Addressing misconceptions on Psychological Safety to improve performance

Introduction

Psychological safety is a foundational requirement for organizations seeking fast flow and effective change. We have seen a couple of articles recently that suggest psychological safety could have a downside, so we decided to reflect on the issue.

An article in Fortune in 2023 suggested that performance is improved when everyone is ‘held accountable’ and implied that this was at odds with psychological safety. Another (Hive Learning) suggested that being ‘comfortable’ was the opposite of psychological safety, though it did acknowledge that you could be comfortable with either scenario.

In this article, we review the benefits of psychological safety, why these benefits occur, whether or not there is a downside, and what you should be ‘comfortable’ with.

Is psychological safety good for us?

As defined by Professor Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is a belief that one won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. 

It may seem self-evident that ‘psychological safety’ is something you would rather have than not have. And, you would be right to think that. As Tom Geraghty explains, the evidence for the good of psychological safety can be drawn from fields including Safety Science, Human Factors, Ergonomics, and Organizational Psychology.

Why psychological safety is good for us and our organizations

Openness is a better predictor of performance than competence. In Amy Edmondson’s research, openness was correlated with low error rates (when competence was roughly similar). And, famously, Google’s Aristotle project showed that psychological safety ranked above all other factors that were tested. 

Top performance and minimal errors of course go together. The 2023 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, published by Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment Team (DORA), showed that high-performing organizations have a change failure rate of between 0% and 10%. This is an improvement on the previous year. The financial cost of errors is detailed in a blog by Sophie Weston here.

Jon Smart in Sooner Safer Happier demonstrated the link between psychological safety and business agility.  

The idea of speaking up and fearlessly raising concerns or questions seems particularly valid in tech. This is because technology and software teams will always be operating with a level of uncertainty and may be working with unclear or competing visions of a potential future state. So, contributing new ideas is fundamental to tech work.   

Further, what if something goes wrong? Do we admit our mistake, or have we been conditioned to hide it? The evidence shows that admitting mistakes improves learning and lessons the impact of those mistakes. 

Other benefits include reduced burnout, reduced staff turnover, increased diversity and inclusion, increased resilience, and better compliance. (https://psychsafety.co.uk/about-psychological-safety/)

Why is it hard to achieve psychological safety?

To have psychological safety, Amy Edmondson identified that people have to overcome or avoid fears of seeming ignorant, incompetent, intrusive, or negative. Whilst these fears are natural, overcoming them is worth the effort, because of the demonstrable benefits (to people and organizations) in organizational learning, innovation, and better performance.

Can workers be too comfortable?

It depends on what we mean. 

The Fortune article (incompletely) defines psychological safety as the feeling of being ‘comfortable, safe, and supported’ as well as having the intention to ‘avoid interpersonal harm’.

The key to psychological safety is being ‘comfortable to speak up …’ rather than being ‘comfortable’ per se. And, of course, we should be avoiding harm. But, that’s not the same as avoiding difficult conversations. Indeed, we must have difficult conversations to have a psychologically safe environment.

Is there a danger of ‘all ideas are good ideas’?

This should not be the case because it is not part of the psychological safety concept. People should feel free to contribute ideas but there is no obligation to act on them. We don’t always get our own way. The principle of psychological safety is that everyone contributes their skills and abilities. So, teams will collaborate and make the key decisions together. 

Asking questions is, of course, a vital method of learning. The issue of any individual continually contributing ‘bad’ ideas should not arise, because people are learning within their role and context. If it does happen, you have a different problem. 

The misinterpretation that we should avoid

There is no evident downside to psychological safety, provided we define it as being ‘comfortable to speak up’ rather than just ‘comfortable.’

Certainly, motivation matters also. Certainly, the pursuit of excellence is still important. This is recognised in the literature on psychological safety; including from its pioneer, Professor Edmondson. 

Openness has to go both ways. We challenge others, but we are open to feedback on our own work. That is, we are psychologically safe and so are they. 

We should motivate people to strive for excellence AND work openly.

A response to various ‘critiques’ of the psychological safety concept can be seen here and it comes to similar conclusions. It turns out that we can’t have too much psychological safety.

Summary

As was asserted by Hive Learning, ‘comfort’ could indeed harm the performance of a business if it means a lack of motivation or a lack of commitment to excellence. But, this is consistent with Edmondson’s statements that psychological safety must go alongside motivation. They are separate business issues. 

Likewise, the idea that people might be comfortable not speaking up is consistent with human psychology. We naturally seek to avoid harm or reputational damage. Being ‘comfortable’ in this natural state, however, is bad for us (since we will make more mistakes and have less chance of reaching self-actualization). And, it’s bad for organizations because it fails to get the best out of most of its people. 

Ultimately, a ‘fear culture’ (known by Westrum’s Organizational Typology as a ‘pathological culture’) is bad for people. 

If a culture is bad for people, then there is a moral and business case for changing it. Regardless of how hard that change might be.

All of that is before we consider the idea that ‘agreeableness’ is a greater part of some people’s personality than others. Are we comfortable with limiting our talent pool only to those who are excessively agreeable? We think not.

Find out more

A great introduction to psychological safety can be found in The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson, reviewed here.  

Conflux provides resources on Psychological Safety that you can access here. 

For a deep dive into psychological safety and how to create such an environment within IT, we have a Spotlight Session consisting of three online two-hour sessions for groups of up to 15 people. It’s designed for engineering leadership teams, change agents, and coaches.  

We also have a ‘See-Do-Teach’ programme (four or ten sessions) to upskill enabling teams and help to grow a culture of psychological safety to enable your people to use their voices (and brains) to build high-performing teams.