How To Create Psychological Safety On Teams

One of the most influential studies in the history of management thinking is a leadership study, led by Amy Edmondson, on charge nurses in a Boston hospital. Edmondson was looking at a variety of factors including teams’ assessment of their leaders and the team’s overall performance. But analyzing the results, Edmondson found something odd. Edmondson found that the leaders who had the most respect from their nurses also reported the highest error rates. And the leaders who were not well-respected by their team had lower rates of error. In trying to figure out the reason for this counter-intuitive correlation, Edmondson found that error rates reported didn’t necessarily mean errors that occurred. Instead, high performance teams and well-respected leaders reported more errors because the team felt psychological safe to do so. On the teams led by not-so-respected leaders, nurses were hiding their error rates out of fear of punishment.

That study was the beginning of a wealth of research on the importance of psychological safety in teams. Researchers find psychological safety on high performing teams almost everywhere they look. From teams large and small and even in Google’s infamous Project Aristotle study which sought to figure out what characteristics of teams predicted the highest performers, psychological safety is almost always present.