Psychological safety enables candor and openness and, therefore, thrives in an environment of mutual respect. This is about framing or reframing the work to set shared expectations about uncertainty and failure, and to identify why the work matters and for whom.

Psychological Safety: Vision and Strategy

The final section goes on to describe how to establish psychological safety and create a ‘fearless organization’. I also see parallels between psychological safety and DevOps in that they are both aspects of modern technology organizations that are essentially ‘win-win’: good for people and good for business. However, it is equally vital not to inadvertently send a message that says, “diverse opinions simply won't be tolerated here,” or “one strike and you're out. David also records these short “Leadership Nudges”, which are great, practical tips for leaders (and that includes non-managers taking on leadership behaviours too).But it's worth reflecting on this idea, which to me implies that you owe your colleagues the expression of your opinion or ideas; in a sense, those ideas belong to the collective enterprise, and you therefore don't have the right to hoard them. We need to feel comfortable in speaking up: to collaborate with colleagues, to suggest ideas, to ask questions, to give feedback, to voice concerns, to acknowledge failure. And because not offering an idea is an invisible act, it's hard to engage in real-time course correction. Whether it’s to report a mistake, ask a question, give some feedback, suggest a better way of approaching a piece of work, or simply to say “I don’t know”, when we choose to use our voice at work and speak up, we are taking a risk.

Making the most of your people: key takeaways from the book

To complicate matters, as companies become increasingly global and complex, more and more of the work is team-based. The examples listed in the book were mostly actions and decisions made by top executives at companies. The lack of simple cause-effect relationships in uncertain, ambiguous environments reinforces the importance of productive responses to outcomes of all kinds, but especially to bad news outcomes.

Psychological safety is not an “anything goes” environment where people are not expected to adhere to high standards or meet deadlines. And so, for anything but the most independent or routine work, psychological safety is intimately tied to freeing people up to pursue excellence. When the mines reopened, more than 30,000 workers were retrained to comply with the newly agreed-upon safety protocols.

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in

This game is worth playing because it not only encourages people to “think big,” but also actually plants the seeds for a future that perhaps wasn’t possible before the game was played. People feel able to speak up when needed — with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns — without being shut down in a gratuitous way.In a workplace, psychological safety is the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Psychological safety is an essential requirement for organizations looking to achieve, navigate, and sustain a fast flow of change. In contrast, a message that reinforces the values and practices of a learning organization is, “it's okay to make a mistake, and it's okay to hold an opinion that others don't like, so long as you are willing to learn from the consequences. This is a great resource from the Re:Work folks at Googleon creating a vision with a team, distilling any existing organisation values and goals into something the team can own and deliver on. To understand why psychological safety promotes performance, we have to step back to reconsider the nature of so much of the work in today's organizations.