The Busy Leader's Handbook

21Psychological Safety:

Making It Comfortable for People to Tell the Truth and Take Risks

People sometimes share with me that their job is to make the boss look good. I usually reply that it’s much more important for them to help the boss be good. Few things are more dangerous to the health of an organization than for leaders to surround themselves with people who only agree with them, or act like they do when in reality they don’t. If the leader is clearly going down a wrong path, the people around them must be willing to speak up and push back.

This means people must feel safe enough to tell the truth. If not, you’ll never be a high-performing organization.

Psychological safety is a subject that’s been in the news quite a bit over the past few years. In fact, when Google conducted its internal research study Project Aristotle in 2015, it found that psychological safety was the most important characteristic in terms of what makes a team productive. In other words, effective teams are those in which people feel safe to take risks and speak out.¹

According to Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the term, “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.”²

We may feel unsafe when a boss (or any coworker) yells, says hurtful or disrespectful things, threatens retribution, makes irrational demands, and so forth. The primitive part of the brain sees this behavior as ...