Psychological safety helps you catch and correct mistakes instead of retaliating, blaming, or shaming. It is the key to an office culture where everyone brings their best game every day.

Psychological safety is the assurance that you will not be retaliated against or blamed in any way for mistakes on the job. It describes an office culture where people accept that mistakes will be made, and that the best way to deal with them is to work together to catch and correct them as soon as possible, and learn how to prevent them in the future.

Psychological safety has been in the news lately because recent research has been compelling about its role in helping teams perform better. While research has long shown that relationships of trust lead to higher performance in the workplace, this particular form of trust turns out to be very powerful. It is a specific behavior that helps people in a workplace stretch and grow into better and more valuable workers.

How Does Psychological Safety Improve Performance?

Imagine the NCAA Championships, the Final Four. The stakes are high, with millions of people watching. For these college age players, being able to handle their nerves is part of the game.

In the fourth quarter, a player gets fouled. There is only one point between the teams. The player gets two shots–and misses the first.

What do the teammates on the floor surrounding the player do at that moment? Try to picture it in your mid.

That’s right, they give the player five and offer encouragement.

Think about it for a minute: The player has just made a huge mistake, maybe one that will cost them the game, and they offer encouragement??? How does that make sense?

That’s exactly when the player most needs encouragement. The player needs to shake off the miss and concentrate on the next shot. The teammates are essentially saying: “We got you. We know you can make this.” Their support at this crucial moment helps the player let go of any negative feeling about the missed shot and focus fully on making the second shot. If that one goes in, their chances of winning improve.

For just a moment, imagine that instead of offering encouragement, the other teammates throw up their hands and bemoan the player for failing at the crucial moment. If that happens, the player would feel so bad that they will never play aggressively enough to get fouled in that situation again. When it’s not safe to make a mistake, team performance drops as the best players learn to hang back just when you need them to be their best.

High performing teams know that perfection is not the goal. They accept that perfection is not possible. The best teams learn to manage the inevitable mistakes and keep playing their best game. This is as true in an office as it is in sports.

Inevitably, someone will make a mistake. When that happens, the manager has a choice. They can be supportive and help the employee do their best to make up for it, move forward, and learn from it. Or they can throw up their hands, make the employee feel bad, and dwell on the problem instead of finding solutions.

Depending on what the manager does, the employee will think one of two things:

  1. I just made a mistake, and my boss is really mad. I’d better start looking for a new job.
  2. I just made a mistake, and my boss is helping me figure it out and fix it. I have the best boss ever. I’d better work extra hard to keep this great job.

The first thought will lead to poorer performance. The second thought will lead to better performance. Learning how to catch and correct mistakes instead of retaliating, blaming, or shaming is the key to an office culture where everyone brings their best game every day.

Not Retaliating for Mistakes Doesn’t Mean Tolerating them

Amy Edmondson, the premier researcher on psychological safety in the workplace, points out that high performance standards coupled with high psychological safety create a workplace poised for excellence.

How your employees feel at work is a result of the mix of expectations and safety as it is practiced in your workplace. The graphic shown here demonstrates how that culture affects your employees’ mindset and performance.

Anxiety Zone: High performance standards and low psychological safety. Workplaces where people are yelling, blaming, playing favorites, and divided against each other in an effort to perform, are terrible places to work. This is a culture that results in high turn over, costing the company dearly to continually replace burned out workers.

Apathy Zone: Low performance standards and low psychological safety. Workplaces where no one cares about how well you perform leave workers feeling unimportant, unrecognized, bored, and unhappy. This too can result in high turnover, eating into company profits.

Comfort Zone: Low performance standards and high psychological safety. Workplaces where mistakes and errors are constantly forgiven, with no thought to helping people learn to be better, are comfortable but boring places to work. When leaders don’t expect anyone to grow or get better, mediocrity can reign for years. Payroll becomes bloated supporting workers who get very little done.

Learning Zone: High performance standards and high psychological safety. This is the magical combination where workers involve themselves in a process of trial-and-error learning and continual improvement, where manageable risks are encouraged, and where innovation leads to efficiencies and wins for everyone. In the learning zone, everyone is engaged and working to do their best, and company profits soar.

Studies show that organizations with high worker engagement are 23% more profitable than in those with low worker engagement. The most profitable companies expect a lot of their employees and support them as they learn to stretch and grow and bring value to the company.

Three Ways to Build Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is an office culture, so it’s important for leaders at the top to train and expect their managers to support their team as they make mistakes and learn from them to improve future outcomes. Here are three ways to do just that:

  1. Catch and correct mistakes early: Once your team accepts that mistakes will be made, managers can focus the team on catching and correcting them. That means having systems of peer review and supervisor review for any reports or work products that move to external customers or other partners. It means encouraging people to ask if they have any doubts at all and thanking them for asking, even it turns out to be nothing. It means celebrating and welcoming the process of double checking and ensuring quality controls.
  2. Prevent the mistakes you can: Where it is possible to change processes to reduce errors, new processes should be devised and followed. For example, if you want cleaner data, improving input can be as simple as enlarging fonts on spreadsheets or other key data entry points. The easier it is to see, the easier it is to get right. Preventing mistakes might also include simplifying data entry processes and using technology to propagate other reports without re-entry. The people who know the processes and desired outcomes best should review processes regularly in a process of continual improvement.
  3. Learn from mistakes: Once a mistake has been caught and corrected, managers should sit down with direct reports for a private post-mortem. There is usually no need to rehash the situation. The best approach is for the manager to ask the direct report: what did you learn from this experience? Usually, employees are harder on themselves than any manager would be. If that’s the case, the manager can simply encourage self-compassion and support the employee by solidifying learning, making sure they have the right take-away, and helping them grow. If the employee doesn’t see the severity of the error, they may need additional coaching or clarified expectations to get them to understand their responsibilities and the consequences of their actions.

Many people even in high positions can recall a key mistake they made early in their career that helped them become the person who later succeeded beyond their expectations. When mistakes are seen as valuable learning opportunities, whole teams do better together.

Does your team need help reducing errors and becoming more focused on learning? Contact me!