Psychological Safety: Articles and Information
Psychological safety means the environment is deemed safe for interpersonal risk-taking. I write about it a lot, because it is — I believe — one of the most important foundations to truly effective personal growth as well as healthy, happy relationships.
Here you will find an outline of the articles I’ve written related to psychological safety, each with a very brief description. I hope this can help you navigate to what you are looking for.
Psychological Safety Articles
- The Cornerstone of Psychological Safety: The cornerstone of psychological safety is your own capacity to feel safe in and of yourself, no matter the situation.
- In this article, I discuss how psychological safety applies to having crucial conversations. Crucial conversations are defined as conversations where (1) there are differences in opinion, (2) the stakes feel high, and therefore (3) emotions will be involved. To get to this, I outline what typically happens during those conversations, what the problem really is, and how we can interrupt the “crazy-making loop” in order to engage psychological safety for the sake of effective crucial conversations.
- Acknowledging Other People’s Emotions: Acknowledging the emotions of others builds psychological safety and opens a gap for magic to happen.
- What do we do when we witness another person’s distress? How do we react, or withdraw, or support them? “To pull information out of emotions, we must turn into the emotions.” In this article, I discuss how psychological safety fosters effective teamwork, supports our personal relationships, and why it is so hard to do! I also outline a very basic approach to help us step over our fear and begin to cultivate psychological safety within ourselves and for those around us.
- Five Steps to Remarkable Clarity: A lack of extremely high levels of psychological safety and radical candor and the ability to sustain them when things get emotional is the single biggest limiting factor in the outcomes that any group can produce.
- In parts #1B, 2B, and 3B of this article, I discuss the importance of psychological safety in order to achieve your goals and to support the achievement of your team’s goals. I pose questions to help you think critically about your current experiences of psychological safety — how you hinder psychological safety and how you can contribute to it.
While most of my articles touch on psychological safety in some capacity, the above articles are those that discuss the topic in-depth. Further, here are some resources on psychological safety you may enjoy:
- Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott
- The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace by Amy Edmondson