The importance of psychological safety in the workplace seems inherently obvious. The idea of creating an environment where people feel comfortable expressing themselves – why wouldn’t that be nurtured?
However, many creative teams are missing out on the benefits of psychological safety. McKinsey has found that while it’s a priority for 89% of workers, only 26% of leaders are actively creating an environment of psychological safety.
Despite its name, the benefits of psychological safety go far beyond a general sense of well-being or security in the workplace. It can drive creativity and innovation too. It influences whether or not people contribute creative ideas, how they collaborate with colleagues, and whether they feel able to take the calculated risks necessary for innovation.
What is Psychological Safety?
Professor Amy C. Edmondson has been studying psychological safety since 1999 and broadly defines it as the freedom to take interpersonal risks. In her book The Fearless Organization, she explains: “Psychological safety is broadly defined as a climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves. More specifically, when people have psychological safety at work, they feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution.”
As Edmondson explains to HBR’s “IdeaCast” podcast, we’re instinctively inclined to stay silent unless we’re convinced that an idea will be very well received. Otherwise, we’re compromising our social position in the group and opening ourselves up to reprisals. A psychologically safe environment is one where sharing ideas and concerns is a social norm, so the instinctive fear of speaking up is significantly reduced.
Experts are keen to emphasize that psychological safety shouldn’t be confused with niceness, though. Being overly “nice” can potentially cause a drag on productivity. As Timothy R. Clark explains to Forbes: “Overemphasis on being warm, hospitable, and caring can turn into a cheerful indifference to the tough decisions that need to be made. We shy away from engaging in the hard-hitting debate and intellectual friction required to solve problems, create new solutions, make breakthroughs, and innovate.”
Psychological safety is a way to own that “friction” and make it healthy. It gives people the confidence to speak up, knowing that people will hear them out and respect their point of view, even if they disagree.
Likewise, psychological safety shouldn’t be interpreted as freedom from accountability. Someone who admits to a mistake in a psychologically safe workplace will still have to take responsibility for it and work to resolve it. However, they won’t be ostracized for it, meaning they will be in a better position to learn and move on from it.
Psychological Safety and Innovation
In 2012, Google launched an initiative called Project Aristotle. The aim was to discover the factors that made their highest-performing teams so effective.
They discovered that the one thing all their best teams had in common was a high level of psychological safety. It was the freedom to try new things, make suggestions, and ask questions (without worrying that they’d be judged) that enabled people to excel.
Psychological safety brings a raft of benefits to any team, no matter the type of work they’re engaged in. But it’s been shown to have a particularly positive impact on factors that facilitate creativity and innovation.
Psychological safety enables the sharing of knowledge, ideas, and perspectives, making creative collaboration far more effective. In an environment where everyone feels able to make suggestions, a team will have far more inspiration and insight to work with.
Psychological safety is a significant predictor of creative team performance as people feel able to share knowledge. Additionally, research has shown that the willingness to take social risks is closely associated with creativity.
This type of environment doesn’t just give individuals the confidence to share ideas, it also gives them the space to do so. Teams where people speak around the same amount in meetings (sometimes known as ”conversational turn-taking” and often used as an indicator of psychological safety) display higher collective intelligence than teams where certain people dominate the discussion.
Creative collaboration also requires people to be able to share thoughts that aren’t full-blown suggestions. As Edmondson puts it in The Fearless Organization: “For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge! This means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas.”
Lastly, psychological safety enables a team to fully benefit from diverse perspectives. Evidence suggests that diverse teams have the potential to outperform less diverse teams but only if there is a high level of psychological safety. People need to feel safe to share the lived experiences that can enrich creative work. Mutual respect and trust also help to overcome the communication barriers that can exist between people with different experiences.
Collectively Embracing Failure
Failures and mistakes are an inevitable and often very useful part of the creative process. They help us refine our skills and gather useful information. However, our societal attitude is that failure should be avoided at all costs.
According to the Neuro Leadership Institute, “Psychological safety is present when employees feel they’re part of an environment where challenge, conflict, and mistakes are valued, and learning is a team sport.”
When something goes wrong in a psychologically safe workplace, the emphasis isn’t on apportioning blame. It’s on accepting that failures and errors are inevitable, understanding them when they happen, and using them as a source of valuable information. This reduces the social threat inherent in failure and makes it less about the individual.
This attitude makes it easier for individuals to admit to failures and take ownership, then learn from them. For the team as a whole, it provides more information to work with, enabling them to adapt much more quickly.
More than that though, it also frees people up to take calculated risks and adopt a robust experimental approach. When people know they won’t be penalized for pursuing an idea that doesn’t pan out, they’re more likely to take the bold steps necessary for innovation and thereby discover those ideas that are viable.
Psychological safety also has a positive impact on our well-being, meaning we’re able to think more creatively and be more productive.
It reduces the fear, stress, and anxiety people are exposed to at work. This is powerful as these negative emotions can interfere with cognition and be a huge drain on our mental resources, inhibiting our ability to think creatively.
Psychological safety might play an even greater role than that though. Researchers discovered a possible link between psychological safety and increased feelings of vitality which in turn had a positive impact on people’s involvement with their creative work.
How to Create Psychological Safety
Creating an environment of psychological safety is a team effort and an ongoing process. It requires buy-in from everyone, especially leadership. However, there are some steps that you can take as an individual to contribute to your team’s psychological safety.
- Demonstrate Vulnerability – Model the trusting and honest behavior you want to see from others by asking for help or sharing that you’re struggling. As Edmondson says in The Fearless Organization: “Sometimes, you have to take an interpersonal risk to lower interpersonal risk.”
- Invite Honesty – Make it clear to people that you welcome their input and actively listen when they give it.
- Build Consistency – Prove to people that it’s safe to be honest with you by consciously reacting in a receptive and respectful way when they share constructive feedback or concerns. As Radical Candor author Kim Scott explains: “The way you ask for criticism and react when you get it goes a long way toward building trust—or destroying it.”
An Environment for Creativity
Psychological safety gives creative teams the security and confidence they need to share ideas, raise concerns, and take strategic risks. It opens the way for a culture of experimentation by destigmatizing the instructional failures that are a vital part of innovation.
Establishing and maintaining psychological safety takes time, care, and the awareness that it’s a continuous process. However, the impact it can have on creative performance within teams and the well-being of individuals more than justifies the work involved.