Build Psychological Safety to create THRIVING organisation

Have you ever been in any of these situations before:

• you wanted to ask a challenging question or state the ‘elephant in the room' - this was shut down, denied, or laughed at?
• you wanted to give feedback to your peer or manager, and it was not well perceived and maybe you faced a defense?
• you had limited space for doing your job or have been criticized when you made a mistake?
• you witnessed people blaming each other and pointing fingers?

Those are some examples of what happened when in a team or organization we deal with a low psychological safety.

Now, how have these situations affected you?

Chances are...

• you felt hurt, disappointed, angry, frustrated or helpless
• you were discouraged and demotivated to repeat the action that was criticized
• you started to ask yourself – what is wrong with me, what is wrong with them
• you just stuck to ‘do your job’ and nothing more
• you asked people to work together and stop blaming each other, but it did not bring much change.

I’m sure your motivation and engagement were affected in some way.

Eventually, maybe you started to look for another job and organization where you are valued and accepted for who you are, you have space, people make mistakes as learning opportunities and people engage in honest and effective debates for a reason.

I’ve been in these situations before, on both sides.

Being in organizations and teams with low psychological safety and being a leader who affected that space in my own team.

The first one caused me stress, losing my self-worth, motivation and belonging. Even though I have a fighting spirit - over time I had to adapt to survive, which ended up in losing some part of my authentic self and caused disconnection.

Second, this happened in my early experiences as a leader and I was grateful to have been given a coach who opened my eyes and helped me change my ways of being and acting, which positively impacted my team's engagement, collaboration, and performance.

Therefore I am so passionately focusing on helping leaders transform knowing the benefits firsthand.

When leaders are unaware and unable to create a culture with high psychological safety, we see low engagement, retention issues, people defending themselves, silos and politics, low teamwork and willingness to collaborate and share, and low interest to open up and build relationships.

These affect business results – performance, innovation and growth.

Creating a psychologically safe culture is a fundament for thriving teams and organizations, with high engagement, connection, collaboration, trust, and relationships and people having fun working and learning from each other.

Learning is one of the key focus in such organizations supported by structures helping individuals and teams to grow.

Psychologically safety is present when people feel safe to ask questions, talk about mistakes and failures, challenge each other and you as a leader, disagree, and hold productive conflicts and feedback.

In essence....

Psychological safety is a space where people feel safe to be vulnerable with each other.

Building a psychologically safe culture is a process requiring a change in a mind- emotions - behaviors level.

Building psychological safety is also a process of meeting human needs of connection, growth, making an impact, and doing things better.

Therefore building psychological safety happens in stages, and in fact, Dr. T. Clark defines there are 4 stages of psychological safety.

These affect business results – performance, innovation and growth.

Creating a psychologically safe culture is a fundament for thriving teams and organizations, with high engagement, connection, collaboration, trust, and relationships and people having fun working and learning from each other.

Learning is one of the key focus in such organizations supported by structures helping individuals and teams to grow.

Building a psychologically safe culture is a process requiring a change in a mind- emotion - behaviors level.

Building psychological safety is also a process of meeting human needs of connection, growth, making an impact, and doing things better.

Therefore building psychological safety happens in stages, and in fact, Dr. T. Clark defines there are 4 stages of psychological safety.

So, what should you do if you sense your team or organization lack psychological safety?

Get in contact with experts on psychological safety who can help you:

1.      Expand your awareness of what psychological safety is and what it is not and what its dimensions

2.      Evaluate the current state of psychological safety in your team/ organization and see the impact and costs

3.   Guide a tailored journey to increase psychological safety and bring desired organizational result

The above is a way I partner with organizations, leaders, and teams wanting to raise their performance, engagement, and effectiveness especially when a change is involved.

In my approach, I do include a transformative journey for leaders, as I believe it’s the starting point that brings positive results, momentums and change.

Involving the rest of the members in a psychological safety journey is equally important as it's a co-created space and so helping leaders in facilitating these conversations and actions in teams is part of it.

Finally, for me, the focus lies on making it a sustainable change and helping leaders and their members to embed a new way of thinking and interacting with each other that last beyond the time we partner together.  

If you struggle with engagement, resistance, retention, and performance or innovation and want to realize or accelerate the change you lead - elevating psychological safety will be the gateway.

Contact me if you would like to find out how you can do it.

#leadership #leadershipdevelopment #psychologicalsafety #extraordinaryleadership