What do we mean by psychological safety

If you look at any kind of business media – whether that’s specific industry magazines, the BBC news page, LinkedIn or any of your professional networks – you’ve almost certainly seen the term ‘psychological safety’. It’s an increasingly important aspect of how we all do business, and what people want from their employers – but is this just the latest buzzword, or is it truly vital for the way you work, and lead?

More importantly, do the people leading in your organisation really understand what psychological safety is?

This is the question we discuss in our latest episode of Unlocking Your Potential – the ASK Europe Podcast; Laura Kean, our resident expert, speaks to Martin Theobald about the importance of Psychological Safety in the workplace – and discusses what that means, how it shapes the people in your teams and their potential performance, and why it should be a key component in what you do, how you do it, and the evolving culture of your organisation.

Psychological Safety is also the theme of our first webinar for 2024; launching a new series where we will introduce key Leadership and Development skills and discuss how you can make small changes to revitalise your professional growth, you can click here to sign up for this session.

Listen to the podcast (scroll down for the links) to learn more about what we mean by psychological safety, and more specifically what we mean, and what it looks like, in the workplace. Can an environment that doesn’t have it be changed? Do your team feel comfortable questioning direction? What happens if someone in your team fails, or something doesn’t go to plan?

Psychological safety means giving people the space to learn from mistakes, giving the whole team the ability to question, to make suggestions, and to communicate directly with even the most senior managers, and everyone having the confidence to stumble, to take accountability, and to build individual and team resilience in safety.

The danger of hot topics like this, and the increased focus on psychological safety in both how we work and how we all speak to each other in our place of work, is that it becomes a ‘tick box’; a generic gesture, lip service on the path to nothing changing. In a working world so changed in recent years, with the pandemic, the economic crisis, the huge shift to more remote or hybrid teams, and the entrance of new generations of workers who expect very different environments to those of previous leaders, it’s important to show (and mean) that your people matter.