Candour and Curiosity: 4 Ways You Can Develop Psychological Safety in Your Team

In 2015, Google released the results of a two-year internal study which showed that the highest-performing teams had one thing in common: psychological safety. Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Psychological safety isn’t about being nice; it’s about being candid, taking risks, openly admitting and accepting failures, and learning from your team and the mistakes you’ve made.

However, psychological safety in the workplace is rare. If psychological safety is such an important component of high-performing teams, why is it rare to come across?

Human nature

Psychological safety is rare because it’s human nature to want to look good and to prevent failure at all costs. Psychological safety means that you feel comfortable being vulnerable in front of others, and being vulnerable opens you up to criticism, failure, or negative feedback. It’s instinctual for us to agree with the boss’ ideas, deflect blame onto others, or become defensive when challenged or criticised. We stay quiet in meetings until we know that our ideas are correct and likeable, and we avoid trying new things because we don’t want to be the first one to try something and fail in front of others. Wouldn’t it be great if someone else could be the first to stick their neck out and we could learn from their mistakes? These instincts to protect our egos and reputations are amplified even more in organisations with strong hierarchies.

How to increase psychological safety in your team

The good news is that there are steps you can take to increase psychological safety in your team now. Your whole team or boss doesn’t need to be on board to do this; you can begin cultivating it yourself and leading by example by embracing a mindset that supports psychological safety. Below are a few ways you can do this.

Change the way you approach conflict

Humans hate losing so much that we would rather not lose than win at all. A perceived loss or failure triggers another instinctual reaction as we attempt to reestablish fairness through competition, blame, criticism, or defensiveness. A win-win situation is the best outcome, so when faced with a conflict, avoid the knee-jerk fight-or-flight reaction and ask yourself how you can work towards achieving a mutually desirable outcome.

Change the way you approach failure

Much like the above tip, we can cultivate psychological safety by changing how we view failure. The fear of failure elicits many “what if” statements — what if they don’t like my idea? What if I’m criticised? What if I fail? Contrary to popular belief, failure doesn’t only lead to negative outcomes. Failure can be positive, too. Failure is part of the journey and means learning and developing your skills through trial and error — what can I learn? What can I develop? How can I improve? How will this bring me closer to my team?

Replace anger and blame with curiosity

Imagine that one of your team members has just come to you with some bad news. They’ve fallen behind on their responsibilities, or they’ve made mistakes on a vital project. It’s natural to be disappointed, but it’s important not to get angry. Getting angry accomplishes one thing only — it decreases the likelihood that they will come to you and alert you of their problems next time. In these instances, reply with something like “Thank you for being clear, how can we get back on track?”. Because getting back on track is what matters to both of you, anyway, not blame or anger. Blame and criticism almost always escalate the conflict to defensiveness and disengagement. The alternative to blame is curiosity — adopt a learning mindset when faced with conflicts. You can state the problem as a neutral observation (“I’ve noticed your engagement in meetings has dropped lately), engage them in exploration (“I acknowledge there are multiple factors at play, can we discover what they are together?”), and ask for solutions (“What do you think needs to happen here?”).

Ask for feedback

Psychological safety is about continuously learning. Asking for feedback on how you delivered your message or approached a task or issue will increase trust, illuminate blind spots, help you positively grow, and encourage others to reflect on the same.

Psychological safety fosters innovation, creativity, risk-taking, and speaking candidly. By adopting a psychologically safe mindset, you and your team will see higher engagement levels, increased motivation, higher learning and innovation, and better performance overall.