Notes on Building a Psychologically Safe Workplace via TEDx

When I watched it: April 2020.

Why I watched it: I watched this talk as part of my research on leadership, teams, and emotions. The speaker, Amy Edmonson, is credited with introducing the concept of “team psychological safety” in 1999. If you’re struggling with getting the most out of your team, this concept might explain why.

Go to the video page for details and to watch or scroll down for my notes.

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My notes

About Amy Edmondson

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. She studies people and teams seeking to make a positive difference through the work they do. Amy is the author of several books, the most recent being The Fearless Organization. She is credited with introducing the concept of “team psychological safety” in 1999. (I hope to organize notes on both pieces at some point.)

Why don’t people speak up when they know they should?

Sometimes a voice is necessary, but people still don’t speak up. This is because no one wants to look:

Ignorant —> so they don’t ask questions
Incompetent —> so they don’t admit weakness or mistake
Intrusive —> so they don’t offer ideas
Negative —> so they don’t critique the status quo

This works for self-protection (it’s what psychologists call “impression management”) ⇒ we are really good at this to protect ourselves; it’s second nature.

The problem - impression management

When we withhold information due to impression management:

We rob others of learning
We don’t innovate
We fail to contribute

The solution - psychological safety

Psychological safety = the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

When you are psychologically safe, you are willing and ready to take the interpersonal risk of learning.

Higher performing teams have psychological safety.

How to build psychological safety

Three steps to create the space for psychological safety:

Create the rationale for speaking up
Create the safety for speaking up
Create the necessity for speaking up

1. Create the rationale for speaking up ⇒ Frame the work as a learning problem (not as an execution problem) ⇒ acknowledge and make uncertainty explicit. E.g:

“We’ve never been here before”
“We can’t know what will happen”
“We need everyone’s brains and voices in the game”

2. Create the safety for speaking up ⇒ Acknowledge your own fallibility (versus knowing it all and being right all the time) ⇒ this applies to all team members.

3. Create the necessity for speaking up ⇒ Model curiosity (versus disregard) ⇒ ask a lot of questions and put people in situations where they must speak.

Psychological safety vs motivation and accountability

These are not on the same scale ⇒ these are not tradeoffs:

Low psychology safety + low motivation and accountability = Apathy zone 😑
High psychology safety + low motivation and accountability = Comfort zone 🙂
Low psychology safety + high motivation and accountability = Anxiety zone: 😬
High psychology safety + high motivation and accountability = Learning zone 😎

You want the learning zone ⇒ When you have uncertainty and interdependence (the dependence of two or more people on each other), it’s also the high performance zone.

Psychological safety is necessary when you have uncertainty and interdependence ⇒ you don’t need it when things are certain and people are independent (it’s a nice to have).