Psychological Safety is Political
Psychological safety is the team’s collective felt sense that it is safe to take interpersonal risks.
This collective felt sense does not arise as a result of each individual feeling safe, each individual being brave, or a critical mass of the individuals feeling safe or being brave.
The collective felt sense arises when every individual on the team shifts their sense of identity to “we” from “me”. The sense of safety arises from the assessment that we are a unit and we can survive any potential negative consequences.
Psychological safety is, therefore, a deeply contextual experience and a deeply emotional one.
Once I accept that you and I are part of a “we”, my well-being becomes intertwined with yours. Your suffering pains me. It is emotionally dangerous to care about others. It makes us vulnerable.
Psychological safety requires each individual to be willing to care for all the other individuals on the team.
And caring about colleagues opens one up to the possibility of a lot of pain around existential anxieties and survival fears.
If everyone on the team is independently wealthy with access to good health care, there are a lot more risks is it safe to take than if any member of the team feels (reasonably or unreasonably) that they need THIS job for any reason.
Independently wealthy people have a safety net that means most decisions they make don’t feel likely to cause personal catastrophic failure. They won’t lose access to food, shelter, clothing, or medical care if things go badly. And if they know all their team mates have the same safety net, they can care about them without anxiety.
But for most people, losing a job is a major survival crisis.
Do they rely on employer-subsidized healthcare or housing benefits? Will it be hard to find another job? Have they not had the opportunity to develop skills that match the current job market? Do they have a mortgage or other debt they are going to have difficulty repaying?
One approach to increasing psychological safety could, therefore, be to only have teams of independently wealthy people.
Another is to create a social safety net of guaranteed employment or universal basic income and guaranteed health care, childcare, education, and elder care.
In a strange twist of unintended consequences, offering foundational survival benefits that aren’t offered by the government decreases psychological safety by increasing how much people want to keep THIS job.