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Psychological safety

A shared belief on a team that it's safe to speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes and disagree without being embarrassed or punished.

What It Means

Psychological safety is a belief, shared by the people on a team, that they can take interpersonal risks there: ask a basic question, admit a mistake, raise a concern or disagree, without being made to look foolish or getting punished for it. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defined the term for work teams in a 1999 paper.

Try It: The Same Moments on Two Teams

Switch between two teams and watch the same three moments play out. Buhata's examples.

MomentWhat happens
A new hire doesn't understand a termStays quiet and guesses
Someone sent a client the wrong fileHopes nobody notices
The plan has a flawPeople mention it after the meeting, in private
Problems raised in the open0
Out of3

Team A may look smooth, but its problems surface late.

How People Say It at Work

  • "Is it safe to say I don't know?"
  • "I didn't want to be the one to bring it up."
  • "On this team, people actually admit mistakes."

The Breakdown

Signs a team has it (Buhata's suggestion)

  • People ask questions that show what they don't know.
  • Mistakes are reported early.
  • Disagreement comes up in the meeting itself.
  • Quieter members get heard.

How to build it (Buhata's suggestion)

  1. As the leader, name a mistake of your own and what you learned from it.
  2. Ask open questions in meetings, such as "What are we missing?", and wait for answers.
  3. Thank the person who raises a problem, before you discuss the problem.
  4. After something goes wrong, ask what happened and what to change, rather than who to blame.
  5. Keep the standards high, and make it clear that speaking up is part of meeting them.

Try it today. End your next meeting by asking, "What's one concern nobody has said yet?"

Where It Comes From

Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, set out team psychological safety in "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams," published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 1999. In a 2019 Harvard Business Review podcast she described studying hospital teams and finding that the better teams reported more mistakes, because their members were more willing to talk about them. Google later listed psychological safety among the five dynamics of effective teams in its Project Aristotle research, shared on its re:Work site.

Good to Know

If speaking up has been met with threats, retaliation or harassment, take it to HR. The EEOC's laws protect people from retaliation for reporting discrimination or taking part in an investigation, and its site explains how to file a charge.

FAQ

What is psychological safety in simple terms?

Feeling safe on your team to ask questions, admit mistakes and disagree without being embarrassed or punished. Amy Edmondson defined it in 1999 as a belief the team shares.

Who came up with psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School defined team psychological safety in a 1999 paper in Administrative Science Quarterly.

Why does psychological safety matter?

Teams that feel safe raise problems early. Google's Project Aristotle research lists it among five dynamics of effective teams, and Edmondson's hospital study found the better teams were the ones talking openly about mistakes.

Do It in Buhata

Team Space and Decisions (Team X)

Record what the team learned from each mistake in Decisions with the Team X add-on, and post the lesson in your Team Space without naming who made it.

Open Buhata

Related Terms and Categories

  • Team building

    Deliberate work, through activities, habits and how work is organized, to help a group of people work together better as a team.

  • Constructive feedback

    Specific, fact-based feedback that describes what someone did and its effect, so they can keep doing it or change it.

  • Toxic workplace

    A workplace where disrespect, hostility, unfairness or abuse are common enough to harm the people who work there; some of that conduct is also unlawful.

  • Sprint retrospective

    The last Scrum event of each Sprint, where the Scrum Team looks at how it worked and picks the changes most likely to make it more effective.

  • One-on-one meeting

    A regular private meeting between a manager and one person who reports to them, used for check-ins, feedback, problems and career growth.

Work, career and remote life

Sources

Amy C. Edmondson, "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams," Administrative Science Quarterly (1999); Amy C. Edmondson, "Managing the risk of learning: Psychological safety in work teams," Harvard Business School working paper 02-062; Harvard Business Review, "Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace" (podcast, 2019); Google re:Work, "Understand team effectiveness"; Harvard Business School Online, "How to Build Psychological Safety in the Workplace"; U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "Retaliation"

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