Psychological safety is a buzzword within organisations, as mental health increasingly becomes a factor they must account for. And rightly so, as evidence clearly shows a creating environments where team members feel psychologically safe can lead to a improvements in performance and wellbeing. Yet, in this drive to create the perfect psychologically safe environment, organisations may be missing out on one crucial element. Does the individual team member have the mental skills to overcome inhibitions to interpersonal risk-taking?
As much as organisation’s create an open, safe environment for interpersonal risk-taking, it will come down to the individual’s own capacities to take that risk to speak up. Are organisations equipping their team members with these skills?
Psychological safety – the organisation perspective
There are debates around definition, but I will paraphrase a concept of psychological safety by Amy Edmondson (1999) as she is considered a leader in research:
A belief that the workplace (organisation) is safe for speaking up, with ideas, questions, concerns, and even mistakes, without fear of judgement or reprisal. It’s a sense of confidence that your voice is valued. There is permission for candour, and requires courage to speak up as there will be conflict, with a feeling of respect for different opinions. Psychological safety is not the goal , but the means to the goal of performance excellence.
I was recently involved in a psychological safety project with a national sports team. And it was fascinating to see how all the focus in studies seemed to be on the organization, the culture, the environment, the team climate. And I bought into this too, as this is where the focus of research evidence is. For example, we considered and amended team structures, processes and systems that we felt would allow team members speak up and share thoughts and opinions. This definitely made a difference, but it was lacking one important element.
Speaking to the individual team members with sessions, I discovered something that the research doesn’t highlight. The individual element.
Missing the individual piece
It got me thinking back to the definitions and how psychological safety is conceptualised.
A belief – without fear – confidence – quality of being open and honest in front of others (candour) – courage – interpersonal respect.
As much as we were setting up an environment for psychological safety, unless the individual person had all of the above qualities and capacities, there was little chance of psychological safety being perceived by the individual lacking in these. We had made the effort with the climate and culture, but many of the team members cited feeling held back due to feelings of imposter phenomenon, fear of confrontation, anxiety and other individual factors. So, I began a change of strategy.
Equipping the individual for psychological safety
The mental skills training that individuals were developing shifted to interpersonal team aspects. Some examples are considered below:
Self-efficacy – helping to build the individual’s belief that they have the communication skills to share opinions and challenge issues.
Self-regulation – managing mind and body reactions to cope with fear responses when thinking about speaking up.
Realistic reappraisal – providing the team member with ways of noticing negative thought patterns (e.g. catastrophising around speaking up) and offering up a way of rationalising that to be more accurate and helpful.
Managing anxiety – considering what the triggers to dysfunctional emotions are, noticing when they arise and learning how to function in and around difficult reactions.
Awareness skills – having a developed sense of awareness to their own thoughts and emotions, to then better understand how that is being portrayed to others.
Awareness for empathy – with increased awareness to one’s own thoughts and emotions, the ability to empathically understand others’ thoughts and emotions increases.
Compassionate assertiveness – the crucial skill for psychological safety
Amongst all the skills that people worked on, one stood out that seemed to offer most benefit for psychological safety – compassionate assertiveness.
Think for a moment about the word compassion. What does it convey to you? Kindness, being nice, loving, friendly?
Paul Gilbert (2017), an world-renowned expert, defines compassion as ‘a sensitivity to suffering in self and others with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it.’
Gilbert talks about compassion being a motivational force. And that with compassion we are orientated towards lessening our suffering and that of others. And as other prominent authors around compassion have noted, such as Kristen Neff, this isn’t always about being kind, nice, loving and friendly. To be truly compassionate sometimes means standing up for what you believe is important. Taking on conflict because you believe it will alleviate suffering for you and others.
What is being talked about here is compassionate assertiveness. Feeling psychologically empowered to express and act in alignment with your needs, whilst having a sensitivity to the needs of others.
To help people develop this quality, I begin with guiding people to have awareness to their own inner narrative. And noticing how they are responding to that. Typically we respond to harsh, attacking inner narratives, with harsh, attacking replies.
Instead, people learn how to notice and respond in a more compassionate manner. Beginning with a friendly, kind response and developing to one that is firm and supporting.
We talk about compassionate action. Compassionate thinking lacks empowerment without compassionate action. So, I guide people to noticing what actions they can take that will alleviate suffering in the future. The knowledge that your act, or the thought about action, may feel very uncomfortable in the moment, but being able to deal with that distress, enables true compassionate responses.
What you do today may feel uncomfortable, but can serve you well tomorrow.
The individual factor
If you are considering psychological safety for your organization, I ask you to put some thought to individual mental skills training. Having a psychological safe culture, environment or organisational space is important, but will be lacking if your team members don’t feel personally equipped to take interpersonal risk.
Stuart is a mental performance psychologist with the Canadian Paralympic Alpine Ski Team and consults with high performance athletes and corporate executives wishing to improve their mental skills to enable better performance.
Edmondson, A.C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Gilbert, P. (2017). Compassion: Definitions and Controversies. In: P. Gilbert (Ed). Compassion: Concepts, Research and Applications. (p. 3-15). London: Routledge.