4 Ways To Think About Psychological Safety
What is Psychological Safety? Do We Agree?
A few weeks ago, my boss asked me to co-lead a short workshop on Psychological Safety with him. One of the things we talked about as we were planning was how we wanted to define psychological safety for the purposes of our discussion. After some thought, we decided we would address the four primary ways of looking at the concept psychological safety using the four quadrant model from Ken Wilber.1
The four quadrant model posits that there are four independent ways of looking at any issue that involves human consciousness:
Interior individual perspective (upper-left quadrant): focusing on the subjective experience of "I";
Interior plural perspective (lower-left): focusing on the subjective experience of "We";
Exterior individual perspective (upper-right): focusing on observable behaviour of an individual and the physical (neurological) correlates of individual consciousness; and
Exterior plural perspective (lower-right): focusing on groups as functional entities seen from outside, e.g. "They."
How we think about measuring or creating psychological safety depends on which of these perspectives we take. But there is not consistent usage of the term in the literature or conversations about psychological safety. I will demonstrate that with a series of quotes from a single book, Amy Edmondson’s bestseller, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.
The Subjective Individual Experience
But in a psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They feel willing and able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor. They fear holding back their full participation more than they fear sharing a potentially sensitive, threatening, or wrong idea.
Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization
From an individual, subjective perspective, psychological safety is the feeling that speaking up is not going to come with too high a personal cost.
One woman I worked with described her experience of addressing bias against women in our workplace as being afraid that she was going to get fired every time she spoke up. This is the experience of a lack of safety.
The individual, subjective experience is important if you want to build an inclusive culture. For example, diversity initiatives that focus on visible representation through recruiting and do not consider the individual, subjective experiences of employees once they start working often result in difficulty retaining diverse employees.
The Subjective Collective Experience
Team psychological safety is defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.
Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization
The subjective, collective experience was the focus of Amy Edmondson’s early research.2
When a team doesn’t feel safe, it often feels cold or muddy. Conversations may feel awkward or tentative. There is a lack of cameraderie. When a team does feel safe, there is a sense of belonging, even when conversations get heated or there is disagreement.
When people talk about a company as a family, it is the sense of being part of a bigger “us” they are referring to.
The Objective Individual Perspective
For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge! This means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas.
Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization
In one team where I worked, my manager would sometimes thank me for my courage when I spoke about my concern that the organizational culture included the kind of teasing and sarcasm that landed like veiled threats. He was seeing my behaviour and reading it as evidence that there was psychological safety in the team. Whether I felt any fear in speaking up was not relevant to his assessment.
This is the perspective an HR team would take when mapping interpersonal skills to job competencies. Does the employee take initiative, focus on the important problems rather than the easy problems, and invite input from others?
Fear inhibits learning. Research in neuroscience shows that fear consumes physiologic resources, diverting them from parts of the brain that manage working memory and process new information. This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem-solving. This is why it's hard for people to do their best work when they are afraid.
Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization
When people don’t feel safe, their bodies react with fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. The amygdala and hippocampus activate and the body pumps out adrenaline and cortisol. If this goes on too long, the body has a flop response, which is the physiological manifestation of burnout.
Cortisol is the key element to watch when talking about psychological safety. Adrenaline is just energy, the physiological mechanism of motivation. It is cortisol that shuts down creativity, collaboration, curiosity, and compassion. And cortisol is released when the brain assesses a situation as a threat.
Understanding this aspect of psychological safety has proven to be extremely useful to me as coach. I watch people's bodies for the nonverbal signals of fear or safety and use that to gauge whether to challenge or offer reassurance. And I have even more power to influence a situation when I combine this perspective with the objective, collective insights of interpersonal neurobiology.3
The Objective Collective Perspective
In 1991, I was following the Dalai Lama as he walked from the large lecture hall where I had just heard him speak to the art museum where he would speak again. By some stroke of fortune, I found myself on the periphery of his entourage, and experienced something I will never forget. He emanated calm and peacefulness.
In his presence, I felt tranquil. And in those days, tranquility was not an expeience I had any familiarity with. That experience was subjective and mysterious to me. Interpersonal neurobiology looks at the mechanism of such experiences.
Somatic leadership training goes further and teaches how to create that kind of impact. This is the most powerful tool in my coaching kit.4
When a work environment has reasonably high psychological safety, good things happen: mistakes are reported quickly so that prompt corrective action can be taken; seamless coordination across groups.
Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization
A senior leader looking at their organization and asking about psychological safety across the whole organization is likely to take this perspective. They want to know whether issues are being raised or swept under the rug? Are rigourous discussions of risk taking place or being side-stepped. Do people face hard truths directly? Do people generally take responsibility or cast blame?
Patterns of behaviour in groups reveal trends.
Each View Has Insights to Offer
Each of these four ways of looking at psychological safety requires different assessment tools, yields different information, and suggests different interventions.
When we talk about creating psychological safety, we should think about why it matters and what we are trying to achieve.
If our goal is to create a culture where we see the benefits of creative collaboration in teams and have high retention, for instance, we want to look at both objective measures of collective safety and subjective measures of individual safety. Otherwise, we may find ourselves asking employees to feel like they are risking relationships in order to satisfy the demands of the job or not asking them to participate fully. Either of those alternatives is a recipe for discontent and attrition.
Ken Wilber, A Brief History Of Everything, Shambala Publications (1996).
Amy Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 350-383.
Dan Siegal, The Developing Mind, Third Edition: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, The Guilford Press (2020).
Richard Strozzi-Heckler PhD, Embodied Leadership: Cultivating a Life of Presence, Purpose, and Integrity, Sounds True (2021).