Psychological Safety

In my practice as a consultant, I frequently encounter people who claim that a lack of psychological safety hinders people’s ability to learn quickly and effectively at work.

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In fact, a colleague pointed me to the TEDx talk by Amy Edmondson (I will discuss below) and suggested, between the lines, that I am not providing enough psychological safety for others in our organisation to learn effectively. Perhaps that is the case. In the same time, however, psychological safety can be used as a “politically correct” way to refuse to engage in deeper learning — and that is what I felt is behind the suggestion of my colleague. Therefore I think it is worth our time to unpack what do we understand psychological safety is and how it functions in our learning. We need psychological safety in order to learn and yet learning for an uncertain future requires us to move beyond our established ways of thinking; which can be inherently unsettling and feel psychologically unsafe.

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Why is psychological safety such a hot topic?

The complex organisational landscapes in which we are working require us to listen to other people’s voices, challenge each other and speak up when we see things differently. However, experience has taught many of us that speaking up (especially in hierarchical organisations) often proves both difficult and risky. We require a basic level of safety and trust in order to be able to take the risk to speak up. In this sense, one might argue that psychological safety is a fundamental condition for improvement, innovation, and error prevention. When we are psychologically safe we learn more effectively and the organisation benefits by improving its processes and operations.

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One part of the story…

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This is essentially the argument put forward by the North American leadership scholar, Amy Edmondson. Edmondson, presently Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, is a popular teacher and writer whose books (such as the best seller, Teaming) and popular lectures have been widely influential. In the TEDx talk above she argues that psychological safety is the missing ingredient in creating environments where people can speak up, challenge each other, and speak about mistakes that have happened or are about to happen. She defines psychological safety as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes”. Edmondson provides numerous examples from her research of people failing to speak up. For instance, she talks about a nurse failing to call out a doctor (who had previously questioned her abilities) on a suspiciously high dosage of a medication, or an air-force pilot failing to challenge a superior officer on a possibly crucial misjudgement. These stories are sadly resonant with most of our experiences of educational and professional life and Edmondson suggests that they are rooted in our attempt to maintain a good social and professional status — asking questions runs the risk of appearing ignorant and challenging the status quo may come across as negative.

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Edmondson explains this in terms of “impression management”, a term which is to a large degree associated with the influential North American sociologist, Erving Goffman. Where I believe Edmondson errs, however, along with others such as the MIT based management scholar Edgar Schein, is in seeing this as a largely individual psychological phenomenon (i.e. patterns of individual behaviour over which we can exercise rational control). Indeed, from Goffman’s point of view (as explored in his influential book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life), “performance management” is a largely unconscious social process that that is a necessary and unavoidable part of the dynamics of group interactions. It would be neither possible nor desirable to strip away the performance and reveal some sort of real or true self. The social processes we participate in are not an attempt to cover over some sort of underlying authentic reality, they are reality. We cannot control this process, but we can influence it through an ongoing and uncertain process of negotiation; perhaps negotiating different norms for our behaviour might mean that instead of idealising harmony we could make a “good impression” on others by speaking up, being critical, or passionately disagreeing.

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