contributes. Do some team members tend to commandeer the conversation or speak over others? Are there individuals who rarely or never say anything? Or does everyone speak roughly the same amount? A lack of conversational equality is an indicator that a team or group may not feel psychologically safe.
A good trick is to write down the names of all the team members, then monitor who speaks in meetings over the course of a week or so. Put a dot next to the relevant name each time that person speaks. At the end of the week you will have created a visualisation of the team's level of conversational equality.
Monitor topics of conversation
Monitoring the amount people speak is one thing, but it's also important to pay attention to the topics of conversation. Common indicators that a team may not feel psychologically safe include:
Team members not suggesting ideas or expressing dissenting opinions
People not asking for help when they need it
Lack of feedback
People scared to take risks or try new things
People not admitting to mistakes
A good example of monitoring for a lack of dissenting opinions comes to us from Alfred P. Sloan, president and chairman and CEO of Ford from the 1920's - 1950s. When trying to come to a decision with his executive team he once said:
"If we are all in agreement on the decision - then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about."
Run polls
Finally, you can run short polls. This can be as simple as asking a question at the end of a team meeting about how comfortable people are to take risks, share ideas, etc. Or you could create a simple anonymous poll using an online tool.
Here are some questions for inspiration (suggested by Natasha Tamiru from Google UK4):
Do you struggle to have tough conversations?
Do you feel judged and team members disrespect each other?
Do you fear asking for or delivering constructive feedback?
Are you or others hesitant about expressing divergent ideas or asking “silly” questions?
Do you feel you cannot make mistakes or take risks?
Are team discussions dominated by a few strong voices that marginalise other people’s perspectives?
Are your team members competitive with each other?
Actions you can take to foster psychological safety
While it's true that leaders have a larger impact on psychological safety, everyone contributes to creating a psychologically safe environment. Try out these tips to help improve psychological safety in your team.
Teach your teams about psychological safety
The first thing to do is teach your team about psychological safety. Simply being aware of the concept can change people's mindset. This is not a one-off activity, but an ongoing process. Make sure that your team understands what it is and why it's important. Talk about it. Assess yourselves on it regularly. Make it a topic that you cover in your retrospectives.
Practise ostentatious listening
Every time you interact with a team member or colleague, be present and make a conscious choice - either give people 100% of your attention or tell them that you can't talk right now, and book a time to talk later when you are able to give them your full attention. Ostentatious listening is about truly paying attention to the person who is speaking and showing them that you're paying attention. It means:
Closing your laptop and putting away your phone (and stop looking at notifications on your smart watch while you’re at it!)
Looking at the person speaking
Not thinking about a meeting you had this morning or a task that you need to do this afternoon
Not even thinking about what you're going to say in response
Simply listening and giving them the space to have their say
Playing back what you heard in your own words when they finish speaking to demonstrate you listened and understood
Treat the work as a learning problem
In today’s workplace, much of the work we do is complex - there is a high level of uncertainty and interdependence. As complexity increases so too does the need for psychological safety. In this context, it’s helpful to remember that what our teams are solving is a learning problem, not an execution problem. Sure they are trying to achieve an outcome, but often the best way to do this is by learning as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Framing the work in this way gives people permission to suggest new ideas, challenge existing assumptions and admit to and learn from mistakes. All of which have been shown to correlate with high performance.
Here’s a simple way you can put this into practice with your team. Next time something goes wrong, instead of asking why it happened, or whose fault it was, ask: “what did you learn?”
Acknowledge your own fallibility
Admit that you don't have all the answers. That you've made mistakes in the past and will inevitably do so again in the future. This could be as simple as sharing relevant stories about past mistakes. Or saying things like "I may miss something I need to hear from you", or "I've never done anything like this before. I need your help."
Respond productively
Encourage people to speak up with ideas, acknowledging when they have taken risks and supporting open discussions about mistakes. This can be as simple as saying something like "hey that's interesting, l'd like to learn more" when someone suggests an idea. As Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford once said:
"You are not the problem. You have a problem. And if you tell me about the problem, we can all rally together to help fix it."
Conclusion
We eventually delivered that website. It was 2 months late, which resulted in negative feedback from the client and a tense post implementation review. The positive that I take from the experience is that it led me to reassess how I interacted with teams. It reinforced that effective collaboration and open communication are essential for getting good results, and it made me rethink how I worked.
These days I prioritise psychological safety with all of the groups that I work with because I understand how important it is. Sure, you might get stuff done without it, but in my experience teams with high psychological safety are happier and get better results.
If you want to learn more, I recommend Amy Edmondson’s book, the Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. You should also check out the article that I wrote about authority gradient - a related concept from aviation and paramedicine.
References
A. Gallo, ‘What Is Psychological Safety?’, Harvard Business Review, 16 Feb 2023 (accessed 27 Feb 2025)
C. Rogers, 'Toward a theory of creativity', ETC: A Review of General Semantics, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1954, p. 249-260
Google, ‘Understand team effectiveness’, Google re:Work (accessed 27 Feb 2025)
N. Tamiru, ‘Team dynamics: The five keys to building effective teams’, Think with Google, Jun 2023 (accessed 28 Feb 2025)
