Often in conversations with executives, we talk about the importance of psychological safety. After all, as leaders in an organization, it is your job to create the conditions where psychological safety can thrive.
Psychological safety is defined as the willingness of employees to take "interpersonal risk." Psychological safety is experienced at the group level, whereas trust is between individuals. Your team experiences psychological safety (or not) while you and your coworker or boss may have a lot of trust (or not).
The opposite of psychological safety is fear. Examples of fear are things like the fear of speaking up (especially to someone in charge or with more power), the fear of asking questions, the fear of admitting to a mistake, etc.
What is behind all of this fear? A lot of what motivates us are the same things we were afraid of from our days on the playground. We are afraid of looking stupid, being mocked or humiliated. Another motivator is the fear of being punished, reprimanded, or retaliated against. We are also afraid of being ostracized. Remaining a part of the group is a big motivator. We avoid doing things that put us at risk for any of those things.
Psychological safety is not just tamped down because of fear. There's also social conventions. For instance, some people were taught not to challenge authority. To them, it's straight-up disrespectful and you shouldn't do it. Others were taught if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
These are some of the reasons why your work environment may not feel psychologically safe to your employees. Your job, as the leader, is to create the conditions where people on your team are willing to take the risk because they feel confident bad things won't happen to them.
An excellent book written by the originator of psychological safety is The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmundson.
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