5/12/2020 How Psychological Safety Actually Works

3,079 views | May 4, 2020, 02:21pm EDT

How Psychological Safety

Actually Works
Shane Snow Contributor
Leadership Strategy

Psychological safety is one of the business buzzwords of the moment, it

seems—in large part because of a big study that Google conducted to
understand what its best teams had in common. And now, as the business
world has gone remote, the term is buzzy for a reason; psychological safety
is more needed than ever.

The trouble is, it’s trickier than its buzzy nature leads us to think.

The term “psychological safety” has been around since at least 1999, when
Dr. Amy Edmondson of Harvard University published this influential paper
on the subject. In her study, Dr. Edmondson proposed that regardless of its
makeup, a team’s success will largely boil down to its members “tacit beliefs
about interpersonal interaction,” and whether they have “a shared belief
held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk
taking.”

In other words, if you can take risks without your team beating you up,
you’ll be more likely to succeed. That’s what psychological safety is about.

But what exactly does “taking interpersonal risks” even mean?

Does it mean being able to leave your teammates hanging on an

important project?

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Does it mean being able to stand up on the board room table and
fart?

Does it mean you can call your boss a racial slur?

All of those are risks you could take.

That can’t possibly be what psychological safety means. Some of those risks
actually make other people feel psychologically unsafe. Or grossed out. Or
disrespected.

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What Psychological Safety Does Not Mean:

Psychological safety is an exciting concept. Unfortunately, in our excitement
about the benefits of “feeling safe at work” and “being able to take risks,”
many of us are guilty of swinging the pendulum too far and actually creating
counter-productive environments.

Take my own screw-up, for example. Several years ago I held a series of
“culture talks” in my company around the idea that I wanted everyone to
“feel comfortable” at work. I recognized our growing demographic diversity,
and I wanted to make sure that the team continued to treat each other well
even as they became more of a merry band of misfits than a uniformed army
of soldiers.

The thinking behind my culture talks was solid, and based on the psychology
and history research I was doing for my book Dream Teams. But what I
learned soon after in my research for the book is that the idea of making a

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team environment completely comfortable was at odds with growth and

problem solving.

If you stay completely comfortable at the gym, your muscles will never grow.
A great leader’s job is to help people combine their different ingredients and
push further than they could go on their own. That is inherently
uncomfortable.

This ties in to the concept of psychological safety, because it gets at the

flawed logic that many leaders intuitively bring when they want to create a
safe environment:

1. You make it safe for anyone to take any kind of risk.

2. So people take risks.
3. That makes other people feel “unsafe.”
4. So people focus on not making each other feel unsafe.
5. And they start feeling scared about what they do and say.

Do you see the cycle?

There are a few key misunderstandings that make the difference between
actual psychological safety, and psychological safety as so many
organizations practice it.

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Safety vs Comfort SHANE SNOW

1) Safety is not the same as comfort

To return to the gym analogy: a good fitness trainer will help you to safely
exercise and grow your muscles. And you will be uncomfortable. But you
will be safe.

The job of a leader is not to protect their team from discomfort. It’s to
protect them from harm—and to help motivate them to push through the
discomfort and harness it for growth.

As NYU moral psychology professor Jonathan Haidt and his co-author Greg
Lukianoff put it, “A culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far
that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that
encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very
experiences embedded in everyday life that they need in order to become
strong and healthy.”
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2) Disagreement is not the same as danger, and ideas are not

the same as violence

As Haidt and Lukianoff meticulously documented in their book The

Coddling of the American Mind, “the meaning of safety underwent a
process of concept creep” in the 21st century.

This mainly came from college campuses, where well-meaning students and
teachers began including “emotional safety” as the same thing as physical
safety. This makes it possible to say that any idea that someone has—or even
the presence of someone who makes you feel emotionally bad (aka
triggered) actually makes you unsafe.

When this conflation gets brought into a team environment under the
mistaken notion that emotional safety is part of psychological safety, it
actually weakens individuals and the team. As CNN’s Van Jones put it to
University of Chicago students in 2017:

“There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a

very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of
being physically safe… not being subjected to sexual
harassment and physical abuse… I am perfectly ne
with.
But there’s another view that is now I think
ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view,
which is that ‘I need to be safe ideologically.’
…I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I want
you to be strong. That’s different.”

Psychology research is clear that the most reliable way to overcome

psychological pain and discomfort is not to avoid it; it’s to gradually dimish
the effects of discomfort by systematic exposure. “Avoiding triggers is a
symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it,” write Haidt and Lukianoff.

In other words, the more you face cognitive friction, the better you get at
not taking other people’s pushback and different ideas personally.

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Now of course there’s an important caveat here: if an individual is

psychologically in a place where they cannot handle being around people
with different ideas than them, or around people who make them emotional
because they remind them of trauma—that is a job for cognitive behavioral
therapy. This person’s pain is real, and there is help for them.

However, this is a job for a professional, in an individual setting, to work

with that person.

When I was in college, a student once climbed a tree and broke his arm. The
college responded by declaring a rule: No climbing trees. A better idea
would have been to have a talk with that student, and just tell everyone else
to be careful. Instead of showing trust in their students, the college said,
essentially, “Trees are dangerous. And we don’t trust you.”

And that does not create psychological safety, as we’ll see in a moment when
we explore the relationship between psychological safety and trust.

3) Taking Risks Only Makes Sense When It Helps The Group

If I feel comfortable enough to bring a loaded gun and put it casually on the
conference room table—my doing so actually creates both a physical and
psychological danger.

In other words, some risky behavior actually threatens a group’s

psychological safety. So it’s false to conflate one’s ability to take risks with
psychological safety.

Speaking up with a point of view that’s uncomfortable helps a group,

because it pushes them to consider new ways of thinking. This is a
risk worth taking.

But shouting down someone who says something uncomfortable is a

risk as well. It takes courage. But it’s the kind of risk that cuts off
dialogue, and reduces the potential for the group to make progress.

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It actually takes more courage to sit with discomfort, coolly look at it, and
make a judgment from a big picture standpoint—not from short-term pain-
avoidance.

And in order to make it feel safe to do that, we need to reduce some types of
risks. As you can see, achieving real psychological safety is not quite as
simple as we make it out to be.

4) Feeling Safe Enough To Hurt People Means There Is No

Safety

The irony of a black-and-white view of psychological safety—and conflating

safety with comfort—is that feeling safe enough to do and say whatever you
want can actually create less safety. (This is similar to the paradox of
tolerance.)

By making it appear safe and comfortable to do anything, we ironically can

make an environment dangerous.

What Psychological Safety Actually Means:

In a team environment, what psychological safety actually means that you

know that things you say and do won’t be used against you… as long as
you’re not being malicious.

Think of it as the opposite of that speech cops give when they arrest
someone, with an added “be nice” clause:

Psychological safety means nothing you say or do

will be used against you—as long as you mean well.
(And it means your teammates will assume you
mean well until proven otherwise.)

Now, one of the problems with psychological safety is talking about it and
actually having it are two very different things. Just telling people that
anything they say won’t be used against them doesn’t automatically
convince people that that’s actually true.
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That’s why I think it’s helpful to break the term psychological safety apart
even further and talk about it in terms of trust.

The difference between psychological safety and trust SHANE SNOW

The Difference Between Psychological Safety and Trust

Ultimately, psychological safety is trust among a group, rather than just

between two people.

This means that the bigger the group, the harder it will be to maintain
psychological safety. You must have trust in everyone in the group in order
to be able to go out on a limb.

Framed this way, what it means to be able to “take risks” becomes a little
more concrete. Because we know that trust is earned by showing three
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things—Ability, Integrity, and Benevolence—although only benevolence is

truly a deal breaker when it comes down to it. No amount of skill or ability
can make you trust someone who you don’t think has your best interests at
heart.

The safety to take risks doesn’t mean it’s now okay to do any awful thing—
because what psychological safety actually is is a commitment to treating
each other charitably—in both directions.

Cynicism vs Charity SHANE SNOW

In a group where everyone treats each other charitably, the following will
happen:

1. If you make a mistake, it won’t be held against you personally.

2. If something is wrong, you can bring it up without it being used
against you.
3. It won’t matter where ideas come from as long as they help the team.
4. If you need help, you can ask for it without people being shitty about
it.
5. When you change your mind, people will applaud your intellectual
humility rather than use it against you.
6. When you make a decision, you’ll weigh what’s going to be the best
for the whole team—and the individuals on it—over what’s best for
you.
7. You’ll interpret other people’s actions in the best light, too.

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In other words, if you want a group to have psychological safety, the #1 thing
you need to do is to get people to care about each other.

Shane Snow is author of Dream Teams and creator of the Snow

Academy school of innovation.

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I'm an an award-winning science and business journalist, entrepreneur (founder of

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