Learning begins with psychological safety. One only has to look to the definition of the term to see the truth of the statement.

The author of the concept, Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, defines the concept as “a workplace where one feels that one’s voice is welcome with bad news, questions, concerns, half- baked ideas and even mistakes.” When put in the context of learning, it means employees should feel comfortable with doing all of these things in a learning or training environment without the pressure or concern of repercussions.

Psychological Safety

The Research

Knowing the definition of psychological safety isn’t the end-all, be-all of its application in the workplace. It takes real effort on the part of management to create this type of environment where employees can thrive and learn successfully. This is not only to their benefit, but to the benefit of the organization as well. According to McKinsey & Company research:

“Leaders can build psychological safety by creating the right climate, mindsets, and behaviors within their teams. In our experience, those who do this best act as catalysts, empowering and enabling other leaders on the team—even those with no formal authority—to help cultivate psychological safety by role modeling and reinforcing the behaviors they expect from the rest of the team.”

Adding to that, a 2017 report from Gallup reported organizations with increased psychologically safe environments saw more employees engaged with their work, which created the possibility of garnering a 12 percent increase in productivity. Google released a psychological safety study of their own. While studying their employees in an attempt to determine what makes a good team, the organization discovered that psychological safety was the most important piece of the puzzle.

Researchers continue on by saying a positive team climate is the most important driver for psychological safety among teams. In fact, a positive team climate which promotes psychological safety has a tremendous impact on employees. A perfect example of this would the ability of a team to weather change such as that seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Additionally, the 2019 People Management Report found “managers who create psychological safe work environments are less likely to experience employee turnover on their teams. If you want to retain top performers, ensure psychological safety across the whole company.

Furthermore, McKinsey reports:

“As considerable prior research shows, psychological safety is a precursor to adaptive, innovative performance—which is needed in today’s rapidly changing environment—at the individual, team, and organization levels.³ For example, successfully creating a “network of teams”—an agile organizational structure that empowers teams to tackle problems quickly by operating outside of bureaucratic or siloed structures—requires a strong degree of psychological safety.”

Building a Psychologically Safe Environment

As with all things, before building this psychologically safe environment for employees, it must start with leadership. To be more specific, it starts with measuring psychological safety within the organization.

The Predictive Index (PI) has compiled a list of nine signs that point to a lack of psychological safety within an organization:

• Employees don’t ask many questions during meetings.
• Employees don’t feel comfortable owning up to mistakes or place blame on others when mistakes are made.
• The team avoids difficult conversations and hot-button topics.
• Executives and team leaders tend to dominate meeting discussions.
• Feedback is not frequently given or requested.
• Employees don’t often venture outside of their job descriptions to support other teammates.
• Employees don’t ask one another for help when they need it. 
• There are hardly any disagreements or differing points of view.
• Employees don’t know one another personally, just professionally

If these signs are present, it’s time to poll employees to see if the problem can be diagnosed. There are multiple ways with which to gather the information. PI suggests a simple survey. Ask employees to rate seven statements on a scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.

1. People at this organization are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
2. I feel safe to take a risk in this organization.
3. It is difficult to ask other members of this organization for help.
4. No one at this organization would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
5. Working with members of this organization, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.
6. If I make a mistake at this organization, it is often held against me.
7. People at this organization sometimes reject others for being different.

PI says “a positive response to the first five statements, along with a negative response to the final two statements, indicates strong psychological safety.”

Creating and/or Making Improvements

Regardless of where the organization is with respect to creating or improving upon the current strategy around psychological safety, Laura Delizonna, PhD, has some advice on how to do so as learned from Google’s Head of Industry Paul Santagata.

Delizonna, by the way, is an executive coach, instructor at Stanford University, international speaker, and founder of ChoosingHappiness.com.

A CLO View of Psychological Safety

To get a real-world view of psychological safety, it’s important to talk to an actual Chief Learning Officer about the subject. Christopher Lind is the VP and Chief Learning Officer for ChenMed. Below is an interview I conducted with him via email about the topic.

Mason Stevenson

Is psychological safety a priority for just you or the entire organization?  A better question might be… do you talk about the topic with your teams and/or leaders?

Christopher Lind

This is a regular topic of conversation with my direct team and entire organization, albeit, we don’t use the term “psychological safety.” Like with so many things in our industry, I’ve found when we use the fancy words, it creates more confusion than clarity. As such, we talk about it in layman’s terms. Regularly in team meetings we bring up what we can do to encourage people to feel comfortable taking risks, giving candid feedback, and sharing ideas. We also create intentional space for that to happen.

Mason Stevenson

What does psychological safety in learning mean to you and/or your organization?

Christopher Lind

Similar to my above response, while it’s a principle threaded into much of the work we do, we don’t always call it out by its formal name. In essence we’re always looking for ways to create opportunity for people to experiment and make failure part of the learning experience. It helps create a space where people trust they can try new things, share new ideas, and give feedback without a punitive response.

Mason Stevenson

What are the traits of a solid psychological safety strategy?

Christopher Lind

In short, I’ve found the most successful implementations of this philosophy and mindset is to not set it out as its own separate strategy. Instead it should be engrained into everything you do and the regular way of working.

Mason Stevenson

What types of learning and/or learning technologies best support an environment of psychological safety?

Christopher Lind

I personally think that’s asking the wrong question. When you look at it as part of everything you do, any of the experiences or technologies can be supportive of this environment. Instead leaders should be asking what are the most important elements of this we can improve on and where do the gaps exist. Once you identify that, you can easily determine what learning and tech can support it.

In Summation

Given all the information shared about creating an environment of psychological safety, one can see the tremendous benefits. Organizations following this strategy will see higher levels of engagement. That translates to increased innovation and motivation. But more importantly… more learning and development and better performance.