Psychological Safety: 6 Common Misperceptions and What Leaders Can Do (Part 1)

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Psychological safety, which means having an environment where people feel safe to speak up, to speak their mind. This concept around psychological safety, very popular. Countless managers, consultants, training companies all have worked very hard to create psychologically safe workplaces. Thousands of articles have been written about this topic. And yet this article entitled, What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety. It's by Amy Edmondson and Michaela Kerasi.

Now, Amy Edmondson is probably the most well-known researcher in the psychological safety space. She's at Harvard. She's written most of the seminal articles on this concept. The research evidence around psychological safety, the fact that it improves performance, is very robust. The data is very clear. It works. However, as the popularity of psychological safety has grown, so too have the misconceptions.

Even ardent supporters of psychological safety become frustrated by distorted or incorrect ideas and expectations around psychological safety that get in the way of progress. For instance, leaders have told the authors that constructive debates about constructive debates that were stymied when participants whose ideas received pushback labeled the conversation as psychologically unsafe.

And this type of misinterpretation, if it persists, can undermine the very purpose of psychological safety, that is, to enhance learning and performance. Leaders who truly understand what psychological safety is and isn't communicate the concept to their teams clearly, stop incorrect assumptions before they can gain this destructive type of force and keep people focused on the value to be gained from truth and candor in the workplace.

And so this article then delves into six misconceptions of psychological safety, Explaining why each gets in the way and how to counter it and then offer a blueprint for building the kind of strong learning-oriented work environment that's crucial for success in today's uncertain business world.

So misconception number one, psychological safety means being nice. Thinking that psychological safety is just about being nice or feeling comfortable is one of the most common misconceptions. Here's the problem. Nice in this context sometimes is code for don't say what you really think unless it happens to be nice. It's essentially the opposite of hard truth. So, for instance, if a colleague's presentation was brilliant or compelling, well, say so.

But if it fell short, it's important that we say clearly and constructively as possible what was wrong with the presentation. For organizations to really succeed, people must be comfortable continuously learning, and that process is often uncomfortable. Wanting to be nice, people avoid being honest, and whether they realize it or not, collude in producing ignorance and mediocrity.

Without candid feedback and open sharing of information, both bad and good, coordination, quality, and learning on a team or a project will suffer. Teams that don't surface hard truths perform worse than teams that do. When people withhold their ideas, their questions, their doubts, the team's risk of making mistakes and experiencing failure increases. The authors find it helpful to think of psychological safety as a shared sense of permission for candor, permission to tell the hard truths.

When I was at Glaxo 30 years ago now, we talked about straight talk, and straight talk was just this, permission for candor. It's a belief that it's okay to take the interpersonal risks that come with asking questions, admitting mistakes, and disagreeing with a colleague. When psychological safety exists, people believe that sharing hard truths is an expectation. It allows good debates to happen when they're needed, but it doesn't mean that participants find debates comfortable.

To be clear, we're not advocating here, says the article, for insensitivity. Psychological safety is entirely consistent with kindness, but let's distinguish between being nice and being kind. Nice is the easy way out of a difficult conversation, whereas being kind is being respectful, caring, and honest.

Misconception number two, psychological safety means getting your way. Less common but equally problematic is the misconception people have that psychological safety means their views should prevail. Now, psychological safety is about making sure leaders or teams hear what people think. It's not about forcing them to agree with what they hear.

So the goal is to reach a good decision. So it's helpful here to think of psychological safety not as a gift for one participant, but rather creating an environment for the whole team. Leaders don't need to agree with everyone's input. They need to listen and make sure everyone's voice is heard, but at the end of the day, leaders are not required to agree with everyone's input, everyone's viewpoint.

Misconception number three, psychological safety means job security. Now, this particular misconception became kind of notorious back in January of 2023 when Google announced that they were laying off 12,000 employees. Multiple workers posted on social media sites that the action was counter to their company's commitment to psychological safety. In a town hall meeting, one Google employee stood up and expressed this sentiment out loud.

But psychological safety doesn't mean freedom from layoffs or even freedom from being terminated for whatever reason. It's freedom to be constructively candid. Now, ironically, the employee that stood up in this town hall meeting demonstrated that psychological safety did exist at Google when he criticized the company and its senior leadership. He believed he could speak up without risking his career or generating a negative reaction from colleagues.

He didn't save his view, you know, for whispered hallway conversations. So be clear, psychological safety means candid conversations. It does not protect an employee from job security necessarily.

The fourth misconception, and the last one we'll review in this particular cast, is psychological safety requires a trade-off with performance. Some leaders worry that fostering psychological safety among employees will make it hard to address weaknesses and to hold people accountable for achieving success. They seem to think of the two as being on a spectrum with psychological safety on one end and accountability for performance on the other. But this is wrong thinking.

Psychological safety and accountability are distinctly different dimensions, but superb performance requires a commitment to both, both high standards and psychological safety. That's because psychological safety enables learning. It helps surface information and knowledge vital for competing in a changing world. But nonetheless, and this is what we have to be really careful about as leaders. Research shows that not learning in groups is very common.

It's harder to learn in a group. People hide information to save face or to be agreeable or both, and teams can easily fall into groupthink where members don't want to disrupt what they erroneously assume is a consensus view. So again, that makes it very difficult for us as leaders to make sure we're not allowing people to hide and to devolve into group think.

We'll wrap it up here for this cast. We'll pick up on misconception number five in our next one. And until we meet again in the Manager Lab, do good work.