Do you feel safe speaking up in your team? Can you voice an unpopular opinion without fear of your colleague’s rebuttal? Will you disagree with your boss knowing that they will value, or at least tolerate your divergent thinking? If you can say “yes” to those questions, then you know what it feels like to have psychological safety.
But if you couldn’t confidently agree with those questions, then you are among the throngs of people who feel psychologically unsafe at work. Your brain is telling you to be on guard, to protect yourself. It’s good to have a brain that keeps you safe. And still, your brain isn’t infallible. It can be a little over-the-top sometimes. So, before you buy what your brain is passing off as fear, interrogate those feelings. Is the fear real? Is it justified? Is it serving you?
Psychological Safety
Here’s my take on what really is a question of psychological safety and what isn’t.
Fear of Harmful Outcomes
It’s possible that you have direct evidence that people who disagree or rock the boat will be punished. If you have examples to show that speaking up might cause you to be yelled at, removed from a project, rated poorly, denied opportunities, or terminated, it makes sense for you to be afraid and therefore to be silent. This is a time when your brain is warning you and you should listen. You have legitimate cause to feel unsafe. The answer in this situation is to seek help from HR and to seek support from peers or leaders with whom you feel comfortable.
While these situations are very serious, I don’t believe they’re all that common.
Fear of Aversive Outcomes
In most situations, if you add a contrary point of view or disagree with the prevailing wisdom on the team, you’re unlikely to be rated poorly or fired. What might happen is that you might be met with counterarguments, you might have the veracity and validity of your information challenged or face a barrage of questions. If you feel unsafe because your ideas might be tested, you might be asked to do additional work, you might have to give up a long-held belief, I encourage you to reframe that as feeling uncomfortable, rather than unsafe. The answer in this situation is to work on your skills to be able to work with constructive criticism and productive conflict so that over time it becomes less frightening to you.
Not Safe from Yourself
There’s one final possibility I’d like to mention. I work with some individuals who feel psychologically unsafe when I can see no objective explanation for their feelings. I watch their managers listen actively and respond in ways that demonstrate they value the diversity of thought. I see their colleagues being responsive and taking the information on board. I don’t see anything that could be classified as uncomfortable being thrown at them. Yet, the fear persists. If you feel unsafe because you believe your team will stop liking you if you don’t go along with them, you won’t make your point perfectly eloquently, or you’re worried about looking less smart than your colleagues, you have a confidence problem, an imposter syndrome problem, not a safety problem. The answer in this situation is not to blame your boss or your colleagues or pin your fear on others. The answer is to seek out reflection, coaching, and perhaps therapy.
Psychological safety is becoming a very popular topic, with good reason. When you don’t feel psychologically safe, you’re unlikely to contribute fully, you won’t throw out creative ideas that spark innovation, you might hesitate to point out issues or concerns that mitigate risk, you won’t sleep well at night. While psychological safety is critical to all of these important obligations, I’m not convinced that it’s the sole responsibility of the organization or the manager to create it. Reflect on how much of your own psychological safety (or lack thereof) you own. How could parsing the parts of your fear that are more generalized anxiety about feeling uncomfortable or unsure help you be happier, healthier, and more productive?
Further Reading
Love the counter point Liane. Are we talking about psychological discomfort (which almost all conflict illicit) or psychological danger. I like your challenge to look inward first!
Thanks, Ren. It’s such a hot topic at that moment and I get concerned when all of the responsibility for psychological safety gets loaded on others, rather than owning some of that “psychological discomfort.”
Anytime we are tempted to assign responsibility for our own experience to someone or something ‘out there’ we could be innocently disempowering ourselves.
Thanks for joining the conversation, Dominic! I agree. In many cases it’s innocently disempowering. In some cases, it’s knowingly resisting the accountability for our own thoughts and behaviours.
Liane, I love how you separate out the reality of psychological safety and not safe from yourself. I also like that you’re asking people to understand where the responsibility is – is it in me, or is it really an issue in my environment.
Janice, I’m glad the distinctions are useful. I’m very empathetic about the real concerns from managers and colleagues who create a toxic workplace. I just worry that fear is starting to go well beyond the objective danger and starting to be a self-perpetuating problem.
As you always do, Liane, thank you for pointing out a holistic approach to psychological safety where we can take ownership of where we may be at on the spectrum. Bravo and thank you.
Thanks Stephen, great teams are full of individuals who understand what they can expect and demand of others and what they must expect and demand of themselves.
Always insightful, Liane. Such a connection between psychological safety and holding yourself to a high level of accountability for producing the ideal environment for growth and a personal sense of achievement. Thank you.
Thanks Mary Jo! It’s painful, I know, but that level of accountability for growth is so powerful!
Hi Liane,
You sure hit the nail on the head. Because in my view, no one can give you psychological safety.
I see too many people frustrating themselves waiting for their work to provide them with psychological safety.
Amy Edmondson, the Harvard professor who introduced the term, defines psychological safety as “an absence of interpersonal fear”. I think working to eliminate interpersonal fear is ultimately futile. Let me tell you why. While toxic work environments certainly do exist that rely on inferiorization, intimidation and aggression to motivate people and to get things done, workers experiencing interpersonal fear is unavoidable regardless of how ‘safe’ the work space might be made to be. Because of how we are wired.
To keep us safe, we are born with nervous systems always on the lookout for threats and danger. Psychological safety can never be found outside of yourself as the protective autonomic nervous system is always being triggered by external stimuli provoking instant internal anxiety and mistrust. All it is capable of ever telling you is the whole world and everything in it is unsafe. Wait all you like, but your external world is not where psychological safety comes from.
Psychological safety comes from within you. It’s something you create within yourself for yourself. One really good way to achieve that in team environments is to make even a small effort to make other people feel psychologically safe, by being interested in and non-judgmental about them, by actively listening to and being open to them. You also do the same thing for yourself, being forgiving of your own shortcomings. It’s remarkable how quickly the desired feeling of psychological safety is experienced by doing this.
And if you find others are not willing to join you in co-creating this place, then maybe consider getting some new playmates.
John, thank you so much for your insightful comments. I agree. I tend to hear psychological safety described as if it’s either present or not present, rather than as a continuum on which you can never reach the end. And much of the work to move on that continuum in internal.