Psychological Safety: what is it and why do we need it?
In our previous post about blameless postmortems and blameless culture we touched upon the negative effects of a blaming culture — individuals hiding mistakes, stifled innovation and, more generally, poor morale. This article will be the first part of a series looking at a related term, psychological safety.
Amy Edmondson — widely credited as the inventor of the term — defines psychological safety as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes”. In a 1999 paper on the subject, Edmondson surveyed 53 teams at Office Design Incorporated to determine the effect of “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”. Edmondson found that teams where psychological safety was higher were more effective — they completed their work quicker and to a higher standard.
Since Edmondson coined the term, there has been a good deal more research into the correlation between psychological safety and team performance. Google’s re:Work report calls out psychological safety as a key indicator of team performance and McKinsey have also conducted research to the same effect. Higher psychological safety can result in 50% higher productivity and 106% more energy at work[1]. The benefits are clear but the question remains; how do we create an atmosphere of psychological safety? To answer this question, we will take a look at why psychological safety improves team performance.
According to Edmondson, performance improves in teams where psychological safety is higher as they demonstrate “learning behaviors”. What we mean by this is learning from failure and handling feedback. Edmondson found that the high performing teams believed others’ intentions to be positive when giving feedback and were more likely to learn from this input.
Matthew Syed comes at the concept of “learning behavior” from another angle in his book Rebel Ideas. Syed talks about the benefits of “cognitive diversity” in teams — effectively teams that can bring a greater range of perspectives to a problem are more likely to be able to solve it.
Syed uses the analogy of radiation therapy in cancer treatment: if 10 doses of radiation are administered from the same angle, healthy tissue as well as tumorous tissue are destroyed, but if each dose of radiation is administered from a different direction converging on the tumor, then only the tumorous tissue receives a harmful dose.
The same effect is present when approaching a complex problem in a team. The more different points of view that can be brought to bare the better the chances of solving the issue (see figures 2 & 3). A team of clones will have a limited selection of answers to a problem whereas a team of rebels — people from different backgrounds with different perspectives — will consider a larger range of possibilities, bouncing ideas off one another to filter out the best solution.
The relevance of this idea to psychological safety is that, if a team member is too fearful to voice their opinion, then you lose that perspective when dealing with a problem. Teams where everyone gives their opinion, even if it contradicts the opinion of someone who may be higher in the perceived hierarchy, are demonstrably more effective. Syed calls this concept “constructive dissent”, but you might know it better simply as lively discussion.
This 2021 paper examines the effects of psychological safety on “task conflict” in teams. The study concludes that “disagreements among group members related to the content of their decisions and differences in viewpoints, ideas, and opinions about the task” can actually improve team performance in a high psychological safety environment. Or in other words, as long as everyone remains friends, lively discussion can help us solve complex problems.
I have personal experience of this concept in practice. I was working in a team building out a brand-new toolset on Azure in a highly experienced systems-team full of very vocal personalities. Everyone had an opinion they were passionate about expressing and our discussions were often intense. We were also a team that had a very good relationship inside and outside of work, and we had a team lead who treated everyone as their equal. We developed a good system of crowd sourcing solutions to our most complex problems around a whiteboard and the team eventually won a DevOps Industry award for the project.
Hopefully this article has gone some way towards explaining why we should talk about psychological safety. Here we’ve mainly looked at the positive impact of high psychological safety in teams. In the next instalment we will delve into the effects of low psychological safety on teams — how, to borrow from Frank Herbert’s Dune, “fear is the mind killer”. Until then, please let us know your thoughts on psychological safety in the comments below.
[1] https://www.emcleaders.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/hbr-neuroscience-of-trust.pdf
