If you’ve turned your nose up at the concept of psychological safety (or you’ve never even heard of it before, and you’re turning your nose up now) because, frankly, you’re getting tired of trying to figure out every new buzzword, I’m encouraging you to rethink.

This isn’t about taking some performative action to show how “woke” you are. There’s that 4-letter word, and it doesn’t have anything to do with psychological safety. No matter your political leanings, your age, or your view on trigger warnings, you should consider whether your workplace is psychologically safe.

Two reasons: First, you’re probably already doing a lot of things to create a psychologically safe workplace even if you’ve never called it that, so small improvements could have a big impact. Second, you will lose employees if you don’t have a psychologically safe workplace — especially in this talent market.

According to a new Pew Research Center survey on the Great Resignation, the top three reasons people left their jobs in 2021 were low pay, lack of opportunities for advancement, and feeling disrespected at work.

Creating a workplace culture where people feel safe to be themselves and feel respected for their contributions is critical.

What is psychological safety?

So what are we talking about here?

Psychological safety isn’t about making everyone happy or having all your meetings in a circle while you pass around a sharing stick.

Coined by Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson in the 90s, the phrase psychological safety refers to a work environment where team members aren’t afraid of retribution for making mistakes, pointing out potential mistakes, disagreeing with supervisors, or sharing new ideas that turn out to be unsuccessful.

In a psychologically safe work environment, people know they’re allowed to take risks (which makes every risk a little less risky).

If you’ve read any of my previous articles or worked with me, you know I value a culture of risk-taking. So much of what we’ve talked about at Trajectify is focused on creating a psychologically safe work environment — without calling it that.

How do you know if you have a psychologically safe workplace? Or more importantly, how do you know if you don’t have one?

Signs you don’t have a psychologically safe workplace

I once had a boss who told me, “Mike, you don’t micromanage your team enough. You didn’t get to where you are in your career without being better than them.” He thought it was bullshit that I saw them doing their jobs better than I could.

He definitely didn’t cultivate a psychologically safe workplace, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t care to.

If you’re like our Trajectify clients (or you are a client), you want your employees to feel psychologically safe at work, and you’re wondering how to know if they do.

So here are some signs you may have some work to do.

No one makes mistakes

Here’s the most glaringly obvious one. If no one is making mistakes, you have one of two problems. Either your employees are making mistakes and hiding them from you or your employees are playing it super safe because they’re scared to make mistakes.

Both of these scenarios are problematic. In the first instance, mistakes you don’t know about can eventually become serious issues. You probably don’t need to know every detail of what happens in your organization. At the same time, lots of small mistakes you’re unaware of could add up to big problems down the road.

On the other hand, if your employees are truly never making mistakes, they’re probably never trying out any great new ideas either. They’re not innovating (because that always involves mistakes), and you’re in danger of stagnation.

Why might your employees be scared of making or admitting mistakes? Well, how are they handled by you, your team, or their coworkers?

On his podcast Work Life, Adam Grant interviewed Navy SEAL Captain Bill Wilson and his commander, now-retired Admiral William McRaven. McRaven organized and oversaw the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

In the interview, Captain Wilson shared a story about Admiral McRaven’s response to mistakes. An officer confessed to going on an unauthorized mission. The Admiral didn’t shame or punish the officer. Instead, he used the situation as an opportunity for learning and moved on.

McRaven said to the officer, “What did you learn from it? Okay. What are we going to do differently next time? Okay, thanks.” That was it.

Admiral McRaven built psychological safety perhaps without ever having heard the term. He knew he needed a team that felt comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns. “If you don’t empower the people below you to speak their mind, then you’re going to find yourself in a lot more trouble and be embarrassed a lot more than if you decided that you didn’t want them to speak up,” he said.

One thing that’s important to consider here is that military operatives do a huge amount of scenario planning. They’re prepared for every eventuality, and that makes the possibility of mistakes less risky.

Every organization can do the same, and we encourage our clients to engage in thorough, frequent scenario analysis.

See: How to Develop Your Core Values (and Implement Them) in Six Steps

No one challenges other’s ideas

In a 2019 TEDx talk, Amy Edmondson talks about the negative consequences of team members holding back their thoughts or concerns because they’re too busy “managing impressions,” i.e. trying not to have anyone think poorly of them. It stifles innovation and can keep people from speaking up when they see a potential problem.

Back when I was at CDNOW, there was someone on our leadership team that always thought outside the box and constantly challenged our ideas, presumably to make them better. I’ll be honest — I found it very annoying. Sometimes I just wanted an idea to be presented and accepted without a whole battle about it.

I talked with my executive coach about my feelings, and they took me through an exercise of envisioning what team meetings would be like without this person. By the end, it was clear to me that our team wouldn’t have been as good. That team member made us better, so I needed to shift my perspective, and to appreciate their challenges.

Psychological safety isn’t about people brutally tearing down other people’s ideas. It’s about cultivating an environment where someone isn’t afraid to speak up if they have a different idea or questions about an existing plan — especially if those questions and ideas are directed toward a superior.

You’ve since heard me share the following expression many times: “If there are ten people in the room and they all agree, then nine of them are unnecessary.”

You never receive constructive feedback

We’d all like to think we’re such great leaders and bosses that no one could possibly have anything negative to say about us. Hopefully we do work hard at being good at our jobs. That doesn’t mean there’s not room for improvement or that our teams can’t help us identify those areas.

Creating an environment where your team feels comfortable sharing when they have concerns makes them happier and makes you more effective.

I’ve worked in environments that were the exact opposite of this — where you couldn’t provide any feedback to leadership without fear of retribution.

At one company, we participated in an anonymous 360-review process with the help of a leadership development consultant. My boss received a lot of critical, anonymous feedback. Rather than getting some coaching from the consultant, he analyzed the reports to try to figure out who made what comments. He called me into his office and pointed to the paper, asking “Are these your answers?”

Yes, he’d figured it out. They were my answers, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that. I didn’t feel safe, and he’d ruined the whole essence of the exercise.

This is one of the opportunities where we’ve been recommending continuous performance management platforms, like 15Five, that are based on biregular bi-directional feedback.

See: How to Give Feedback

You’re frequently telling people how to do their jobs

Fake delegation erodes any sense of psychological safety. Think of it from the employee’s perspective. They’ve been given responsibility for a task, but every time they take an action, they’re told to do it a different way (their supervisor’s way). They’re micromanaged so completely that it’s clear their supervisor doesn’t have any confidence in the employee’s ability to do their job.

If you’re often telling other people how to do their jobs, you either have the wrong people on your team or you have a problem delegating.

I’m not always the perfect delegator, but it’s something I work hard on because I know how important it is.

When I was the head of technology at CDNOW and we were merging with our closest competitor, our teams worked for two tough months to prepare for the launch day — when we’d share our combined brand and new online store.

I had some concerns about whether we were technologically prepared. I asked questions about the areas I thought we might be weak in and accepted the reassurances from my teams.

The day we launched, everything was fine at the beginning. Then as the traffic picked up, web connections started to drop. Eventually, the site became unusable. Everyone was trying to diagnose the problem and work to fix it. There was also a lot of finger pointing. The database team was blaming the developers. The developers were blaming the network people. The network people were blaming the database people.

I had a suspicion about what it was, and I asked the head of networks to check our bandwidth. It was something I’d had questions about prior to the launch. The head of networks came back to me and told me it was the bandwidth, explained what they’d done to address it, and confirmed that it would be resolved within the hour.

I didn’t get angry, and at the end of the day, he said this to me: “Mike, thank you for letting me make that mistake. You could’ve overridden me during the planning process and just had me do it your way because you have more authority and believed differently about how it should be done. But I wouldn’t have learned anything. We wouldn’t have had a problem, and I would’ve just held a grudge against you.” He wouldn’t have learned that his way didn’t work. He’d have been less trustful of me, and I’d have been less trustful of him.

See: How to Delegate Like a Boss

The same people are always talking

You get great ideas and discussions about those ideas — from the same few people at every meeting, in every online conversation.

If others aren’t speaking up, they may not feel safe to do so. Especially right now, remote or hybrid environments could be diminishing risk-taking for some.

One of the ways we’ve adapted to remote work is to be more careful and meticulous about communicating what needs to happen and what gets done. We document things more. And that means any possible mistakes or outside-the-box ideas are more visible. Putting something into a Slack channel or sending an email might feel riskier than making an off-hand comment in a meeting or a quick hallway conversation or informal coffee break together.

Someone could forget that comment — it won’t be memorialized forever the way it is once you’ve typed it out and hit “send.”

It’s possible that the visibility of remote work could have a dampening effect on risk taking. So what do you do about it?

If you’re seeing less risk taking on the whole or by fewer people in your organization, you may need to replace that old spontaneity with new intentionality. You need to show your team that you still value innovation and the ability to make mistakes.

You could have business plan competition or innovation meetings. There are dozens of ways to intentionally create more opportunities for innovation in your organization.

Your team engages in unhealthy competition or conflict

Finally, competition and conflict can be beneficial elements of a work environment — as long as they’re a healthy part of the culture. If team members are trying to cut each other off at the knees or bashing each others’ ideas in public forums, you have a problem.

This is another situation that has been exacerbated by the move towards more remote work and distributed teams. I’ve heard leaders talk about some of the conversations happening on Slack channels, and it’s concerning. They’ve shared screenshots that have made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. People say whatever they want because it all seems less personal when online.

If that becomes the environment, people don’t feel safe taking risks.

Your job as the leader there is to be a watchdog. Deal with people who are creating an unsafe work culture. You may have to have a few difficult conversations, or you may need to let people go if they don’t align with your organization’s values.

See: How You Can Harness Workplace Conflict to Help Your Organization Thrive

Final thoughts

If you saw yourself or your organization in this article, don’t panic. Workplace environments and culture can get away from us sometimes, and that’s been especially true for many companies trying to navigate the revolutionary shift to remote or hybrid work.

Now that you know there’s a problem, you can begin taking small steps to fix it. Schedule more one-on-one meetings with your team members. Ask for feedback. Pay attention to who’s speaking up and who isn’t.

Contact Trajectify to see how we can help you make sure your values are being put into practice in your workplace culture.