How To Build Psychological Safety Through Uncertain Times
~ 9 minute read
Photo credit: Rineshkumar Ghirao
Take a moment to think about the last time you kept something to yourself because you feared how it would be received. Chances are, it didn’t take long to recall. Now, think about the last time you felt like you could share something new or difficult to hear with someone, without them thinking less of you. How does it feel to have that kind of relationship?
Psychologists often call that latter feeling psychological safety. It can be felt at multiple levels, in our individual relationships, our work teams, our organizations, and even among the broader public. Moreover, psychological safety, or its loss, at one level can affect how we feel at other levels.
Let’s take the deportation of activists and funding cuts initiated by the federal government in the past few months as an example. They’ve led to an understandable fear among past student protestors and pivots in how nonprofits communicate their work. Last week, Candid, the nonprofit data reporting organization, shared the results of a February survey of over 300 communications professionals.
Among those surveyed, 55% reported “fear of government retaliation or loss of funding for advocacy.”
It is impossible for anyone to say what the next few years hold for the country or its institutions.
Yet, it is because of this uncertainty and turmoil, not despite it, that organizations guided by their values need to work harder than ever to cultivate psychological safety and consider the broader consequences of their action and inaction.
Psychological Safety: A Team-Level Phenomenon
Psychological safety is most often thought of as the sense that honesty is expected and even welcome among teams.
We owe much of the research on this view of the term to psychologist Amy Edmondson, whose work in late 1990s and beyond sought to study the concept not as an individual-level phenomenon, but a team-level one.
This means that psychological safety is not just something that exists within you as an individual employee, but is an emergent property of the team. Think of this as the difference between individual-level “performance” as a measure of individual-level productivity, and team-level “success” as a product of your team’s collective efforts.
The distinction can get a little academic, but I can assure you that it matters from a practical and personal standpoint.
Individualist Views Erode Psychological Safety
Photo Credit: Adam Thomas
Imagine a leader called out by a fellow colleague:
“George, some on your team don’t feel they can speak their mind.”
George might respond:
“That’s on them. I expect every member of my team to have enough confidence in themselves and what they are offering to do so regardless of consequence.”
This response comes from what I’d call an individualist view of contribution. This puts the onus of contribution on the one contributing, and the fruits of that contribution as originating in them alone. It is a view criticized by Frederick Douglass, who, in his lecture Self-Made Men, stated this plainly.
“. . .there are in the world no such men as self-made men. That term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist.” - Frederick Douglass
In this view, the leader’s role is to set standards for the quality of the contribution and for team members to self-assess whether what they hope to share meets that standard.
But quality is subjective, and highly subjective views of quality erode organizational culture (see the table below).
How Subjective Quality Standards Undermine Psychological Safety
| When leaders define "quality" as... | Common phrases you might hear... | Negative impacts on your team... | Better approaches... |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blind agreement with leadership | "I value loyalty over everything else" or "I expect you to support these decisions" | Creates echo chambers, stifles innovation, and fosters a culture of fear | Explicitly value diverse perspectives and reward constructive challenges to ideas |
| Vague and constantly shifting standards | "I'll know good work when I see it" or "This isn't quite right, but I can't explain why" | Increases anxiety, decreases confidence, and leads to wasted effort and eventual burnout | Establish clear, consistent criteria and provide specific examples of what success looks like |
| Unattainable perfection | "I expect nothing less than perfection" or "There's no room for mistakes here" | Paralyzes decision-making, discourages risk-taking, and allows small problems to grow until they become crises | Celebrate learning from mistakes and create forums to discuss challenges early |
| Cultural or identity-based conformity | "That's not how we do things here" or "You need to adapt to our culture" | Systematically excludes diverse perspectives and reinforces inequitable power structures that harm innovation | Welcome diverse experiences and ideas as a fundamental part of building organizational resilience and growth |
Often, when contributions are deemed valuable under an individualist view, contributors may seem to be generously rewarded as exceptional. But what we offer to any endeavor does not occur in a vacuum, and this view inevitably assumes that context and history have no bearing on the present which, Douglass rightly points out, is complete fiction.
Systems-Thinking Opens the Path to Psychological Safety
Photo Credit: Nico Bhlr
Now, let’s imagine that George responds to someone sharing the potential for low psychological safety with the following:
“It sounds like I need to learn more. If there’s a way I can be part of shaping a space where my team can be honest about their experiences, I want to know.”
This response takes something closer to a systems-thinking view of contribution. I’ve described how systems-thinking views of organizational culture operate in earlier articles. Narrowing our focus to psychological safety, such views see leaders as an important, but not lone, part of shaping spaces where honest input and novel contributions can be shared. Each team member has identities, motives, and abilities that influence their contributions in specific spaces. But these individual-level factors alone don’t predict the team’s level of psychological safety.
I might be as opinionated as they come, but if pointing out a flaw in our strategy will endanger my job, I’ll think twice about raising my hand on the Zoom call.
Leadership style does have an impact on team psychological safety, but it’s not the only factor. One large-scale meta-analysis found that greater psychological safety was associated with more positive leader relations (like transformational leadership or inspiring, growth-oriented leadership). But separate research by Barjinder Singh, Doan E. Winkel, and T.T. Selvarajan also found that when employees of color felt their organization valued diversity, they had higher psychological safety than white employees who felt the organization valued diversity. This suggests that organizational policies and actions (like those related to diversity) may influence psychological safety differently among those of differing identities.
Taking Douglass’ views to heart, every organization has a wider context in which it operates, and a history that came before it. Organizations and individuals seeking to change may resist reckoning with their past, wishing to “turn over a new leaf” without having to do the hard work of understanding their role in past harm. But doing that hard work sets the stage for what comes next. And if we need reminders of how the broader social context impacts the workplace, we need only look at headlines describing how political shifts have led to layoffs.
A systems-thinking view of contribution does not excuse a leader from taking intentional steps to craft an open and honest atmosphere. It acknowledges that psychological safety is influenced by factors across the organization and beyond.
Psychological Safety in Shifting Systems
Photo Credit: Vladislav Babienko
What does all this mean for the team leader or manager aiming to cultivate psychological safety within a broader environment where that safety seems under threat?
Remain open to creativity, new ideas, and challenges to “the way we do things here.” Adhering to the status quo can be tempting when uncertainty abounds, but completely closing yourself off from new or different ways of operating will leave you less able to weather future storms. Perhaps the highly uncertain funding landscape is cooling your organization’s interest in programmatic creativity. While implementing new programs might not be feasible, exploring the potential of new and diverse programs to leave the organization more resilient during the next funding crisis could be strategic.
Be aware of how chaos impacts everyone differently. Some on your teams will feel less able to share their views in an oppressive political or organizational environment, while others will be even more engaged. This sets up a challenging dynamic, since those most impacted by the issues often offer the most valuable and creative contributions to addressing those issues. Leaders would do well to build norms and structures for everyone to share such input.
Build equitable spaces for praiseworthy failure. Rampant fear of failure on the one hand, and unrealistic goals for perfection on the other, are destroyers of psychological safety. When things go wrong, accepting that we are better than the worst mistake we’ve made is essential to learning and growth. In her 2023 book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, Amy Edmondson describes how, following the initial failed rollout of healthcare.gov, teams adopted a norm of welcoming and even praising when others openly named mistakes and miscalculations on their part. Understanding how norms for agreement and perfectionism undermine good work, they opted to do the opposite. By cultivating radical norms for praise, teams were able to quickly name and route errors in the next few updates. Welcoming individual failure can incentivize a necessary step to collectively solving problems—being made aware of them.
Building Trust Through Change
The steps above are one path to building psychological safety and trust under threat and uncertainty. Trust can take myriad forms. We can trust that someone will do as they say. We can trust the advice they give. But for those doing challenging, long-term work, what may matter most is trust that honest feedback, whether positive or negative, won’t harm the relationship. That trust is the essence of psychological safety.
